foomandoonian

In a perfect link with my post about useful Twitter applications from earlier today, Get Satisfaction have just announced a new service called Overheard:

Get Satisfaction's powerful Overheard feature enables you to support customer conversations across the Web by bridging the Twitter stream to your Get Satisfaction community. Hear what your customers are saying, and respond to them in a channel they are already using. Simply set the keywords you want to track, and you'll see all the messages on Twitter ("tweets") that match your search terms. See someone you want to reach out to or a customer idea worth exploring? Turn that tweet into a topic and quickly bring the rest of the Get Satisfaction network into the conversation.

Get Satisfaction have built a fantastically useful website built around a concept so simple and brilliant it's staggering to me that it hadn't been done before. Essentially it's a tech support forum, linking customers with companies, including Twitter.

Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships. Thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. You’re free to ask, free to answer, and free to start a new conversation. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate: companies, employees, customers — anyone with an opinion, an answer, or something to say.

Overheard is powered by Summize. The company or individual simply runs a search on the company name and identifies an issue. They can then get a topic started on Get Satisfaction:

The topic starting page makes you narrow the problem down over several stages until it is well defined. It even estimates the likelihood of the discussion getting noticed once it is posted! Presumably this could also be an ideal forum for companies to steal away customers of their competitors who are less web savvy! All in all, this use of Twitter is probably smarter than any of the others I listed earlier.