[cfeduke]

There's some selection bias in here too. People who have had excellent customer service experiences on Twitter aren't taking into account the number of people who did call or email customer service versus the substantially fewer people who used Twitter for the purposes of contacting companies for customer service.

Of course a company should have used Twitter for customer support - fewer requests, and the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising. Win win.

[itishappy]

> the requests that you do handle often convert to free advertising

This cuts both ways. If you have a well-oiled customer service team working in public, great! But if something major goes wrong one day and you have 3 million people @ing you with no easy way to identify their account in your system and suddenly your hashtag starts trending... that's free advertising too.