Even Pros Can Make Rookie Mistakes

When we saw one of our clients, Bigelow Tea, mentioned in The Twitter Book (by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein) as a positive example of how businesses should use Twitter, we were ecstatic.

And then we realized we’d stopped taking our own advice.

In the book, O’Reilly and Milstein applaud Bigelow Tea for using conversational tweets to direct traffic to their tea-related blog posts, rather than those generic “New Blog Post: Topic X” auto-tweets, which most users have now begun to subconsciously tune out.  Naturally, we were pleased — until we realized the Twitter Tools plugin we’d just installed on the Bigelow Tea Blog was doing precisely what The Twitter Book had lauded us for not doing, all because we hadn’t double-checked the plugin’s default checkboxes.

So we disabled it.  (The auto-tweet part, not the whole plugin.)  Our lesson?  Sometimes a compliment can help you find even more ways to improve.  (And, while you’re at it: make sure you double-check the details…)