The word of mouth in public has never been as fast and worldwide with the Twitter growth. More important than marketing or advertising is what your community, your users, are saying about your product or your brand.Listen first to everything being said about your brand on Twitter search (follow the space as well, your competition and the key players)Sort what you see into categories, here are a few:complainsproduct suggestionsnew features requestsbusiness opportunitiescongratulationspeople recommending your products to their friendsetcDecide if there is an action needed or not to every single one, I would go for the negatives and help request firstAnswer them as fast and as best as you canGet into a private conversation with the user if the conversation continues and follow up until he is happyIt is easy to describe how to do it best but much more difficult to actually apply it to your brand especially if people talk a lot about it. I think it is worth the time and resources investment.A good case study: Robert Scoble yesterday saw me saying on Twitter that our web host for Seesmic, Servepath, went down for more than 5 minutes and took some of its customers sites down entirely. Robert follows me but probably also follows Rackspace his new employer. Robert took this opportunity to write a blog post and we got into a conversation on Twitter and his blog.In a matter of minutes, representatives from both Servepath (our host) and Rackspace (Robert's company interested in getting our business) started to get in the conversation with many customers of both commenting at the same time. It was priceless information about their services but also competitive information for the companies themselves. All in public, that is very new.I have insisted that I was not dissatisfied in general by Servepath but of course annoyed that we went down entirely for a significant time given the budget allocated to our hosting. Now Amazon went down a few times too and I take it Rackspace has its problems too, but this is not my point here.Brands who are not listening will fail but listening is not enough. Very few of them actually start getting immediately in the conversation. I saw an article and that was explaining the popular shoe brand Crocs was going out of business and in a matter of minutes their community manager answered saying that as any business they were going through tough times but that they were safe.Congratulations to all these brands for their transparency and more important, for getting in the conversation, including on week-ends!
