“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.

Twitter is the greatest thing to come around the Internet in years. I had never been on the leading edge of technology acceptance – before Twitter. I did Usenet News after it had long gotten past its prime, slept through the World Wide Web. Blogging ? Set up my own online diary ? Why would anyone do that ? But Twitter does it all. Social computing. Online news and views. Bulletin boards. Twitter can do it all. It is my interface to everything I’ve done online for the past twenty years. It is east to join and easy to use. And, most importantly, Twitter is free.

Twitter is a model of user friendliness because it does functionality right. You get started right away and you can learn as you go. For an old guy like me, that’s important, because I still remember VHS and Betamax, but never had the patience to program my Video Cassette Recorder, and I still remember learning to type using Multimate on a Compac PC that ran DOS. No, not MS-DOS, just DOS. If you throw too much functionality at me too fast, a man my age cannot absorb it all, but with Twitter, I can keep up with the youngsters, even get ahead of them. I’ve recruited one of my three daughters for Twitter – they all had Facebook pages – and managed to get one other’s long dormant Twitter account linked to mine, I’m a low frequency blogger, so what I typically do is just manually insert the links to my blog entries as I update my site. I have cross-linked my Twitter page to Facebook.

For me, the most important and attractive feature of Twitter is to act as a “one-stop shop” for web browsing. I’ve linked many news services, including BBC, the New York Times, Die Zeit, and CNBC’s Fast Money onto my Twitter feed. Usually, I’ll log on before going to bed, to check out what is happening. I reserve Favorites for specific items I want to keep, and if I need to know more, I’ll go to the owning website. I discovered that the Onion News Network is up on Twitter, always a favorite. There are also a number of government sites linked into Twitter, including the White House. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin also have sites linked to Twitter, so if you want to know where Newt is having dinner this evening, check it out. I’ve been a little hesitant to tweet at work, since our office operates in a secure intranet and it might be taken wrongly – but Twitter does have enormous potential for business intelligence gathering. Just a few days after joining Twitter, I came across a very interesting project that was announcing its open solicitation just the day before.

Again – the power of Twitter is that it gets you to where you want to go on the information superhighway without getting stuck in traffic. That’s what we all need don’t we?

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.

As well as the variable distribution channels, leveraging Twitter as a selling channel has another benefit for the users / customers: anonymity. Consumers can eavesdrop and follow messages without giving away their identity, email address, or any other contact info. While a selling dept may not like this ( if the mind-set is to concentrate on harvesting email addresses ), the customers will like it better and should be more ready to take part in a well planned selling event knowing that they are not signing themselves up for a future crammed with promotional spam.

For a CPG company (Consumer Packaged Goods), you could try running a competition or some other promotional program through Twitter that leverages the short-message, group-chat nature of Twitter. Send out clues and have users answer with guesses…

Sponsor a Twitter channel for something in your demographic… Sponsor a live reporter covering something interesting… Do something clever with tweets sent to your account.  It will definitely help if your products are something the tech-hipster, early adopter, social-networking-kids want. Also, bear in mind that you wish to approach with caution — the Twitter demographic isn’t keen on enrolling for spam, or having corporations attack their social scene with advertising, so you want to add value to the conversation.

Social-media tools are fostering consumer service through:

Direct sales: Dell explains it has sold millions worth of refurbished computer parts and obsolete inventory thru its @Dell Outlet account (over 750,000 followers) on Twitter since 2007.

Promotions/Marketing: An obvious temptation for consumer brands is to use their Twitter account for promotions and marketing.   A word of caution here.  You should be aware that overly aggressive marketing will backfire.   Many avid Twitterers see this as a form of spam. They can report to you to Twitter’s spam account which could cause your account to be suspended by Twitter or that they can block your account and when many users block an account again put your might suspend your account.   Unless, like @DellOutlet, you have a specific account that is used only to promote certain products, jobs or services you should be very careful to blast promotional Tweets all the time.  Remember that your tweets should always add value to the reader.  A useful tactic could be   well-defined and executed Twitter-based coupon campaign, or a prize draw with some nice incentives.

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.

Twitter provides a way for computers and other devices to inform people about their status or their findings in a friendly manner. At this sector headquarters in California they had eclipsed a planned with a sensor that checks the humidity of the soil. Whenever is time for the planned to get some water it will post its tweet saying something like: “Water me!”

Many other devices can follow this example. What about a washing machine that warns you about not having enough soap, or detecting a colored item in the white wash or simply to inform you that he has finished his load. The ice cream truck that constantly tweets its location, is the replacement of the annoying music these trucks usually make, to alert people that they are in the neighborhood.  In New York City a moving truck started to tweet his location and availability to carry a new load, which has caused a fad, which is why everybody with a truck in New York is now using Twitter. True, it is usually the truck driver that does the tweeting here, but it could easily be the truck itself.

Gartner predicts that by 2012 20% of non-video Internet data is comprised of physical sensors reporting their status. That is an amazing prediction. Just think about how many sensors would be transmitting data.  These sensors can easily be programmed to send to tweet in exception cases, so people can take the appropriate action.  This is a usage of Twitter that has yet to be explored, but provides very interesting possibilities.

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Twitter can be a massive platform for discussing stocks and other fiscal instruments and will most likely replace bulletin boards like the ones at Yahoo! Finance as the preferred strategy for debating individual public corporations. The dimensions of the Twitter audience makes it possible for groups interested in one stock to post views on that company, trades, research, rumors, and information directly from the company in real-time. A stock with a massive investor base may have a following that brings in thousands of comments a day. This sort of “Info market’ for stocks has started to appear through services like StockTwits.

Communities of active stockholders and day-traders who are sharing opinions and in some case classy research about stocks, bonds and other financial instruments, will essentially have the power to move share prices. In the cases of some smaller and more thinly traded stocks, this power may be used to spread rumors and influence trading patterns. A discussion around a certain stock is highlighted on Twitter by using the $ in front of a stock symbol, in the same way as the hashtag (‘#’) is used for keywords.

At some point central government agencies like the SEC are going to need to investigate how Twitter users access the service to spread info about public firms. A few of these comments are probably going to be deemed misleading as is true on bulletin boards today, because some speculators will attempt to move share costs up and down based primarily on their volume of messages and the messages that they can get their followers to tweet. As this function of Twitter usage grows, the community of analysts on any one publicly traded company may become almost as massive as its stock’s daily volume, making Twitter-based input as vital as any other info on many stocks. Yahoo and other large bulletin boards may begin to supplement their services using Twitter, extending the power of the medium to pass along info whether it is correct or not. Twitter is one of the most disruptive technologies to become part of the financial markets in many years.

It will permit individual and professional investors to exchange many thousands of bits of info about the markets in surprisingly short time periods. The issue will be that a great amount of this info may not be correct.

For people who don’t have cash to put into the market, Twitter will be the ultimate platform for fantasy stock trading in which people post the price at which they would have acquired or sold a stock. That might become part of an enormous contest among Tweople who need to compete with each other to show who can create the best performing portfolio, even without cash.