Under the hood of my Guardian Hack Day hack was a data importer which pulled data from DabbleDB. I really like DabbleDB, so this isn’t an attempt to make them look bad at all. In fact it’s an attempt to show good customer service (which could in some ways have been great if there had been more information given or the invitation to start a conversation about what the consumer would have liked).

I had a bit of a sense of humour failure about half way through my hack.

I’d given myself the fun job of playing for the first time with JSON or XML import and App Engine. I’d been wanting to find a reason for doing this for a while for other projects I’m tinkering with but just never seemed to find the time. So, a 24 hour hackathon, under a time constraint, seemed like just the perfect time. I’d armed myself with a whole load of links to read in advance and actually seemed to be making some nice progress with a sample chunk of JSON. Hurrah. With this success I went to wire up to DabbleDB feeling invincible. 1 hour later and cursing (myself mostly) and feeling like a complete newbie for not making this work I discovered the problem. It wasn’t me, it was the JSON coming back.

So I twittered in the style of Mr Jones from Dad’s Army. Then went and made some tea as both I and Mr Armitage seemed from our tweets to be in need of some. And it seemed like a very British thing to do under the circumstances.

A bit later the nice people at DabbleDB twittered back, pointing out rightly that their responses weren’t padded (my bad), but they weren’t entirely standard.

It was really nice to feel listened to, but it didn’t solve the problem. I already knew there was some non-standard code around there in the response. I just wanted to know how to switch that off. By this time I’d gone for Plan B and had written the XML importer using their RSS feed. This meant that I’d checked off both of the things I wanted to teach myself, which was nice. Only downside to that is the RSS feed only gives you the first 20 records, something which I discovered with just an hour to go before the hack was due to be used in anger (customisation features on the JSON and RSS output please).

I think the great thing about the experience was that DabbleDB were actively listening and responding, even when the voice they were hearing seemed annoyed and you wouldn’t naturally want to go there and interact.  It relates a lot to the phrase from Obama’s acceptance speech which I feel is a bit of a maxim : I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.

I’ve spoken in the past few weeks to some big brands who either feel they don’t have time to monitor or listen. Furthermore I’d heard from one that there would be no point to listening as it would either take them too long to respond to their audience/fans or that they didn’t want their roadmaps muddied by the wishes of their users. I can’t see the point to either of these arguments. If the tiny team at DabbleDB can listen and respond so can anyone. Moreover if you don’t listen to your consumers your competitors will and if they’re nimble they just might steal your audience. If that happened you’d have no one to blame but yourselves.