Relief for Twitter Headaches

By Social Editors • on September 19, 2009

The Wall Street Journal, By Sarah E. Needleman — Twitter’s popularity as a customer-service and public-relations tool for businesses is growing. But so are the headaches of managing all that communication with consumers—sorting through hundreds of messages, crafting the right responses, planning promotional campaigns, keeping track of it all.

And keeping track of what people are saying to each other about your company, your competitors and your industry on Twitter isn’t easy, either. Now, a growing number of free Web products are helping companies minimize the hassles.

CoTweet Inc., a San Francisco-based start-up, offers several tools to help companies respond to tweets. Marcus Schmidt uses one called Tweet Assignments for his job as a senior marketing manager at Microsoft Corp. He oversees two company Twitter pages where consumers post about 300 questions and comments a day. He says Tweet Assignments helps him generate swift responses from the appropriate Microsoft employees by allowing him to send consumers’ tweets to colleagues instantly, without having to copy them into email messages. The recipients can then respond directly to consumers with tweets of their own or send responses back to Mr. Schmidt.

Winnie Hsia, a social-media specialist for Whole Foods Market Inc., uses another CoTweet tool to manage the 300 to 500 tweets posted daily to the natural-food chain’s Twitter page. Called Conversation Threading, it tells users which tweets have been responded to and when, and allows them to review all the messages exchanged with any correspondent. Ms. Hsia uses it to get “a better sense of what our past interaction has been” before she responds to a tweet or sends messages to customers. It also helps her avoid accidentally responding to the same tweet twice.

CoTweet launched its Twitter tools publicly in July and so far doesn’t charge for them. But it plans to start charging a monthly fee that will vary by usage by the end of year, says Jesse Engle, chief executive.

Getting the Message Out…

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