I’m over 50, by a few years. I never wore glasses until 18 months ago. I could drive, and I could read. I could see the scrollers on the bottom of my TV.

Once my eyesight started to deteriorate it happened very quickly. Three eyeglass prescriptions in 14 months. And my vision kept getting worse and worse.

I have a really good eye Doctor that identified my cataracts on the first visit. He just was not prepared for how quickly they progressed. Neither was I.

I’ve spent the better part of last year not being able to see much. Faces were a blur at 3 feet. Roadsigns were a blur at 20 feet. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if the stoplight was red or green.

But I was seeing a doctor – so I felt that I was safe driving. Nobody told me not to. (But nobody understood how quickly things were changing for me).

What is funny (not really) is how much my life was altered because of this – and I did not even realize it. I went to the office MUCH less often (I am lucky to be able to work from wherever the Internet is).

I stopped traveling – and I used to travel a lot. It was just too difficult to navigate an airport. And a strange city.

But I swear – I did not realize until just recently what my lack of vision was costing me. Partially because it all happened so quickly. And partly because I still think of myself as invincible

So I finally got cataract surgery on one of my eyes last week and I can tell you my life has been changed drastically. I can see. I can see. I can really see.

So let me tell you about the procedure.

It is SO fucking easy, You get some lab tests done (and that physical you have put off for years like I did). Then you show up to a clinic (not a hospital). You get an IV – prolly the worst part if you are squeamish.

Then a very, very nice Anesthesiologist will be your best friend. She/he will put a little magic juice in the IV and – Boom! You suddenly are done.  You have never really been asleep, but you don’t remember. You are just done. Done.

And the next day you take off the eye-patch (your Dr. does) – and you can see. You. Can. See.

Now you need to put in eye drops several times a day for 10 days. But you can see.

On a scale of 1-10 on pain with 10 being the worst and a torn cuticle being a 7 – this was a 2. Perhaps even a 1.

Don’t be afraid to see. This is a very simple procedure that has already changed my life – and I still have another eye to go

Many people don’t have a choice about their ability to see – having cataract surgery should be a VERY easy choice.

I run Social Media for Rackspace Hosting. I have ran SM since we had SM. And I tried a lot of third party tools in the last 4+ years. But none of them really did what I wanted them to do. Most of them were really written for Marketing. I was more interested in being helpful.

Early on in our Social endeavors there were just two of us, and staying in sync was easy. But as we demonstrated more and more wins I was allowed to grow the team. And that added to the complexity we dealt with.

So about 18 months ago my employees started writing a tool to help us do what WE actually do every day – Social Media Support. NOT marketing (but Marketing has a play in this). We wanted to take care of customers, in real-time. And with a team of 6 I needed to know who was doing what, and when.

So I stole our mobile developer and brought him onto the Social Media team. I borrowed another developer part time who was just interested in what we were doing.  And of course, I had hired engineers to manage our Social Media accounts – so I had them to help.  I had the right people to build a tool that did EXACTLY what we wanted to do.

So what does our tool do? I’ll give you some bullet points below.

• Uses Twitter OAuth for account management.
• Allows a full audit trail of which of my employees said/did what.
• Allows us to see, in real-time, which of my employees is responding to a customer issue – both on the web, and on mobile (iPhone now, Android very soon).
• Allows us to set sentiment on a tweet (set by humans, not an algorithm).
• Allows us to tag a tweet. With a variety of tags that let us dive deep into any given product and the sentiment around it.
• Allows us to set notes on a Twitter account.
• Allows us to tie customer account numbers to Twitter accounts.
• Allows us to flag twitter accounts used by employees – ties into our LDAP database and pulls job title, phone number, email, etc.
• Allows us to display customer “projector feed” views for any of our brands/products. The views can be customized to show negative reactions, positive reactions, etc – it is a very powerful view for a Product Manager to have.
• All mentions of our brand are stored locally – we can find all tweets from a customer for the last 18 months, etc – locally. And quickly – and we deal in fast, so this is important.
• It is a fully-featured Twitter client – built around our brands.
• It is built first and foremost to be an engagement tool.
• One click to translate a Tweet via Google Translate.
• Allows us to set keywords that are highlighted to get our attention.

There is much more – and we are nowhere near done. But we now have a Social Media Support application that is just as useful mobile as it is via the web. It allows us to scale our Social Media Team well enough that a team of six basically covers 24/7. It allows us to quickly see what items have been acted on, and by whom. It allows us to respond and categorize/set sentiment for 15K+ tweets a month.  And the data we have accumulated about products and customers and feature requests is extremely valuable.

Now we are considering making this a tool that you could use. We are considering making it a product.

Does any of this sound interesting to you? Will it improve your workflow as it has ours? What else would you have it do (and yes, metrics are included, but they are not the focus of this tool – this is NOT Radian6 – this is a support tool – perhaps think of it as a “real-time ticketing system”).

Let me know in the comments – or email me at rob@rackspace.com

Rob

My intent is to mostly focus on business stuff here, but not boring business stuff. I’m interested in building amazing customer experiences around support (you read that right!).

I’m passionate about using Social Media tools to improve the customer support experience, reduce the overhead and hassle of using tickets to get simple problems solved and eliminated wait times caused by inefficient processes and tools.

I currently run Social Media for Rackspace Hosting – something I have been doing for almost 5 years now. I created our first Social Media position and have now built an amazing team of engineers that do an stellar job caring for our customers online – but more about that later.

My team has also built a unique and innovative tool that allows us to quickly identify and assist our customers and track our brands. More about that later as well!

I won’t be posting often, and I will be doing little re-posting or linking to other content – this isn’t intended to be an aggregation blog – this is primarily just going to be my own thoughts – for better or worse!