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by AdamTReineke 5417 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.
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.
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.
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"

That's pretty sweet for being FOSS.