Cisco Social Software Lets You "Stalk" Customers 123
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."
Consequences? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?!
Are CISCO crazy? (Score:3, Interesting)
"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.
Isn't this what customers want, though? (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Twitterfall (Score:2, Interesting)
How is this different from just opening up Twitterfall and searching for "cisco"?
Re:not stalking (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that in some instances, the areas where these posts are being made are in what the posters deem to be a closed room, and I'm sure you'd be mad as hell if your comments in private are purposely eavesdropped.
Obviously there is a lack of control over this by most users, and maybe their understanding of the tech they're using is limited, but by posting something on a wall in facebook and thinking that only their friends can see it because those are their privacy settings does make it private to them.
I tend to take your advice for most things, but still, it's stifling to live constantly thinking about whether you can safely voice your opinion. And in my opinion, that is not exactly a free society, either.