“If you’re trying to hide from your customers, don’t use Twitter.”

Increasingly, corporate giants like Comcast, PepsiCo, JetBlue Airways, Kodak and others are beefing up direct communications with shoppers through social-media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The popular social networks have helped companies quickly and cheaply reply to consumer beefs, answer questions and tailor service and goods. It has bolstered current consumer services, easing the load on call centers and expensive mailers that most customers don’t like anyhow.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and online software services like LiveOps, Salesforce.com and RightNow Technologies are all are getting used to improve customer service, keep users and gain a competitive advantage. As more corporations effectively use social-media tools for customer care, it is also becoming better to shift customer-relations resources to the U.S. and feed into the growing “homeshoring” trend. Home based employees are now becoming a trend among companies that take advantage of improved technology, gain productiveness from staff no longer tied to long commutes and leverage the experience of local employees. Several companies with vast call-center operations overseas plan to shift some jobs back to U.S. soil.   The advances in technology will allow companies to create virtual call centers staffed with veterans, the unemployed, college graduates and retirees, working from home.

Twitter allows companies to see in real-time what their buyers think, and they can learn a lot from that.  The greatest benefit of Twitter is “listening for the point of need”.  Finding out where the company could do something to fulfill that need.  Our short experience shows that people express their needs more on Twitter than on any other social network.  This is understandable, since you can quickly jot down a tweet, whereas a letter or even an email takes much more time.

The more ways you provide customers to get in touch with you, the more likely you are able to satisfy them.  When you show your customers that you are willing to listen to them, you create loyal followers.  For most people call centers are too maddening, with long waits and inexperienced, bad-English speaking agents.  Email is too slow in an age of instantaneous online communications. This doesn’t mean that call centers are a thing of the past though. Twitter is for basic troubleshooting and can be used as an addition to the traditional phone support.  Many people are still like to call on the phone, mostly because they haven’t even heard of Twitter.

Never has it been so easy for a business to find out what people are saying about your company or brand. Twitter offers an opportunity to listen in on what is said about your brand in the marketplace.  Before, you needed expensive market studies to find out how your brand was perceived, today you can just type in your brand-name in the Twitter search box and all the buzz on your brand will show up on your screen.

This is very powerful. Whilst you have a chance to just eavesdrop and draw your own conclusions, you should set up a Twitter team to respond to what is said in the marketplace about your brand. You would want to know what your customers think, both good and bad.

A trendy US corporation called ‘Whole Foods Market’ has set up more than 50 Twitter accounts, tweeting on different topics in different product areas. Mostly about ‘green’ topics, but sometimes as specialized as cheese.  They have almost a million followers and are following about half of them back from their main account @WholeFoods.  They have set up separate accounts for their local stores, but these are less popular, with only a few hundred followers.  Nevertheless, the brand is set up well to listen to its customers and is actively engaged in conversations.

Imagine how a consumer would respond and to view your brand when he tweaked it about a malfunction in your product and he gets a spontaneous reaction from the company with an offer to replace the product! You will have a fan of your product for life!

By analyzing what is tweeted about your brand, you can determine how your brand is perceived and how you can improve brand awareness.  If the competition started to bash your brand, you would want to be aware of this so you can counter the attacks. Don’t fall into the trap of countering these attacks directly because you don’t want to engage in a direct confrontation with your competitor.

Many people think that the conversations on Twitter are trivial. Who wants to know about you having ice cream or what place you went to for dinner last night? The fact that people miss is that trivial conversation is important to someone, perhaps the people who sell ice cream or the restaurant that you did visit. In these trivial conversations, people are revealing much more about themselves than they ever would in a survey. Twitter is a power already and a doorway into the future of business. Smart entrepreneurs will get into the game early.

One of these smart entrepreneurs is Zappos.  This is a trendy online store that promotes itself with:

“Free shipping BOTH ways, 365-day return policy, 24/7 customer service. Millions of men’s shoes, women’s shoes, girl’s shoes, boy’s shoes, handbags, men’s clothing, women’s clothing, Uggs, Nike shoes!”

The Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, actively tweets on the main @Zappos account, which has almost 1 million followers, half of which he has followed back.  Zappos is a very trendy brand and were on Twitter early.  They not only stimulate their employees to go on Twitter, but they even suggest that that the employees use Twitter names as @Zappos_Fred and @Zappos_Elisa.  This may seem like a very risky strategy. In the old corporate world, spokespeople for companies were always selected carefully and usually funneled through one corporate entity. Corporations were afraid that employees might inadvertently reveal things that might hurt the company. With this approach, Zappos does the opposite. They stimulate their employees to talk to customers and engage in meaningful conversations about their brands and their products.  And it is working! They have many followers that are real fans and their sales are skyrocketing.

Zappos has a page on their website http://Twitter.Zappos.com, where they show everything that is tweeted about Zappos.    Every comment made by anyone that mentions their brand is put up on this page – unmoderated.  So both good and bad comments from customers are shown here in broad daylight.  Drawing attention to your brand in this way is certainly a bold move.