Serving the Twits

A quick warning: this post is a bit off topic and not directly related to the usual security content of this blog.

It seems Twitter is being used more and more as a customer service and brand monitoring tool for a variety of companies big and not-so-big. A few weeks ago, Chris Hoff twittered his painful experience with Southwest Airlines and bad weather in the north east. Low and behold, he received a very personalized tweet back from SWA apologizing for his rough travels and an additional follow-up tweet upon his return.

Yesterday, Mark Hendrickson on TechCrunch wrote about a company, Get Satisfaction, that is performing brand monitoring and customer service within the Twittersphere for companies such as Comcast. I am not sure how personal the service is, it was clear the tweets from SWA were not a bot but an actual person.

A few days ago I was experiencing a lot of browser crashing with the new FireFox RC1 release. Amidst my frustration I had twittered about the issue and, low and behold, I received a tweet back from @firefox_answers with some helpful debugging suggestions that actually solved my problem.

There has been a lot of talk lately about Twitter’s issues with uptime as well as a great debate yesterday about it: See twitout versus twitter love. It’s likely they will get these issues resolved, especially with the rumors going around this week of their additional round of funding. If done well, this could be a great channel for customer service and brand loyalty. Of course, if done wrong, it could come across as creepy and big-brotherish.

Now back to Security.