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Comment by SteveNuts | Hacker News Reader

Maybe if they had some CRM functions for brands to use, maybe using machine learning to automatically pick up on nasty tweets about your brand and add them to a queue of cases to investigate.

Seems like a lot of people turn to twitter to complain about products/services when things go wrong, give companies an easy way to handle those?

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Yeah I built an integration like this for a hackathon at work (we did call center software, e.g. we serve the people that serve people). The system categorized tweets so that the customer could respond to issues and such - the obvious value add is it's unlikely a customer will come to you directly, but they'd likely complain online.

Somewhat related I've noticed that some of the really successful open source projects meet people where they are and are really accessible via channels like Twitter (SpringBoot and Auth0 are good examples of this, from my experience).

I also work on call center software. Care to say which company?

Why don't you start?

I left a year or so back, but it's based in IN (USA) and just got bought by a place in SF (USA). If there was any overlap that's probably enough to identify it :)

Basically the entire Japanese OSS community runs on Twitter. It's their medium of choice for communication, which is great since discussions are very very open (it's facilitated by their language's much higher information density compared to English, probably ~5x).

The vast majority of the contributors are eager to talk to users around the world, so if you use a project with a known Japanese maintainer, try shooting them a message on Twitter. Their English may be broken at times but you can usually understand what they're saying pretty easily.

Microsoft have a service their Dynamics CRM product that does something similar for a range of social media - Microsoft Social Engagement.

Wouldn't surprise if a lot of CRM companies support this kind of thing given the importance of social media to brands and customer service.

The celebrities were always lose leaders for twitter, although I am not sure they realized. The profitable piece would have always been the customer retention and not advertising, once they crossed into main stream. Purchasing is not the mode users are in when on twitter, it is almost always negative brand engagement when the use case is not interpersonal.

Social media monitoring is a small cottage industry that does the things you're describing (and usually extends the monitoring to Facebook, Instagram, and anyone with the API), with Hootsuite being (likely) the largest player.

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