BigSuzyM's Blog | Not your typical day job....

I know what you’re thinking…what the shitting Christ is going on with the Elite Courtesans Twitter accounts at the moment?

Well, Lisa and I have been considering the best way forward as an agency on Twitter for the last couple of months. We went through a stage over the last year or so where, in addition to the main @EliteCourtesans Twitter account, some of our ladies signed up with their own accounts, not to mention Lisa and I doing the same too.

What we’ve noticed with Twitter though, at least related to our agency where some of the girls have more time or drive to tweet than others, is that unless you tweet regularly, having a Twitter account can actually be detrimental to your business. Daft as it sounds, it’s better to have NO twitter account than one which isn’t regularly updated.

So, while having a bit of a clear out the other day anyway, we decided to ask Donna, Claire, Nicole, Michelle and Maria – who quite honestly don’t have the time to keep up with Twitter and were tweeting either not at all or only sporadically – to delete their accounts.

In the interests of fairness, and because we were worried we were tweeting too much from our personal accounts and not enough variety from the main @EliteCourtesans account, Lisa and I decided to do the same. Thing is, @EliteCourtesans is a big driving force to our website, we have a lot of followers there and many who interact well with us. It makes no sense to tweet so much from our personal accounts (which were set to private anyway because we really did tweet a lot of very personal stuff…well, I did at least).

So the way forward, for the moment at least, is for Lisa and I to joint manage the @EliteCourtesans account, our goal being to not just tweet endless links to our website, but also to add some more personality and discussion to the account too.

So there you go. Some of you have been asking for an explanation and there it is. Not using my personal Twitter account is going to be HARD. Did you see that episode of Eastenders where Phil Mitchell was locked in a room at the Queen Vic and started going mental with Crack withdrawal? That’s me right now. I bloody love Twitter but i’m sure I will get used to the new set up in no time.

So sign up and follow @EliteCourtesans please – we really do like to natter to our customers/potential customers and other sex industry workers. Just to show you how fabulous Twitter is, and that it’s not all about what people are having for tea that day, I’ve compiled some of my favourite tweets below:

Follow Friday Wahey!

Hello. Me again. On one today aren’t I?

I can think of better things to do with my Saturday afternoon than spend it logging into the various Touch Local websites (touchoxford, touchswindon, touchbristol etc) to update my advert details. But that’s what I had to do today, because Touch Local have changed the contact number for Elite Courtesans in all of our listings from a standard UK mobile number to a premium rate number without our permission. See here:

You notice how they have also included a little ‘calls cost 150 pence…’ note under the business description, as if we had put it there and are profiting from the number (we didn’t and we’re not). That’s good of them.

Is it a scam? Well, i’ve no doubt that somewhere deep in the bowels of Touch Local’s terms and conditions it says that they can do what they like, when they like. We’ve held listings with them for 4 years, then all of sudden, presumably under the misapprehension that sex workers and their customers are unlikely to kick up a fuss, they decided to change our phone numbers – and those of other escorts and agencies – to premium rate. I’ve only looked briefly, but they don’t appear to have replaced contact numbers in any other industry listings with premium rate alternatives.

I don’t know how much the Touch Local CEO has earned from this little business idea, but no doubt he’s up a few quid. I’m just surmising here, but I would imagine a scheme like this is reliant on the fact that escorts won’t check their adverts and customers will miss the call cost note and then be too embarrassed to complain. I reckon i’d be forgiven for thinking that Touch Local put the country code 44 at the beginning of the number to make it harder to spot as premium rate. I’d probably even be forgiven for thinking that the fact I have to click a ‘view phone number’ drop down link to see the number in the first place, is a purposeful ploy to make it harder for me, the advertiser, to spot the unauthorised change to my listing.

So, if you work in the adult industry, and you advertise with Touch Local, i’d suggest you check your advert. You can change the number back to your standard mobile number yourself if you know or can retrieve your login, although who knows how long it will be until they change them back to premium rate again. Even better, tell Touchlocal to stick their advert up their jacksy and get it removed altogether. Apparently, you can can do that via their form here: http://www.touchlocal.com/go/pages/contact_us.

Oh, and this website is interesting too.

Anne Robinson will hear about this.