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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.
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.
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"?
Rule #1 of buying stuff: the vendor is not your "friend", on Facebook or otherwise.
Stop!
Hammer time!
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.