[cek]

By the way, it should be very clear to people that smart companies are very carefully using twitter for PR stunts like this all the time.

One of my own examples: I have Comcast cable for my Internet connection. A few weeks ago the connection started going up/down/up/down every few minutes. I tweeted

    Comcast is like a yoyo this morning. Up-down-up-down-up-down. Mostly down though. /cc:@comcastcares

I immediately got two responses from Comcast reps (e.g. @comcastbill) and they sent me a new modem Fedex.

I have ~6500 followers. I do not believe I would have gotten this treatment if I had 20 followers.

For what it's worth, I plan on completely taking advantage of this phenomenon for my own benefit :-).

[AdamTReineke]

Response from most businesses on Twitter is great. I have 668 followers and get lots of help. UPS, Mediacom, McDonald's, Delta, Verizon, EVGA, and more. Even the city I live it is active on Twitter. When I complained about an issue with mobile bus schedules on the city's website, they forwarded my feedback on to the bus system. The number of followers doesn't matter if the company is committed to getting feedback on Twitter.

My only thought is that this type of response doesn't scale well at the top end. Monitoring (and responding) to a Twitter search for a term like Google or Netflix would take a ton of people.

[a3camero]

The monitoring is automated. There are a lot of suppliers of this type of software and it's not very hard to write it yourself. I recommend playing with YQL + Twitter search API + cron.

[AdamTReineke]

Right, getting a list of the tweets is easy. Filtering them and deciding which require action and then acting on the information becomes much harder.

[a3camero]

One thing you can do is parse the tweets for mentions of certain words. In any event, you can alert people to the tweets rather than having them sit there. Not sure how large corporations handle it process-wise.

[wallflower]

Check out the open source ThinkUp from ExpertLabs:

Live demo:

http://expertlabs.aaas.org/thinkup01/index.php?u=whitehouse&...

http://thinkupapp.com/

"ThinkUp is a free, open source web application that captures your posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application"

[AdamTReineke]

That's pretty sweet for being FOSS.

[ben1040]

I have only 3 followers, and Charter has done similar things for me. They have three shifts worth of folks who monitor the brand on Twitter and reach out to people who have things to say, both good and bad.

In fact I generally only keep a Twitter account around for calling out Charter when my cable internet isn't working, because I get a response in minutes from someone in my hometown rather than having to talk to a script-wielding service rep in a foreign country.

[larrys]

I had the same thing happen a few years ago when I mentioned to Comcast repair that I knew Brian Roberts.

[Helianthus]

You don't even have to have followers. People are _paid_ to monitor and respond to _every_ complaint addressed to twitter, and you can abuse this shamelessly:

I'm a nobody on twitter (<30 followers) and I tweeted my cable company about their shitty phone customer service. I ended up emailing a nice woman who was powerless to do anything in the corporate hierarchy, but nevertheless _personally emailed me_ my cable bill for three months until the wheels of bureaucracy turned and fixed the problem.

Social Media people are paid to be cheerful and nice despite the fact that they have no bureaucratic power and no leverage with the technical people. Be nice to them but critical of the company (read: honest about your problems) and they will help you, because they feel the same way. Plus you skip the phone menus.