USA Today’s article about social media and Customer Service touches on some key topics and realities for consumer brand companies embracing Twitter, etc. In the article they indicate that over 50% of the Fortune 100 is using Twitter for customer service (CS) today. Exciting news, right?

Yes…but (there’s always a but), it often comes with an avalanche of traffic and noise. For some brands, its probably like building out a new call center, lighting up 50 phones and only hiring 2 new people to staff them. There is a risk of INCREASED customer frustration in some cases. Twitter is just a new communication channel for customers and companies to converse. Email forever changed the world of phone-based support. Web tickets and Wikis dramatically changed email-based support, and Live chat blew them both away. Twitter is now doing the same. There is still a lot of learning to be done but some companies are managing it well and leading the charge.

With new channels and new technology come innovations and adaptations. Twitter’s meta-data allows customer service to understand more about who they are talking to than ever before. Your influence and relevancy can be immediately assessed, and can be used (in both directions!) by the company to triage who to respond to first. As much as we’d like to think every cry for help should be treated equally, it will be interesting to see how social media metrics and influence play a role in the service pecking order. Will influence assessment be taught as part of the CS team’s social media training? Will they all start using our TwitterRank to figure out who to respond to?

If @scobleizer starts (sorry Robert, you are always a great example) complaining about a product on Twitter, will the Twitter-savvy CS team be on him in seconds? You bet. If I complain, will they even care? Maybe…if I file an FCC complaint.

In customer service situations, we, as consumers hope for a democratized experience. It wil be interesting to see how social media policy shakes out between departments. In marketing, its all about finding influencers. In customer service, will this be ignored, or will SOP be to assess influence as the triage mechanism for complaints and cries for help?

Do you use Twitter and other social media outlets for customer service? Do you evaluate influence as part of the process? If so we’d love to hear your thoughts!

A quick update from Las Vegas - We are at BlogWorldExpo this week joining in the fun. Yesterday, Filtrbox was the title sponsor of a great inagural Social Media for Executives session. Some great discussions and tons of advice were live-blogged by @agarahn. Check out the #execsocmed hashtag to check it out.

Shhhh. Tomorrow we are giving away 100 Filtrbox t-shirts in 10 minutes at Blogworld. 10:30 am, right after the morning keynote, right in front of the bookstore. Tell your BWE friends! The shirts are great.

We have some exciting news to share! Filtrbox and E SOURCE are working together to provide North American utilities with strategic social media guidance, supported by a robust monitoring, analysis and engagement platform. Utilities, like many other industries, are starting to embrace social media as a way to effectively communicate with their customers, via tools such as Twitter, YouTube, and corporate blogs.

Working with E SOURCE on this project has been great. We are glad to see the Utilities starting to better leverage social media. We think proactive social media listening and engagement will greatly benefit the companies that fully embrace it, especially in times of service problems or ongoing issues. E SOURCE is also leveraging our TwitterRank technology to assess who the most influential Utilities are on Twitter.

“Although social media is a relatively new space, utilities are learning that they can effectively leverage these evolving channels to better serve their customers, manage their brands, and increase satisfaction levels,” said Matthew Burks of E SOURCE. “An integrated social media strategy has strong potential benefits; however, even the first step of listening can provide invaluable insight into public opinion and critical brand and operational concerns. By teaming with Filtrbox, we give our utility clients the ability to monitor, analyze and, if appropriate, engage in relevant real-time online conversations.”

More about E SOURCE: They have been providing unbiased, objective energy business intelligence to over 300 utilities and large energy users for more than 20 years. Our research analysts and consultants are among the best minds in the business, delivering significant and timely research that equips our customers with the right information at the right time to make better, faster decisions. We predict and address trends, technologies, and problems related to energy efficiency, utility customer satisfaction, program design, marketing, customer management, and sustainability.

Link to press release on PitchEngine: Filtrbox and E SOURCE Join Forces to Bring Social Media Marketing Strategies to the Utility Industry

When everyone’s a twitter about social media, how do companies adjust to the changing role of marketing in an era of social media vs. traditional marketing, interactive vs. traditional media, and real time consumer feedback? Does your company need to have a presence on Facebook? Should you be hiring someone to Twitter instead of using direct mail – or should you use both? Although some companies have embraced social media marketing very successfully many are still wondering where to even start, and how to integrate into existing programs.

Join us and Stage Two Consulting on September 18th at 1 PM ET/ 10 AM PT for a complimentary webinar— as we discuss how social media marketing and traditional marketing integrate, how your company can leverage social media, along with best practices, how to listen, monitor, engage and interact, with highlights of specific case studies.
During our 60 minute seminar you will learn how to build a basic framework for social media activities within your organization, as well as:

• The evolution of marketing
• Traditional marketing vs. Social media marketing
• Looking ahead - blending social and traditional marketing
• How do we get there?
• Listening, monitoring, engaging
• Everyone doesn’t need a Facebook page
• Opt in via Twitter: is Twitter the new Direct Mail?
• Micro Blogs
• Best practices
• Case Studies
• Q&A

Sign up!

Are your Twitter followers of any value to you? Can you get them to take action or respond to questions? What happened to blog subscribers being the end-all, be-all yardstick of “voice”? I’ve been thinking about this topic a bunch lately, and recently came across a good post on GigaOm that talks about this very topic.

There are some useful points in the GigaOm article. Namely that blog subscribers are more valuable in general because of the intent and level of effort required to subscribe and the conscious decision it represents. Subscribing to blogs is pretty easy for most, but it does indeed take more thought than the single-click “follow” event that happens millions of times a day on Twitter.

Of particular relevance to us at Filtrbox was a point made about “deficient continuity”. Here’s the issue;
If you are not watching your twitter stream every second of the day, or spending quality time every day scanning your profile page to see what your followers said earlier in the day, you are missing the conversation and missing the posts/links/stories/opinions you care about. You miss everything you don’t watch. Filtrbox solves this problem because the monitoring is persistent, but that’s another post…

This may be part of the problem - if you don’t see the tweet, how can you possibly engage and respond? With a blog post, it comes to you when you are on the task of reading or consuming news. Its either in your inbox, in an RSS reader, or you have hit a portal page with your feeds on them. Does this make you more likely to respond?

Taking a look at our own blog, our subscribers were growing at a much slower rate than Twitter followers. I also have noticed that we don’t get as many comments or responses to blog posts. (Granted - we’ve not done a great job of updating this blog with good, fresh content) The questions I started pondering were:

• Has the conversation totally moved to Twitter?
• Has information overload finally saturated our readers?
• Is the audience/community/group of readers of a different profile?
• Do we have to work harder to convince people to subscribe to the blog? Is it more work to consume the content?

Something else I’ve noticed is that just like more traditional news stories, time of day and day of week matter on Twitter. In fact, I’d suspect the “deficient continuity” problem is quite a bit worse, and the attention/responses you’ll get evenings, weekends, etc is vastly different than, say, Tuesday morning.

What do you think? Are your Twitter followers more valuable than your blog subscribers?

Ari from Filtrbox will be joining Vignette, New Belgium Brewing and Brickfish at an event put on by Red Door Interactive in Denver on Tuesday, July 14th. Should be a good discussion with lots of useful advice on how to implement a successful social media strategy.

From the site…

An effective social media strategy requires research, planning, implementation, tracking and reporting on results. Learn how to strategically implement your social media efforts for maximum return with a panel of Social Media experts (the real kind, we promise) from leading internet presence management firm Red Door Interactive along with industry experts from New Belgium Brewery, Vignette, Filtrbox and the social media solution, Brickfish. In this session you’ll gain valuable insights and actionable best practices that you can take back and immediately apply to your social media initiatives

Sign up here to join us!

Andrew Hyde (@andrewhyde) of Startup Weekend and Techstars shows how to customize Filtrs to monitor individual Twitter accounts for specific topics. Check out the video.

Note: A Filtrbox G2 account is required for this hack. If you have a Basic account and want more power and more control, drop us a line and try G2 for 14 days for free!

Filtrbox now supports real-time alerts for all of our content sources. This means you can set up alerts for Twitter (as well as the millions of other sources we monitor). The system will send you an email alert as soon as a new mention is found. There are a ton of useful applications for this feature, but here are a few essentials.

• Company monitor - set up an alert for any mentions of your company on Twitter. Even when you are not being spoken to with an @reply, you still see the mention.
• Vanity Search - set up two Filtrs for this one, one for your name (use quotes!) and one for your twitterID. The problem with desktop tools or Twitter search is that they are only working for you when you are running them and interacting with them. With Filtrbox it’s set it and forget it. What I love about this is that even when I’m running around to meetings, the alerts are in my inbox and I don’t have to waste time in multiple apps looking for the mentions.
• Lead Generation - search for a phrase or a hashtag that relates to your business. Monitor the conversations in real-time and tweet back when folks are looking for solutions.

Please note that a Filtrbox G2 (paid subscription) is required to access this feature. If you have a Free account and want to upgrade, please get in touch with us.

Instructions

1. Log into your G2 account
2. Create a new Filtr, or use an existing one
3. Enter your search term in the “find articles about” box. If its a new Filtr hit save!
4. Check the “enable realtime alerts” box

5. Tune the Filtr’s sources and minimum rank. If you just want alerts for Twitter, uncheck the Mainstream and Blog options. You can also uncheck the “include in daily briefing” if you don’t want the results coming each morning in addition to the real-time alerts. Save the settings.

Click on the thumbnail to see our own company monitor:

If you have any questions on the setup let us know by leaving a comment or question here.

Filtrbox G2 has just been updated with several new features that greatly enhance the power and flexibility of the service. The major features are the availability of real time alerts, ability to customize the contents of the Daily Briefing emails, fine-grained control over sources, and FiltrRank (all on a per-filtr basis). Internally we’ve been referring to this collection of features as “the scalpel” because it enables you to get very precise control over the Filtrs and your monitoring strategy. There are now 3 dimensions of control over what you choose to receive and be notified on, and this control doesn’t impact the system’s listening and news gathering. Give the the new features a try and see if you can become a social media monitoring ninja! Keep reading to learn more…

Real time alerts
Filtrbox constantly monitors millions of sources for new mentions that match your Filtrs. Now, with real time alerts, as soon as the system detects a new mention, an email alert is sent. Using this feature in conjunction with the per-filtr content control enables you to set up alerts on a per-source basis, which means you can now enable real time Twitter alerts, or alerts JUST on mainstream, highly relevant content.

Custom Daily Briefings
An area of great interest to us at Filtrbox is that of “information overload” and “noise control” as you probably can tell. It doesn’t matter if you are monitoring the conversation on 100+ topics for a list of clients, or tracking a few personal-interest topics. When people are barraged by too much information, we tend to shut down and either ignore things or tune out. The result is that you start missing critical mentions and the tools that were supposed to help you only make things worse. We are working to address these problems for our customers, and this features is something many have asked for. You can have Filtrbox monitor and listen but not include the results in the Daily Briefings. Control what you get in your summary each day, but still sleep well knowing that the system is listening and the information is there when you want to investigate.

Custom source control
There are cases where you might want to set up a real time alert for something on Twitter (but the keyword is irrelevant or too noisy elsewhere), or you want to listen for news on a major company but don’t want to see every single mention published every day. With the per-Filtr content control this is easy to do. You can now control source type (mainstream news, blogs, Twitter), the FiltrRank, and inclusion in the Daily Briefing emails. Here’s what it looks like.

New article display
The Filtrbox dashboard has also been updated with a new article display, so that you can sort through the articles based on source type. This makes it much easier to hone in on articles per-Filtr, and gives a helpful perspective on the conversation happening for each type of content. Here is an example for mainstream news.
 

Twitter view
One of the added benefits of the new article display is a Twitter-only view we have enabled. You can leave this up as a Twitter dashboard, or use it to check in now and then and see the history of what’s been said on a particular topic or referencing anything specific like a hashtag, a user, or a conference.
 

Note: Real time alerts, and custom, per-filtr control is available only in Filtrbox G2. Users of the free version of Filtrbox can upgrade to enable them. Please email sales and request an upgrade.

Log in and give the new features a spin, and let us know what else you’d like to see in Filtrbox G2. We have an exciting product roadmap for the rest of 2009, and always listen to our customers for input.

Reminder: Clear your browser cache before logging in!

In the past few weeks we’ve added two features to enhance our support of Twitter monitoring within Filtrbox.

1. Tweet This - From within the dashboard, you can now tweet any article in your account. Just mouse over an article and you’ll see the new “tweet this” link on the action bar. This is a super-easy way to share articles found in Filtrbox with the Twitter community. All you need is a twitter account, and as long as you are logged into Twitter in your browser it will work seamlessly.




2. Twitter links in your Daily Briefing - The ability to monitor conversations on Twitter in Filtrbox isn’t new, but the Daily Briefing emails have now been updated to show you who posted the tweet. Its also a live link so you can visit that person’s twitter page very easily. Here’s what it looks like in your daily briefing email.

Let us know what you think!