Slashdot Mirror
Cisco Social Software Lets You "Stalk" Customers
coondoggie writes "Cisco this week unveiled software designed to let companies track customers and prospects on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other public forums and sites. Cisco SocialMiner allows users to monitor status updates, forum posts and blogs of customers so they can be alerted of conversations related to their brand. The software is designed to not only enable enterprises to monitor the conversations of their customers but to engage those that require service, Cisco says."
Now I won't have to remember my client's anniversaries, their kid's birthdays, when & where they go on vacation ... because they'll all fire me if they find out I'm stalking them.
wait a minute
Awesome. So tell me, what happens when companies start to use this to toss around defamation lawsuits (RIAA style) to squash negative opinions of their product(s)?
Won't someone think of the Apple-haters?!
By posting to these kinds of social sites these people have indicated that they want to be heard. I wouldn't call it stalking if you are doing exactly what the "target" is asking you to do.
"Cisco this week unveiled software designed to let companies track customers and prospects on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other public forums and sites.
Are they inviting a lawsuit? These folks must be crazy! Anything that breaks the law by being used as the inventor intended breaks the invites a lawsuit. This is one such product Simple as that.
"The software is designed to not only enable enterprises to monitor the conversations of their customers but to engage those that require service, Cisco says"
I think to get the creepiness quotient expressed properly, 'service' should be in special quotes there.
but to engage those that require service
Yeah, right. If they were worried about you getting good service, the TAC was a little more flexible with you not running the absolute newest version that was just released, work with you even though you don't have all of the debug logs from every switch between point A and B, and because they can not recreate the problem in the 5 minutes they "tried" it in their lab.
Any awareness program like this would be about PR and the sales department, not customer satisfaction after the sale.
As if I needed another reason to not have a facebook account. If there's not an anonymous option I just create a temporary fake account for whatever forum I'm wanting to comment on and then forget it. I have more hotmail, yahoo and gmail accounts than I can count. In the last 15 years I'll bet I've used hundreds of temp accounts.
Isn't this what customers want, though? I'm rather serious about that.
Say a company has a website and on that website they obviously have a news area, a contact page (perhaps even a listed e-mail address.. rare as that may be) and because they're not totally stuck-up, they also run a forum.
What happens?
People don't read that website for news.. not even if it had an RSS feed. They expect to get those updates from a Twitter feed.
People don't post to those forums. Why would they? It's probably small and won't get very many eyeballs, even if it -is- the official forum and they can get in touch with the actual business people / engineers there. They expect to just go @SomeCompany on Twitter and get their responses there.
People don't use the e-mail forms... again.. @SomeCompany on Twitter.
Substitute Twitter with facebook / youtube / vimeo in some scenarios.
Note that people will do this even if the company does -not- in fact have an account at these social networking sites. Heck, if nothing else, people will just complain on those sites about the lack of the company being on that site.
So I reckon this is exactly what people want. Even if it's not what they want, they in part brought this unto themselves.
And yes.. I realize that part of the reason is because it is oh-so-public. Blaming Company X for a problem with Product Y on Twitter tends to get re-tweeted and picked up right-quick. Saying so on the company's own forum tends to lead to relatively bland responses. So companies, too, brought this requirement to be on social networking sites unto themselves.
But certainly neither party should complain about the development of these tools (and Cisco's is hardly the first).
How is this different from just opening up Twitterfall and searching for "cisco"?
Just like iPhone, Apple will start rolling out iStalk soon.
I heard Apple has been testing it internally for a while. Those email replies from Steve Jobs' account really all came from a beta version of iStalk, not Jobs himself.
Rule #1 of buying stuff: the vendor is not your "friend", on Facebook or otherwise.
This article brought to you by the good folks at Juniper Networks.
Companies already do this manually, or with in-house software. A friend of mine had his guitar broken by an airline and made a YouTube video about it... no, not the really famous one you're thinking of, this is another guy with another broken guitar... anyway, the "Social Media Specialist" for the airline made a comment on his video to the effect of "talk to the baggage center and they'll make things right."
Sir Lar is on a tirade about being about to slalk customers and this "vapor ware" of Cisco is getting him into a masterbating rage.
I can see this software being very useful to identify problem customers who incessantly complain, no matter what the cause. Such customers consume vast amounts of service resources all out of proportion to their numbers. When they attempt to sign up with your company, you can check if they're a bad customer. If their name comes up on the list, bam, their applications for service is declined. This will make them think twice before moaning and groaning that your product didn't come with a free ass-kisser or that the color didn't match their drapes.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
In 90's and early 2000's the only way to connect with people or friends were through mailing lists, and then came orkut, facebook and a hell lot of sites where connection just became a byproduct to style. Every college or school kid, association members, tom, dick or harry is part of some social net. Over the time membership to these virtual spaces became necessity to connect with people rather than style.In 90's the fad phrases was 'text me' which after a decade became 'facebook me' or 'do an orkut'. The concept of social networking has evolved over the past decade. Although texting and emailing were considered revolutions, people generally were quite shy in sharing there information. Normally, accounts will be created using fake names (or cool names) and every one used to have multiple accounts also and among those only few were really used.Most of them were really skeptical or perhaps unintereseted in providing any valid personal information to any of these sites( hotmail, gmail etc) unless expected to be verified. Then came the social sites. In social sites you dont consider yourself as giving information to the sites but to your friends so that they can find you and connect. Provision of credentials became a necessity than an option. So what, its cool,its utility and everybody I know are doing that. Everybody thinks the same way and mostly ends up at the same place. Alongwith so many features and facilities, social sites come with a lot of side concerns. One among the biggest problem is that your profile with lot of credible inforamtion is out there. The credibility of your profile is again made valid by your friends connections. You usually wont keep back inforamation about yourself in social sites because thats made unnatural by the very definition. You always chat/tweet/facebook or whatever it is and let know your friends know whats going on. You will ardently enter into discussions and polls and let yourself known in that circle.But the circle usually is bigger than you think. The point is all the inforamtion about you, your interests and your history from your friends perspective is entered somewhere. A decade back online advertisement mainly concentrated on mailing lists ; however on a different dimension. The inforamtion about us, restricted to email addresses, were collected and stored and later used in multicast advertising(spam). This became non-existent over the time due to ineffectiveness, cost and prevention technologies(like filters). Its ineffective because you never know whether the right ad reached the right person, or even a person, and its costly because the increase in the sales with these means were very less. Google and many companies changed the field by targeted advertising. However, the ad is delevered only at the point of some interest. Lets say you googled for cars, google will push related advertisements only at that point of interest. This although created lots of reveniew for google, cant be considered as highly effective because most of us dint care much about the ads but the contents. Moreover, since add is placed per interest there is no way that the companies will come to know the context of our interest or our future interest, basically because they dont know who we are and what our interests are. Social sites will be the holy grail for any company looking for serious advertisements. There you will find people, their interests, plans and virtually anything that he or she has shared with his/er friends.So why this dint happen so far? How come, most of the time I am presented with a clean page with not even a shard of an ad ? Well, because these sites have to become a part of you and not a choice. Another reason should be that these sites should have enough members( critical mass)so that the advertisement oppurtunities are enough. I guess we are getting there now. Cisco alongwith many other companies including the sites (orkut or facebook) will defenitly be looking forward for cashing the cow.It might have taken a long time for building up the social network, but the return of interest is also that huge. From the node's point, lets hope the future wont turn too ugly with heavy ads and feedbacks.
This sounds like something companies already have happen, but pay some poor part-timer minimum wage to do. The part-timer has a slower parsing rate, but it's about the same.
In other words: what you put out on social websites is pretty much like what you put on any other website: open to bot scrutiny. I would expect nothing less from a completely free service. If you want privacy, pay someone money to provide you and yours with a contracted service for such.
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
Who refuse to use Facebook, Twatter etc.
If I did feel that I HAD to sign up to them, it would be under an assumed name and with a throw away (ie Hotmail etc) email address. All the personal details I'd give would be phony. Just like those I gove to the telephone canvassers who call mostly when I'm just about to sit down to eat a meal.
So, for their beneift,
I'm 23, Single, 6ft tall, Female, Long blonde Hair, like classic Northern Soul and only drink white wine.
I think the only new thing here is that Cisco has made a product out of it. I know of services that have done this before.
Personally, I don't like it. If I want the company to try to sweet-talk me into thinking their wonderfully fantastic then I'd contact them. If I wanted a problem solved then I'd try their tech support. If it isn't something that either of them can help with (like "how do you do X?" or "which are the best drivers for Linux?" or "this is terrible, has anyone else had the same problem?") then it goes somewhere public and I sure as hell don't want someone trying to astroturf the situation.
Are you serious? People expect companies to provide tech support via twitter? Maybe I'm getting to be an old fogey, but that strikes me as just plain weird... What do others think?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
What we're on the cusp of is the transformation between "hard enough" and "easy for Average Joe".
That's why FireSheep was so fun. It was a trick "everyone knew about" but wrote off as Too Hard. Seriously, it's "security through difficulty" and I'm as guilty of it as anyone.
But now we have a "systematic" campaign where everyone in any kind of power trying to connect their two particular dots so that when all 50 of them link up we get a Big Brother system - that *you* can't use (for National Security Reasons).
Overall I think it's the defining issue of the entire decade, and it won't stop until some event Too Big To Ignore traumatizes us into protecting privacy properly.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hence why Obama opted to continue his support for the patriot act...
Hmm...I wonder.