What is your professional / educational background?

I’ve been in the e-commerce business since 1997 when I built the e-commerce department for Alamo Rent A Car. I’ve worked in the travel industry for 10 years and now three years in financial services. I have an undergraduate degree in International Marketing and a MBA. Stacy Gratz is the voice behind @hrblock. She has been in the interactive space for eight year. This is her second year with @hrblock and Twitter.

Did you start up the H&R Block Twitter account or was something already in place when you took over?

We launched the @hrblock account on Twitter in December of 2006. We were expanding our social media programs and wanted to try this new microblogging platform – although I would say it is more like a group instant message.

What Twitter applications do you use to post your tweets?

We mostly post directly through the web through Tweetdeck or coTweet.

What tools do you use to monitor the conversations around H&R Block ? ex: TweetDeck, Monittor etc

TweetDeck is the tool that we use the most. We have multiple brands, products and potential spellings. We set up various columns to monitor our brands.

Have you had to educate others at H&R Block about the benefits of Twitter? If so, how did that go and are they seeing the light?

We’ve had to educate the organization about all our social media efforts including Twitter. It helps with Robert Scoble and Biz Stone tweet that they are at an H&R Block office and we can respond. It also helps that the Wall Street Journal and mainstream media are now talking about Twitter. It was much more difficult to explain the value in Twitter two years ago.

We’ve been able to use Twitter in a variety of different ways. Customer service is important for any brand. We answer questions and help people with any issues they are facing through Twitter.

We also use Twitter to share important information and tax tips. These past two years have been challenging with the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009. There are a lot of things that consumers can do to better manage their tax situation. We’ve also launched contests and other promotions that are centered around products that we offer such as online tax preparation or Second Look.

We also use Twitter for listening. It has also been very helpful when we can instantly show what people are saying about our brand or an event. For example, we were able to see what people were saying about our SuperBowl ad seconds after it aired. We were also able to see brand sentiment after Timothy Geithner said he used TurboTax during his confirmation hearings. Actively listening to Twitter is a great research tool because it is real time and unbiased.

Does “management” ever second guess your tone or direction on Twitter?

No. We have a great brand and because we are engaging to share our tax expertise or to help our consumers our tone has always been in line with the brand.

What was the most interesting Twitter conversation you’ve had?

It’s funny – last year people were surprised that @hrblock was even on Twitter, this year they are looking for @hrblock to help them. We have a lot of Twitter stories where we were able to help people complete their taxes and A LOT of last minute tax questions on April 14th and 15th. My favorite tweet is from someone stating that they never thought they would be an @hrblock groupie!

How many hours in your day do you spend Twittering?

We are always plugged in, but, we collectively spend about four hours a day actively tweeting.

Are there certain times of the day you Twitter more often?

We tend to find that evenings between 7pm and 10pm are the most active for us, but, we are online all day.

Have you been able to “quantify” your social media efforts at all?

We are looking at Twitter and our other social media efforts as brand building activities. While we can measure the amount of followers, friends, or fans, the measurement tools today are imperfect. We can easily measure the quantity but getting to quality of contacts is more difficult. Even tools like Twinfluence are not perfect. We are looking at brand level measurements versus only transactional measurements.

What other online or social marketing efforts do you think have been most beneficial or successful for the H&R Block brand?

In general, I believe that H&R Block benefits greatly from being part of the conversation online. We have our own community site on hrblock.com that is continually updated with useful tax information and blogs. It has been instrumental to help people navigate through the Tax Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act of 2009. We are also actively participating in Yahoo Answers. Our tax professionals are answering questions and demonstrating the tax expertise that H&R Block has at the local level. We also want to ensure that our brand is represented where communities are forming – through Youtube.com, Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. We tailor each of our programs to match the interests of that community.

I was about to leave a comment on a recent blog post by @Bruce but instead I feel it needed to become a blog post.

How is it in all our Twitter debate that not once have we touched on the issue of safety? Frankly I don’t really give a crap how insightful and useful it can be if people are dying from some crazy Twitter serial killers. As most of you know already is that on Twitter you can be followed by anyone. Yes, I know that you have the ability to make it private but how often do people do that?

I think what is especially scary is BrightKite. For those of you who don’t know what BrightKite is, it’s “(A) location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they’re up to.” What this means is you “check in” on BrightKite and it tells your followers your exact location at the time of check in. Um, hello? Have we all forgotten Mom’s voice telling us never to tell people online were we are? Look at how many people have posted there exact location on BrightKite’s home page!

Yes, I understand there are privacy settings, but you have to remember that people are naive. Say for example someone contacts me through twitter claiming to be interested in a redesign for their web site with Imulus. Of course I wouldn’t want to pass up an opportunity for my company and, me being the trusting soul I am, I check in my location on BrightKite which posts on Twitter for all can see. Is no one else seeing a problem with this?

Yes, you can argue with me the reasons that Twitter and BrightKite are helpful. Yes, you can tell me how many times you and your buddies had a great night out because you happened to be down the street and they happen to see your Twitter post. However, what I am interested in is how far are we willing to sacrifice safety on the off chance that you might benefit from these social networks?

In February we had an awesome 3rd Thursday meetup to talk about the positives and negatives of Twitter. And, as always happens with discussions regarding twitter, the argument: “Why do I care that someone just bought salami at the store?”, was presented^*.

I’ll be honest, as a fairly hardcore twitter user it’s impossible to argue that this type of talk doesn’t take place on Twitter. It does.

That said, I think that you have to recognize that people inherently have a certain level of care (rather they admit it or not) about what people around them are doing. Realistically you can’t get closer to someone without eventually breaking down some personal barriers. At Imulus we have an extremely transparent work environment. Consequently we talk about a lot of personal things that outside people might find “mundane” or “not interesting”. However, it’s this exchange that brings us closer. Think of it this way, when I talk with my mom she always asks me what I’ve done recently. While I usually don’t have incredible stories to tell her, she is still genuinely interested because she cares about me.

For the first time I think the right mix of ingredients has been blended to make this type of interaction possible online. It’s called twitter, and here’s why it works:

1. At 140 characters it’s manageable. I don’t have to spend time reading a huge novel about how George (Imulus co-founder) got together with some friends and made a bacon explosion. Instead, I spend three seconds reading his tweet and think, “damn, I like George, I hope he doesn’t die of a heart attack.” It’s a smile on my face and something I can bring to a conversation sometime.
2. You pick who you’re invested in and if they’re worth it. I think sometimes people forget that they don’t have to follow a ton of people on twitter. The truth is you should only follow the people who you get something positive from. Perhaps it’s humor, perhaps you know them in real life, or perhaps they are your idol. The point is you have the choice to regulate your level of involvement (@penguin really said it best).
3. You don’t have to get permission. This may sound creepy but the great thing about following someone on twitter is that in most cases you don’t have to get their permission. Instead, you can start having them contribute to your feed without having to inconvenience them or worry about if they know you. This gives people the ability to take part in a relationship on one side until they feel like they have something to contribute.

These three things combined create a community dynamic that, to date, has yet to be seen online. Plus, I’m not even including twitter’s other benefits (asking questions, trend tracking, professional exposure, etc.) I’m simply talking about human relationships and their ability to exist in a manageable way online.

^{* Please note this may not have been the exact argument given. But it gets the point across and allows me to use the world salami without sounding dirty.}

Over the past few months we’ve moved back and forth between Intense Debate and the default Wordpress comment system for Imulus Insights. Over this time period I’ve had the chance to get a bit more fully involved with Intense Debate’s foundation, plugin, and structure. This process has for the most part been a massive headache. However, I have to admit that if the service weren’t something we felt had potential we wouldn’t have stuck with it. I’m a fan of admitting when something isn’t a good fit and moving to find a different solution. In this case the benefits seemed worth it so we stuck with it and now Intense Debate is fully integrated and styled into our Wordpress install.

That said. I have some criticisms.

Let’s take a brief look at some of Intense Debate’s HTML:

Okay, I’m not going to spend too long on this as I think the image above illustrates pretty well why working with Intense Debate’s DOM structure is a nightmare. Still, I’ll talk about a few of my major annoyances.

Wrapper, wrapper, wrapper, small-wrapper, smaller-wrapper…

First, Intense Debate is filled to the brim with what seem to be uncessary divs, wrappers, classes, and ID’s. For the life of me I just can’t see why they would need five or six wrappers for specific elements. I just don’t think their users really need that much customization potential. If it was my call I would make the trade off between four wrappers with ID’s and Classes for a simpler system that’s easier to work with. Granted, maybe I can’t ajax in every element on-demand but at least the product would be easier to work with.

Names should be used to make things easier, not harder.

Second, the naming convention they use could be a lot more straight forward. Instead of:

#IDSubscribeToThisWrapper

perhaps stick to something a bit simpler:

#idc-subscribe

Document your DOM.

Third, provide better documentation for your developers. I spent a good chunk of time on the Intense Debate CSS documentaiton page, and while the page is a good start to documentaiton, it by no means has the depth of information that is required to “style” each indvidual element of Intense Debate. If you’re going to add ~200 classes and IDs to customize the applicaiton, at least document it so I can see what I’m working with.

I spent some time on the comment customization layout on the Intense Debate site — and while some of the options are nice, it’s not quite enough. For instance, Intense Debate allows you to link to your own CSS file for style customizations. However, they don’t offer any sort of example CSS file if you want to see how they did things to begin with. This… would be a nice thing to have. Granted I can work with a web inspector to see their styles, but it’d be much nicer to have a tangible CSS file that I could go thourgh.

My wish.

I recognize that some of the above criticisms are being done in order to provide their users with the most amount of customization possible. However, I feel that if customization is the end goal Intense Debate should take a different approach all together. Here’s what I suggest:

Give customers two choices.

1. The ability to use your generated HTML in a widget format (like currently exists)
2. A set of Wordpress template tags that can be used to run functions dynamically without generating the HTML

I would have a substantially reduced amount of criticism is I was able to use the Intense Debate service without having to deal with there ridiculously dirty HTML. Template Tags would allow me to pick and choose what portions of the service I want to incorporate, as well as the ability to style things exactly to my liking with my own HTML stucture. No more !important; declarations, no more individualized Intense Debate only stylesheet, just simple, clean, easy to use Wordpress template tags. This is how the majority of plugins currently work for Wordpress and I see no reason that Intense Debate can’t follow that method. And considering they’ve been purchased by Automattic I’m hoping this is in the works.

End Verdict

I have to admit that the comment traction gained from using Intense Debate is worth the sacrifice of dealing with it. However, I hope they realize they have a long way to go to make their service developer friendly.

It’s called charging people a monthly fee.

Why are so many web-services scared to charge their user base? Especially when the service kicks ass like Facebook or Twitter. TechCrunch is saying that 1 in 5 people on the web have accessed Facebook. I’m sort of thinking that there is something of value there for that many people have an interest. Why then are these companies still looking for a way to make money when the answer is in their face?

Charge us!

Facebook is struggling with ad supported revenue and Twitter is anyone’s guess. Their customers are asking to be charged and would gladly pony-up some cash if it meant a better service.

Facebook and Twitter set bad examples for start-ups by not charging. It creates the impression that all web-services must be ad-supported. This simply isn’t a good approach to building a long term sustainable service. Locally, I try to attend the monthly Boulder / Denver New Tech Meetup, and I’m continually heartbroken by all the startup founders looking for ways to capture VC funding when they already have a fairly nice service to offer. It’s as if everyone is trying to cash in on building the ‘next big thing’ by growing fast and selling to Google.

I fully understand giving a service away in the beginning in order to draw in the users, but have a clear plan to stop the free services and convert to a paid model. The “try before you buy” model isn’t used enough. Facebook could charge for users who’ve been on their services for over 1 year. Twitter could easily charge by volume of Tweets.

I can already see the comments coming in about how charging will diminish the social / community value of these services. Yet, I would be MORE likely to use these services if I was confident they would be here in the future and not sold off to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft.