Get Satisfaction Transforms Twitter Stream into Customer Service

Starting today, companies on the Get Satisfaction support network can respond directly to posts in the public Twitter stream, and incorporate those conversations into their own Web sites. (Disclosure note: I have a relationship with Get Satisfaction.) Some of Twitter's recent buzz has been on how companies are looking for customer buzz through the service, typically by using Tweetscan to find company mentions. Get Satisfaction takes this to the next level by bridging the public Twitter stream into Get Satisfaction's support network.

The new service ("Overheard") enables companies (or helpful friends) to convert any given tweet into a standing thread - it's hard to share reset or return instructions in 140 characters, and Twitter isn't intended for a detailed discussion - and letting the twitter poster know with a return tweet that someone wants to help. Mashable spells it out nicely:

"I really like this move from Get Satisfaction. Twitter (when it’s up) has proven to be especially efficient at uncovering trouble spots and potential feature ideas for a multitude of companies. Meanwhile, Get Satisfaction has emerged as a discussion hub for customer service issues that traditional customer service isn’t addressing. Combining the two will make Get Satisfaction a much more powerful tool, and give the corporate types that want a convenient all-in-one interface something to chew on." - Adam Ostrow

The less-sexy, but ultimately more functional, part of the company's launch this week is the introduction of Help Center, an open source help application (raw source here) that can be used to integrate Get Satisfaction's support network into the company's own Web site. Yahoo!/MyBlogLog is one of the early adopters:

"We try to reach our customers wherever they are. Our bloggers speak to us through their own blogs, Twitter, and many other channels. We want to bring all of these conversations into MyBlogLog so that all members can benefit from the discussion. We're excited not only to respond to our customers in a uniform and focused manner, but also to connect via the channels that our customers are already using." – Ian Kennedy

The Twitter/Overheard functionality is slick because it's acknowledging a manual process - I know plenty of startups, PR folks, and customer reps that are trying to get a handle on Twitter by chasing customers down with Tweetscan, cut/paste, link following, and emails. Overheard is a no-brainer to use. What's more intriguing long-term is to see how companies respond to the Help Center - though not being touted as such, it's one of the first few dedicated, public-facing applications for Enterprise 2.0. And yes, that means all of the company's overheard tweets can come along too if they like. Less sexy is fine with me.

Comments

[Wesley Miller]

Dear Christine: recently I have grown into WEB 2.0 and started to become a more active blogger and have returned to implementing some of the web discoveries into my cafepress.com shop online. Just this weekend, I was introduced to mybloglog.com and being the voracious site browser that I am and putting every tool to work, uncovered the implementation of the getsatisfaction forum your article mentions. I thereby have taken the tools and created for my tiny self-promoted cafepress PREMIUM shop, a presence among GIANTS at getsatisfaction.com. I have thanked them well by spending the early days of this week contributing several companies to their directory including cafepress, Windows Live, hmelyoff laboratories, camfrog.com and a few other products, too. Glad to be in the loop for a change. It is very exciting WEB 2.0 action.

[Mark]

Times are changing, the conventional modes of doing business have evolved too. Social Networking is taking the world by storm. With the likes of Myspace, Face Book twiter and so on things are just gonna grow.

More job oppertunities are being discussed in social netowrking websites then in paper.

And tweeter is really becoming more and more popular with each passing day.

Mark
Editor
http://www.212articles.com
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[Christine]

Ian: that's funny you mention twitter vs. blog subscribers. I've found that folks are subscribing to twitter and simply clicking on the blog updates they like from there.

Has anyone worked out a formula for incorporating Twitter followers, Facebook feed subscribers, etc. into blog reach?

[Ian Kennedy]

Hi Christine,

Thanks for the mention. It's a big experiment now but I like what we see and if the MyBlogLog community ends up adopting it, we'll go with it.

Twitter has been great too. The number of people following twitter.com/mybloglog has now exceeded the number of people subscribed to the MyBlogLog Blog!

Ian

[Christine]

Yes, absolutely! Summize is the excellent search technology under the hood of Overheard at GetSatisfaction.com. (As evidenced by the colorful Summize logo on all of the Overheard pages.)

Tweetscan, on the other hand, is what I've seen PR and other folks using on their desktops as part of the manual alternative. Sorry for any confusion.

[Abdur]

Nice post, Get Satisfaction is great. Just a quick correction to your post. Get Satisfaction uses Summize as its backend Twitter search.

Thanks

[Britney Maosn]

Maybe more companies will now get social networking and respond to their clients! As well watch comments out there!