“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.

Up to the moment service details: Twitter can function like a real time search for airlines and others. As an example, JetBlue (@JetBlue; over 730,000 followers) actively answers traveler questions about flight times, delays and weather updates.  They are using Twitter as an early-warning system.

Starbucks is employing a mix of social media thru Twitter (@Starbucks; over 240,000 followers), Facebook (3.2 million fans) and its own social-networking site (http://MyStarbucksIdea.com) for product concepts and feedback. Splash sticks, the corporation’s new plastic plugs for sip holes, were made in part thru feedback from their customers.

Thru social-media forums on Facebook and Yahoo, PepsiCo asked buyers to go to its DEWmocracy web site and vote on one of three selections for a new Mountain Dew flavor. More than 350,000 voted last year.

Online communities to exchange comments: Facebook and MySpace offer bulletin boards for clients to weigh in on leading brands. Dunkin’ Donuts actively manages a fan page on Facebook with over 825,000 fans. It made use of the page at length to complement advertising and email to tell consumers on a new range of sensible food and an iced coffee day event in April 2009.

Harley-Davidson’s company profiles on MySpace (36,000 friends) and Facebook (175,000 fans) let it solicit comments from their loyal buyers and produces videos of its motorbikes on YouTube. Harley uses Twitter (@HarleyDavidson) to tie it all together.

The creation of Internet communities has prompted some of the traditional Customer Relations Management (CRM) software companies to tap into this resource.

For example Salesforce.com is helping 6,800 firms including Comcast, Dell and Starbucks build online communities to solicit buyer recommendations on ways to improve operations.  RightNow Technologies has created a social-media tracking service, dubbed Cloud Monitor, to monitor what customers are saying about brands and their products on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

Market Research & Analysis:  You have a low cost opportunity to poll the Twitter community to see how people were responding to your company’s product in the marketplace. It is still too early to do some heavy data mining on Twitter. The tools to do this are not available yet and one shortcoming of Twitterer is that it only keeps an archive of all Tweets broadcasted in the last 30 days. Applications are springing up left and right to fill this void. Some are already storing data in their own database as far back as December 2007 and will allow you to retrieve information at a cost.   An example of this is http://TweetScan.com.  Another application that gives you archive data is called http://Tweetake.com. They give you a real-time query on the Twitter database in a nice CSV format that you can import into Microsoft Excel.   This service is free of charge, but is limited by the Twitter API, which only allows you to retrieve 1000 records.  For data mining today the expense probably outweighs the value, though it is a potential use worth pursuing in the future.  It would not hurt to back up your own tweets, direct messages and @replies every month and store them for future reference.

B2B Communications: Some of the most interesting and creative insights are on how a company could make use of Twitter as a quick and easy communications tool between suppliers, partners and retailers. While it clearly will not (and should not) replace a comprehensive supply chain system, it could be useful for quick status communications that don’t make sense in traditional system.  For example it could be used to signal exception cases.  This can be reported from any place interesting a very accessible and below cost device: the mobile phone.   This means it can be a report it from any place at any time which makes it really useful.

There are also opportunities to use Twitter to build better internal communications internally among employees to foster a better working environment.

Brands aren’t about ‘messages’ anymore – brands today are conversations — and today the most important conversations are happening through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.