3’s X-Series blog, dedicated to documenting ‘mobile internet musings from 3 people on the go’, is shut. They’ve run out of musings, it seems…
Link: xseries: Hello, I must be going …
Hello all, well the time has come for the X-Series blog to close its doors for a while. We are going to re-ignite a new blog later in the year, but in the meantime there’s plenty of places for you to say hi, including:
3 neXt
3 neXt on Facebook
3 Skypephone Forum
Strange, very strange.
Why start a conversation with the public and X-Series users only to dump that conversation a little while later? A new blog is coming, eh?
Why not bother keeping the current one going ’til then? Ran out of things to say? Can’t be arsed? Deary me…
Corporate blogging is a fascinating thing to behold — and it doesn’t — or shouldn’t — be held to the same rules as a marketing campaign. I don’t think they should be switching conversation on and off.. That said, the wind seemed to have blown out of the X-Series blog of late (the last post was back in October 2007).
This was a great blog when it started. I even used it to get in touch and have a problem solved when I was caught in a customer service loop (i.e. shop said “call CS”, CS said “you’ll have to go to the shop”. Grrr). I agree with you completely Ewan. It now smacks of having been part of the marketing push to launch X-Series. They couldn’t be bothered to post for ages now. That causes me more of a problem with 3 than if they hadn’t done it in the first place. It gave the impression of openness and being clued-up to their audience. Now it just looks cynical.
Three (UK) have not been actively promoting x-series gold (or silver for that matter) for some time now. No advertising in store, no mention in the last few months three mag’s either. It is becoming increasingly obvious that something else is going to be launched later this year – lets just hope its even better than the excellent X-Series gold add on, I’m not sure I could live without my 80 hours of Slingbox a month any more!
Trevor Bennett.
Its better that they tell everyone that they weren’t going to be updating the blog over the coming months, let’s hope that they’re working on something super-cool that they’ll come back with.
Ewan
I agree with you about corporate blogging. If it isn’t something that, once started, is seen as an integral activity for the company by everyone involved – including the senior management, then it is danger of looking like a marketing ‘ploy’ as soon as people can’t be bothered any more.
When will we ever learn.
We always hope that a corporate blog will be more than a marketing exercise. But deep down we all know that if the blog is stated by the company and run in-house, with no outside writers, it’s a marketing exercise.
The exercise worked for 3 so they don’t need it anymore. Will they and other Companies try it again, of course. Will we all fall for it again, as world weary as we are? Of course, because we live in hope, that “this Company is different this time.”
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I just got a text message from 3 saying I’d reached the “fair use” data limit on my x-series mobile.
I thought the limit was 1GB per month? I usually use a lot of web browsing and stuff on it but it comes to no more than 100MB in a month and fine it very hard to believe i’ve used ten times that in half the month. In fact the data counter on my phone shows just over 1GB usage ever as I’ve never reset it. I phoned them but they seemed completely unable to find any useful information for me about what I’d supposedly used and when.
Did they change the limit or something and I’ve not noticed?
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Three are very odd at the moment, on the one side they are cutting edge, literally pushing what can and should be done … in fact their portal is pushing people to have web access – on the other hand, ports are blocked and the customer service is poorly trained – you genuinely get different responses from different people every time you call!!!
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