Catherine van Zuylen

It’s interesting that with the rise of social media, companies seem to have unlearned everything they learned about integrated marketing and service in the email and ecommerce “revolutions” in the past. Many companies are hopping on the “social media” bandwagon this year, launching social media initiatives in specialized groups to listen to and engage with customers in Twitter, Facebook, and communities.

But at Attensity, we believe social media should not be pursued in a vacuum. It should be aligned with other customer feedback, marketing, and service principles and processes. Being able to listen, analyze, relate, and act on multi-channel feedback (from social media, emails, surveys, call center records) better than anyone else is a key component in increasing loyalty and revenue...

I've recently been keeping tabs on some of the more innovative uses I've seen for social media monitoring that go beyond just watching your brand. Thought I'd share some:

Media Post reported that seismologists are turning toward social sites to gain an alternative read on earthquakes. Often social media postings appear before USGS official earthquake reports, and can provide a more rich, complex view of an earthquake than simple sensore can provide. So hoping to better understand activity patterns, some seismologists are informally monitoring chatter from colleagues and friends that spread across social sites like Facebook, as well as publicly available videos that people upload to YouTube. I know when there is an earthquake in California I get more real-time insights about it from Twitter than anywhere else!

Fast Company recently reported that two researchers at HP Labs, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, have discovered ...