Social media is here. Your customers are talking. And they’re talking publicly. Twitter has a large user base and provides a simple application and interface to get you started.

What should you do?

1. Search Twitter for your company’s name, brands, products, or services
2. Search Twitter for your competitor’s company name, brand, products, or services

Why?

We see several trends.

Today’s customers are social networkers and influencers. They are publicly sharing observations and experiences regarding your company’s products and services and those of your competitors. New social web applications such as Twitter allow any customer to amplify a single voice.

Twitter, Facebook, and all social networking services have an inherent interest in growing their user base. Hence, they continuously innovate and build new tools and services to foster easy sign-up, discovery and broadcasting of users’ experiences. For example, at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Twitter’s CEO announced @anywhere. This technology enables publishers to embed Twitter and its tools directly into any web page, thereby strengthening and streamlining the social network’s presence, broadcast, discovery and follow process for any reader. Facebook’s Connect feature has similar capabilities.

Twitter recently partnered with Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo search engines to have them incorporate Twitter’s search results into those search engines’ organic search results. And this week, Facebook surpassed Google’s search page as the most visited web site in the US. Social media platforms, and hence your customers’ voice, will continue to become more ubiquitous.

Forward thinking managers and business owners are already taking advantage of new conversations enabled by social media. These business owners understand consumers have a bigger microphone, but these astute business leaders also realize that social networking applications provide a new means to respond. At a discussion about the popular and social restaurant review site Yelp.com at SXSW, a restaurant owner said he responds to negative feedback on Yelp the same way he would if the reviewer was still a guest at his restaurant.

How?

Simple. You don’t even need an account. Twitter’s real time search allows anyone to search for any buzz at any time. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in a phrase of interest. For best results, if your company or brand or product name has more than one word, enclose all the words with double quotes. Try adjusting the search phrase to include specific product names or model numbers. Do the same with your competitor’s products.

You’re likely to find many useful and interesting Tweets, a trend of positive or negative comments, and actionable insights. You may even find customers or prospects who have been reaching out to you directly.

Search is only the first step. From there, develop a process to allow for interaction and engagement. Make plans with your team to engage with authors of negative reviews or complaints about your products. Make social media a two-way street.

After all, if listening is part of your strategy, you’ve got to be ready to act and change. Be authentic, honest, and transparent in your responses. As soon as you show you care, you’ll rescue customers, and you’ll have made your caring engagement public.

Allegiance has several social media related projects in development. The Allegiance platform is all about helping you listen wherever customers and employees are talking. Hence Twitter and social media are natural channels for us to capture. In the meantime, use Twitter.com or a Twitter client such as Seesmic to monitor public experiences and dialog about your company and the competition.

Join the American Marketing Association for the free March 23 webcast titled, “Social Media – The New Frontier of Customer Feedback.” Speakers include Matthew Bowman, former CEO of Wi5Connect (a social media company) and Eric Weight of Attensity (text analytics expert). To register, go to http://bit.ly/ajOQop

For the second year in a row, Allegiance was honored with the 2010 Service Leader Award for Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) by CRM Magazine. It is especially gratifying to receive this award since customer satisfaction is one of the top criteria. Click here to read the full article.

The winner is selected through an extensive three-month process and proprietary rating formula that involves industry analysts, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores reflecting customer satisfaction.

Allegiance was rated highest among its competitors in helping businesses to perform surveys and collect feedback from multiple channels, including e-mail, Web, phone, print, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), and social media. In addition, with the acquisition of Inquisite’s online survey software, we raised our already high score in the category of depth of functionality from the prior year.

But we are not resting on our laurels. We are busy planning the launch of an entirely new set of features and functions to help companies capitalize on customer and employee feedback. I hope you will plan to join us at the Allegiance Engage Summit in May 16 – 19, 2010 to hear all about it. For more on the summit, click here: http://engagesummit.com/