Nate and I were in Canton, Ohio yesterday for a training session with one of Social Business Strategies‘ clients, Incept. A significant portion of this training was getting a class of iCME’s (internet conversation marketing experts) up to speed on Twitter and familiar with Hootsuite.
A problem we quickly discovered when we got there… they didn’t yet have Twitter accounts, and they didn’t have email accounts, and the IT guy wasn’t in… and Twitter requires a unique e-mail address for each account registered.
Sort of 
My workaround: Use the sole Google account we had created for them for Google Reader purposes and take advantage of the nifty plus sign hack to create the Twitter accounts. For example, I’ve already created a Twitter account using:
- cherylelizabethharrison[at]gmail[dot]com
But by taking advantage of the plus sign hack, I can use:
- cherylelizabethharrison+twitter[at]gmail[dot]com
(I hope the brackets aren’t too confusing, I hate spam.) In addition to Twitter recognizing this as a unique email address, GMail will direct the message to my inbox so that I can click the confirmation link.
Not only did this enable us to create the accounts we needed for our training quickly, but it streamlined all of the iCME’s conversations into one single, searchable GMail account. As a call center, tracking conversations is extremely important. The workaround turned out to be quicker and more effective than what we were planning to do. And Timothy deemed me Social Media MacGyever, which I am strongly considering changing my job title to.
You can’t always accomplish a task as planned, so you should always be prepared to find a workaround. (Nate called it a reacharound, but… I don’t think that’s what he meant.)
Have you solved any problems lately using a different tactic than planned?
