You have a contact on your twitter who you have a professional relationship with, as well as the now-standard follower semi-friendly relationship. Say you want to ask him a quick question about your professional issues, like setting up a meeting or just a small 1-minute query about something.

Now, I’ve been on the receiving end of stuff like this, and I know how badly it affects my weekends and days off when I can’t disconnect from the job. Some guys enjoy calling you at five pm on a sunday and setting up a meeting for the next day, and it’s not nice. It’s even worse if your’e on holiday.

So I’m now working on a similar sort of etiquette on twitter. I could send a quick d or @message, but I’m not going to do so outside of work hours. The big problem being working out what work hours are for people, sometimes, as I have people who work sunday-thrusday, monday-friday, monday-saturday morning, and then time zones to deal with. It’s not easy, and I don’t do it much on twitter, so I eventually end up just dropping and email a lot of the time, which I can assume is dealt with in working hours. Still, the urge to just send a d is *there*.

I feel the same as most really in that he shouldn’t have been the only one doing this. Set priorities, when the load starts infringing on your life outside of work, it’s time to make some decisions, either hold steady and do what you can in the hours you have allocated, or ask for more resource and justify why you need it.

Batman sleeps when he want’s to because he has the common sense to beable to switch between two realities, one is work, one is the playboy (read; normal life). They meet occasionally, but if either takes over completely, you’re in trouble in my view.

Reading about the events leading to the Batman question, actually causes many more questions;
– why was he the only one doing it?
– what was so broken at his company that the normal support route did not work?
* Could he not hand off the support requests?
– had his efforts been noticed by *anyone* else at his company?
* if not why not?

Are we once again facing the problem of Eternal September?
As wave after wave of people discover the same basic fundamental concepts over and over again, but each time with a slightly different interface.

Posted a comment over on Vero’s post around the panel level’s thing.

Seriously, have you ever seen Batman on a bright sunny day? No, it’s all shadows and moonlight for him.

Why? Because the police of Gotham City are out during the day. They’re taking care of business. In fact, they’re working pretty damn hard during the night as well.

Batman is only called upon to deal with the edge cases. The whackos. Ones who don’t fit in the normal support model.

Your call centre & customer care team are your police men. Your Batman is the press officer who deals with the outraged politician or journalist who could really mess things up for the business.

You are probably not Batman. You’re not even Robin. You are Alfred.

You help things along. You make sure there’s a clean suit to change in to. When you notice the Batmobile has a dent, you hammer it out. You’re inoffensive and don’t overshadow Bruce Wayne.

This isn’t a bad thing. This isn’t a criticism. Alfred is the cornerstone of the Batman story. Alfred is an indispensable weapon in Batman’s arsenal. And – here’s the best bit – he never has to risk his neck.

We should all try to be Alfred for our employers. Almost invisible, smoothing things out, lending a hand, giving sage advice and a timely homily on what today’s adventure has taught us.

You see, Batman is special for two reasons
1) He has excellent help from the likes of Alfred
2) He has spent literally years training in ancient martial arts.

He, and the cops, are highly trained professionals who do an extremely complex job. You can lend a hand, but don’t get in the way.

As they say, Do Not Try This At Home.

You don’t start with Batman – or Batmen – you start with cops. You only need Batman for special occasions. If you don’t have customer service – get them, train them, pay them. If you do already have them, get them involved in proactive support. Make sure that they work the hours that your customers want to call on them.

If that doesn’t work, and no one else can help – and if you can find them – maybe you can hi… wait… I’ve slipped genres…

First off, he is not Batman And I am not just saying that because I live “in” the set of Gotham City here in Chicago. Batman had Alfred, Lucius Fox and – more importantly – people who were working for him who did not know they were working for him!

I have been in this guy’s shoes before, but before the days of Twitter and even YouTube. My role was more internal to the firm, but I did solve problems for customers too. I did a lot of work because I chose to take it on, otherwise my brain would have been bread pudding by now.

From what it sounds like, he was doing this alone, and that is part of his problem. I had assembled a “team” of basically other likeminded folks who gave a damn, and though we were not purposely sneaking around, we all knew we were doing things that were against the norm and culture of where we worked. It was not a 24/7 operation, but because we were working on Web sites and Web apps, it was a late night task many times.

In some companies, people may not be receptive to social media, and unfortunately there’s not much you can do. But in some companies, you need to keep needling people and eventually they will get it. For this guy and others, I hope they work for the latter and not the former.

mp/m

But in all seriousness, clearly this company has problems if it’s one man, on a volunteer basis, who is interacting with the customers.

This company needs more people who will stop to pick up the trash than those who will just walk by and say “that’s not my job.” Sounds like customer satisfaction is NOBODY’s job, and that is scary news.

Forget the “get a consistent voice” advice – get people involved, employees AND customers, and let this guy get some sleep so he can go back and fix/improve the product and make more of these conversations about how much the customers love the products/services, driving more business their way.

Things I can think of to do:

Make it clear that this kind of “social media support” is at least semi-official, and establish a few key, real people as Batman and Batman stand-ins (I wouldn’t mind terribly if my support call was handled by Robin if Batman was busy!)

Establish this kind of support as a clear role in your company, and try to get the appropriate resources. If you’re working your day job and doing this as your night job, you won’t last long. I’m fairly sure Wayne Enterprises mostly ran itself, and it’s probably easier to be Batman if your day job is “reclusive millionaire”. But this is likely to be the most difficult thing to do, as many companies won’t “get it” yet.

Remember that the police are there to handle the mundanities. Batman didn’t bother going after all the petty crime, or typing up arrest sheets, or spend much time in court. You may be going too far as Batman if you’re trying to handle the whole support job from start to finish. Just knowing the right people to hand things off to and building relationships with your existing internal support people (who may otherwise resent you) will help immensely. If you’re doing Batman’s unpaid job because the city has decided it can halve the number of policemen, you’re onto a loser, I think.

If you can’t get the appropriate resources, then you’re going to have to manage expectations as early as possible. And don’t forget the Batman, having no great responsibility to anyone but himself and his own sense of justice, cherry-picked the personal jobs that were most interesting and fulfilling, and let Commissioner Gordon handle the drudgery…