I saw an article fly by titled Tweet for hire: More big businesses hire tweeters and naturally, I thought of our book. It’s not ridiculously profound that companies are starting to use social media to reach out to people but reading this article go me thinking – how do these companies go about doing this?
A few weeks ago, to my surprise I was contacted by Charter (a cable provider) after I tweeted about how bad their customer service was. I had canceled service 1.5 months back and all I wanted to do was pay my final bill but they insisted that it would cost them $1.99 to send me a bill that I was never sent in the first place. It seemed pretty stupid for me to have to pay them just to pay them more.
It appears Charter has a small team of tweeters responding to people’s comments but how do they operate? Frankly, I have no idea, but what I do know is that if there’s more than 1 person manning the social tubes, it might be hard to keep track of everything without some help.
With a little knowledge of PHP, MySQL, and the Twitter API I could imagine cooking up a pretty simple app to help out with this process. Imagine a ticketing system where every ticket is a tweet. Saved searches would help bring relevant tweets into the system, and representatives could claim and reply to tweets as needed all from one interface. Simple, yet pretty cool I think.
By the time you get through our book, making an app like this will be easy as cake.