Feed your community sweet and sour tweets

Today Lithium Technologies Inc. of Emeryville, Calif. is announcing its new Social Web Connect service available to users of its eponymous social networking service. The new service will let businesses integrate comments about their companies' interests on social networking sites, such as Twitter, into their own Lithium-based forums.

According to Sanjay Dholakia, Lithium's chief marketing officer, by feeding live tweets (whether sweet nothings or sour grapes) into a company's Lithium-based forum other users can respond to queries, comments and criticisms. He claims this give-and-take among users can resolve negative issues before they evolve into major tech-support headaches.

Maybe more important, Dholakia suggests, is that companies can spot new ideas for products, promotions and other revenue-generating opportunities.  

Companies like iRobot Corp. of Bedford, Mass. use Lithium's service to foster customer engagement with their products that often results in dramatically reduced technical and customer support costs because product-savvy users can help fix things faster and even better than official support teams.

Another new service coming from Lithium will be its CRM Connect service that pours social network chatter into your CRM tool. You can link Twitter tweeters comments into their customer profile to get a fuller picture with what they really think about your company's products and services.

Available later this quarter, Lithium pricing is based on page views.