It is good to see a popular and useful service like Get Satisfaction move towards a viable business model, though the pricing for these premium services is probably a bit too high for individual developers. The Basic services will cost between $120 and $149 a month (the introductory price for this week is $99 for three months), while the Pro package starts at $349. For large companies, of course, this is a very small price to pay for satisfying their consumers, and those who don't want to pay can still stick with the free service, which has also been enhanced with a pared down version of the premium features.

Features

So what comes with the premium packages? The paid accounts come with a new Management View, which will allow companies to take full editorial control over their Get Satisfaction forums. This includes prioritized topic handling, monitoring and managing the activity of their employees on the service, advanced search functions, and additional filtering and sorting mechanisms. Companies will also be able to moderate topics and remove inappropriate content.

Those users who decide to stay with the free version will get access to a 'lite' version of the Management View.

Get Satisfaction already hosts forums about close to 7000 companies. Many of these will surely opt for the premium services - especially those that already have employees answering questions on Get Satisfaction anyway.

When over 1,000 social media users were asked what companies' role in social media should be, their answers were somewhat surprising. For all the griping about intrusive internet ads, lame marketing campaigns, and lousy customer service, you would think that the last thing users would want is to have companies invading the platforms they use for communicating and socializing with their friends and colleagues. As it turns out, the opposite is true.

It seems that users are actually receptive to the idea of companies getting involved on social media platforms and interacting with them while there. Out of the 85% of users who want companies to have a presence in social media, 34% want companies to actively interact with them and 51% want companies to interact with them as needed or by request. 8% think companies should only be passively involved on social media and 7% think companies should not be involved at all.

This desire for business-to-consumer interaction goes beyond simply offering customer service via Twitter. Although 43% would like to see companies offering customer service through social media, 41% would like companies to solicit feedback and 37% would like companies to provide new ways to interact with the brand via social media. These numbers could not be more clear: these consumers are practically begging for businesses to get involved in social media.

Not So Shocking: Social Media Users Like To See Social Media Used

If these numbers seem a little skewed it's because the survey was only given to social media users. They're more likely to understand and appreciate how social media operates. Where traditional advertising and marketing campaigns broadcast messages one way (business to consumer), social media encourages conversations. And these open dialogues are exactly what today's social media users desire and participate in regularly. Give their active use of this medium for social communications, it's not a huge leap for them to say they want to use social media in new and different ways - such as for communicating with businesses.

Although it can be scary for businesses to take that initial plunge, once they get in and get involved, it will be worth their effort. The numbers from this study back that up, too: 56% of users say they feel better about companies when they can interact with them on social media and 57% say they feel better served.

We definitely agree with those numbers. Most people don't think to call customer service over minor complaints, feeling that it's just not worth the effort. But if you have a brand representative respond to one of your Twitter posts like this, the experience is so much better:

The API will allow companies to build services on top of the Get Satisfaction infrastructure. As president Lane Becker suggests, a company could recreate their Get Satisfaction area on their own site, or they could build widgets to expose their support channels to readers on the company blog, or the social networking profiles of employees. "Or create some clever visualizations that help you better understand what your customers are saying," writes Becker.

On the consumer end, the API could be used to create tools that make it easier for people to create and track discussions around companies and products. We think it might be interesting for someone to create a mashup that tracks which companies are the most talked about on the site, as well as the overall mood of each (i.e., which company has the most optimistic customers? the most frustrated?).

The Get Satisfaction crew has released Ruby and PHP libraries for the API, which are available on the new, Mashery-hosted developer site. The API also supports OAuth, a third party identification protocol that will make it easy for companies to integrate Get Satisfaction services into their existing user ID system by passing users into the Get Satisfaction system and automatically creating/linking accounts there.

In a blog post, Becker promised additional "API-related tricks ... in the coming weeks and months" from Get Satisfaction.

Comcast is Watching You

The trend of companies being tuned in to what's being said on the web may not have begun with Comcast, but even if they were not the first, they are the company receiving the most attention around their activities as of late.

Given the nature of their business as an internet provider (as well as some of their questionable practices - like bittorrent throttling), they were sure to attract the attention of the internet-connected folks who blog, socialize, and use Twitter.

One of the more notable examples of Comcast in the Twittersphere was their response to Michael Arrington's internet outage, something that he railed about on Twitter after Comcast support failed to resolve his issue - a method that worked rather well.

Even though Arrington's Comcast experience gathered a lot of attention, a Comcast rep notes here that this practice is something the company has been doing for going on six months now and that most people find the experience a positive way to interact with the company.

Other Customer Support Experiences on Twitter

Comcast is certainly not the only company using Twitter for customer service. Let's run down some of the other major players gaining attention for their Twitter-savvy:

Another big name on Twitter today is Dell Computers. The company actually has several customer service people on Twitter who find complaints and address them. Unlike Comcast, though, their Twitter activity hasn't received a large amount of attention, outside of marketers and social media pundits. (Perhaps because there are fewer complaints?)

Then there is Twhirl, a somewhat obvious example of a company that would use the medium as they are makers of the popular Adobe AIR Twitter client. For instance, Mack Collier posts about his experiences with Twhirl's support via Twitter on his blog:

Case in point, a few months ago I started using the Twitter client Twhirl.  One day I tried to sign-onto Twitter with Twhirl, and Twhirl said it didn't recognize my password, and wouldn't let me sign-on.  Frustrated, I posted on Twitter that I couldn't get Twhirl to work, and that I was going to download and try Snitter (a competing service to Twhirl), instead.  Almost instantly, someone from Twhirl contacted me via Twitter, and walked me through the process to get Twhirl working for me again.  I have used Twhirl ever since.

Southwest Airlines is also heavily involved in the Twitter community, using the service to inform their customers know about deals among other things. Jackie Huba reports getting a tweet from them explaining that if she booked a ticket using PayPal, I'd get $50 back in PayPal credit.

Southwest is also known to tweet press happenings and pointers to blog posts, while also staying tuned into conversations about their brand. David Armano had recently flown Southwest Airlines and found the airport check-in a two-button breeze, something which he mentioned on Twitter. He received a "thank you" from the airline a few hours later. How nice!

Blogger Cyndy Aleo-Carreira ( @fourlittlebees ) said she had received support from Socialthing! !, Twhirl , and Toluu developer CalebEston via Twitter. When I spoke to her about her experiences, she describes a recent example when she had an issue with Toluu:

I got my invite and went to log in. Whenever I can, I use my OpenID because I'm tired of entering passwords in Passpack. However, OpenID failed. I have a low threshold for fails of that variety, so I Tweeted that it was a bad first impression. Within about two seconds, I had a response from @calebelston asking me what issue I had, could I describe it, etc. Best part is that I sent him the info, as well as the issues I was having importing my complete OPML file to Toluu, and then forgot about it. You know how it gets when you are trying 85 apps at a time. Then I get an email from him: Hey, we've been working on this issue. Would you be willing to try it again and see if it works? I was floored that he remembered to come back and contact me.

She also detailed her issue with Socialthing on her blog, saying:

They must have been monitoring Twitter, because my short little blip about the error received an immediate reply asking for a screenshot, and a blog post about the issue went live shortly after. Socialthing was back up and running quickly.

All Companies Should Get on Twitter!

Social news up-and-comer, Mixx, is another company monitoring tweets. Blogger Helen Thompson had some trouble with the service and tweeted a negative comment on Twitter. She explains what happened:

Next thing I knew, Mixx had added me on Twitter. This led me to joke that perhaps I could invoke Johnny Depp and get the same response. Sadly, this wasn’t the case, but the good folks at Mixx patiently sidestepped the joke and asked what hiccup I had run across. I wasn’t able to reproduce the problem...However, I was very impressed: within a few minutes of making a complaint about a technology, the technology folks approached me with “Hey, I see you had trouble with our platform. What can we do to make it better? OMG if VW had done this with me when my Jetta was made of fail, I might not be driving a Toyota today!

That last bit is worth a second look - companies could potentially lose customers when they appear to not care about your issues. Without knowing what her Jetta issues were, it's hard to say whether VW was ever given a chance to address them, but it's still interesting to think that even a frustrated customer like her could have been turned around had someone responded to her problems.

Maybe car salesmen should keep Twitter accounts? Wouldn't that be something! What if every business you interacted with had a Twitter address? You wouldn't have to follow them per se, and be inundated with marketing drivel (unless of course, you wanted to), but if you ever tweeted a problem, they would be right there to help.

It could be that, at some point, the companies that aren't on Twitter will begin falling behind in customer satisfaction without even knowing why...and losing customers in the process. Maybe not a car manufacturer as big as VW...as least not yet...but here on the web, these Twitter conversations could be the "make or break" point for new internet startups.

... But Don't Forget Traditional Customer Service

Social media blogger, Corvida of SheGeeks, frustrated by an auto-reply email message that MyBlogLog sent in response to her support request, twittered her frustration and received a response from the company only 10 minutes later.

SheGeeks Tweets

This particular incident, though, points to a larger issue - as is often the case with Comcast issues, people are venting on Twitter as a last resort after the company failed to deliver quality support via more traditional channels.

While it's nice to know that Twitter is available as a way of getting a company's attention, all methods of customer service and support should be treated with the same consideration.

By pouncing on the Twitter complaints while ignoring the emails, one has to wonder if the company is, in fact, more concerned with reputation than they are with service.

For Companies: How To Track Tweets

A Salesforce community manager, Kingsley Joseph, explained how he monitors tweets so quickly - he uses a Yahoo Pipe that tracks Salesforce's online word of mouth. He even coded a generic pipe which people can use to track mentions of their company. Here's the pipe.

Via the Church of the Customer blog, here's how to use the pipe:

In the search field, fill out the terms you want to track. For example, Salesforce Ideas could use: "salesforce+ideas", ideaexchange, ideastorm, dellideastorm, mystarbucksidea. Usually the second field (URL fragment to ignore) should be .yourdomain.com . This is to prevent posts made in the your own blog/community from showing up. The dot before the domain is important. The first time you run the search, Yahoo might return an empty list. To force it to go fetch feeds, click "More Options" and then click "Get as RSS". You can then hit back and re-run the pipe successfully. Titles are de-duplicated and sorting is reverse chronological. Multiple search terms can be used and the matched term will be prefixed to the title of the post.

Salesforce's Yahoo Pipes Tool

Other methods for tweet tracking can involve using a service like Tweet Scan, which performs real-time monitoring of Twitter. Take a look at a Tweet Scan for keyword "Starbucks," for example, and see what we can learn:

• Rom wants to know about the new Pike Place blend
• Winterheart is drinking Italian Roast.
• Stlplace thinks Starbucks should be worried because the McCafe iced latte not too bad and it's cheaper ($2.79 for medium size, no extra for syrup)
• RonHubbard is also digging the new Pike Place blend.
• tdcool is listening to Starbucks' Ambient Luxe album and thinks it's quite relaxing music

And this was just a cursory look.

Starbucks Tweets

But Tweet Scan isn't the only way to search Twitter. Quotably also does Twitter searches where conversations can be followed in a threaded fashion. Matt Dickman rounds up even more services that may be of use.

For more advice, Charlie O'Donnell good job listing ways a company can use Twitter.

And for companies needing even more help, companies like Radian6 are now offering social media analysis and monitoring solutions for PR and advertising professionals.

For Customers: How to Get Support

In addition to the companies mentioned above, several businesses have "community managers" active on Twitter. These reps act as evangelists, customer service reps, and public faces for the company the represent. Blogger Mario Sundar posted a list of the community managers he found on Twitter (which I edited to remove the people whose Twitter username he couldn't find):

1. Will Pate: Community Evangelist - ConceptShare (@willpate)
2. Mario Sundar: Community Evangelist - Linkedin (@mariosundar)
3. Eric Skiff: Community Evangelist - Clipmarks (@ericskiff)
4. Marilyn Pratt: Community Evangelist - SAP Labs (@marilynpratt)
5. Brett Meyers: Community Evangelist - Zloop (@brettmeyers)
6. Ryan Knight: Community Manager - Yahoo (@yank)
7. Jennifer Puckett : Community Manager - Disney (?)
8. Jim Lynch: Community Manager - Ziff Davis (@jwlynch)
9. Jake McKee: Community Guy - Formerly Lego (@jakemckee)
10. William Azaroff: Community Engagement - VanCity (@wazaroff)
11. Carole McManus: Community Specialist, formerly Yahoo 360 (@puttopal)
12. Asa Dotzler: Catastrophist, Mozilla (@asadotzler) 
13. Anand Iyer: Developer Evangelist - Microsoft (@anandiyer)
14. Damon Billian: Director of Customer Evangelism - Mint (@dbillian)
15. Domini Perri: Community Manager, Utterz - (@domjp)
16. Daniel Ha: Disqus (@danielha)

Dominic Perri, the Community Manager over at Utterz, introduced himself in that post's comments, too. (@domjp)

Let's also add Flock (@Flocker) whose community manager is @evanhamilton, Lookery (@Lookery), and Toluu (@calebelston).

I'm sure this list is woefully incomplete, but, despite the numerous Twitter apps, no unified resource of this information is currently available. We encourage companies with a support rep or community manager on Twitter to respond in the comments on this post with your information so our readers can beginning building their own personal Twitter service directories.

And if you've received customer service via Twitter, please feel free to share your stories here.

No, I don't mean my idea personally (although I do have some ideas for the company), but rather the collective ideas of every Starbucks loyalist, hopped up on caffeine. Simply put, My Starbucks Idea is a socially driven marketplace for Starbucks-related ideas that will help the company reinvent itself.

You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple -- we want to hear it. Share your ideas, tell us what you think of other people’s ideas and join the discussion. We’re here, and we’re ready to make ideas happen. Let’s get started.

All you need to do to participate is sign up on the site using a username, password, and an email address. Once you're logged in, you can post your idea in one of 13 categories:

Every posted idea immediately shows up in the recent ideas queue, where it is voted on in a Digg-style manner. If it gets enough votes, it gets 'promoted' to the popular ideas list and top all-time list, from which Starbucks employees and management pick the best ideas to actually implement in stores. If your idea catches someone's eye, it will be labeled as **under review**, and if they actually decide to implement it, you will see a **coming soon** tag next to the idea.

A complete list of ideas that are going to be implemented can be found in the ideas in action section of the site.

Overall, the site is an absolutely great idea. In many ways it is very similar to Dell's IdeaStorm which I similarly praised. Every company could benefit from its own implementation of a socially driven marketplace for ideas, especially major consumer brands such as Starbucks and Apple, which have developed an incredibly loyal core following. Such marketplaces can help companies capitalize on the passions of their their most important fans and deliver on the promises of the next big thing without huge research budgets.

My Starbucks Idea has been a huge success so far, just like Dell's IdeaStorm before it. Approximately a month after launching, the site has gotten a plethora of great idea submissions from Starbucks-lovers, and the most popular submissions have gotten tens of thousands of points (votes) and hundreds of comments. As long as Starbucks keeps letting the community freely voice its opinion and keeps implementing the crème de la crème of the community's ideas, the company has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Disclaimer: I own Starbucks stock.

AideRSS's "post rank" algorithm scores items in any feed for the number of comments, Diggs, tags in Del.icio.us and inbound links it's got. You can then view, or subscribe by RSS, to just the 50%, 20% or most popular items inside that particular feed. The new Firefox plug-in lets you apply these filters on the fly inside Google Reader with just two clicks.

The first 200 RWW readers that click through this link can get access to the plug-in immediately. The plugin uses GreaseMonkey (no separate download required), which the company says isn't playing nicely with the wonderful new Firefox 3 Beta, so FF3 users won't be able to use it yet. Update: We're hearing reports that you can turn disable addon version checking in Firefox and then use this plug-in with FF 3 Beta. Likewise, in the spirit of "it's in private Beta" users with Greasemonkey already installed and turned on may need to turn it off first. See this customer service thread for details.

Here at RWW we use AideRSS regularly, some of us daily. It produces simple, powerful and clearly useful results. In addition to using it in any feed reader, there's all kinds of other things you can do with a feed filtered by popularity. See, for example, our recent post on bricolage blogs ("10 Sites for Finding Wonderful Things"), where the most popular items from 10 prolific blogs are filtered using AideRSS and displayed dynamically using FeedDigest.

AideRSS can filter almost any RSS feed, including tag and search feeds. Popularity, as expressed by explicit attention gestures like AideRSS indexes, may not be the perfect determination of quality - but it's not a bad start at all. AideRSS is a great little tool and we expect that many Google Reader users will find this new extension very useful.

How It Works

DreamAds appear only during your REM sleep, as a footer overlay to your dream. According to scientists, things that we see during our sleep are up to 10 times more influential than the things that we see in our real life. And this is exactly what makes DreamAds a potential cash-cow for Google.

DreamAds works with a very light apparel that you put on your head. It is said to be so light that you won't even feel it and so it won't disturb your sleep in any way. The apparel will be distributed for free, starting with a beta rollout in San Francisco - dates as yet unknown. Here is a concept drawing of the device, which we got from our Google source:

Full image

On the business model, we were told us that the ultimate goal is a CPA model (Cost Per Action), whereby ads are embedded into dreams so that users can 'action' them. However the current technology isn't that sophisticated. So in the first version of DreamAds, Google will start with a 'Cost Per Impression' based ad model.

Conclusion

This is an intriguing product that has the potential to take Adsense to the next level. Google will probably be able to make around $500 per DreamAds apparel user. And with the upcoming CPA version, the high relevancy could increase Google's revenues to $5,000 per person. Think about that: $5,000 * 1 billion users means an unparalleled distribution model for advertisers and a gigantic revenue source for Google.

Our source didn't confirm this, but we've heard a rumor that Google has already started a private beta program with a limited number of trusted testers in the Mountain View area. ReadWriteWeb will stay on top of this story and bring you updates as they happen. In the meantime, please share your thoughts in the comments.