Salesforce.com touts doubtful Twitter tool

Marketers know in their tiny hearts that Twitter, the 140-character-per-post social network, is a gold mine. In their somewhat smaller brains, they think that they'll get rich from working all those tweets, as each post is called.

No fools, the folks at Salesforce.com have decided to work the marketers who think they can mine gold from the tweets of the growing number of Twitter users. Now in beta, the company has released its Service Cloud for Twitter, a service that lets marketers follow tweets about their products and services with the fanciful notion that when someone fires off a 140-character-or-less flame about said product or service, they will be johnny-on-the-spot in dousing the fire of criticism. At least, that's one "use case" scenario Salesforce.com has conjured for marketers to get excited about.

The problem here is that while marketing departments might be able to track every devastating tweet slung at their company's wares, they really won't be able to do much about it. It's rare (non-existent?) for marketing staff to be able to respond to technical problems people are having with products. And it's rarer still for company legal departments to let just anyone from the company offer advice about what to do.

So, the likely scenario will be for the nasty tweets to be grabbed, filtered and fed into the company's already over-burdened help desk system, which will push the tweeters to online FAQs, e-mail response systems and voicemail hell. The likely result will be more negative tweets about how unresponsive and uncool the experience with the company was, feeding the flamers with fuel instead of putting out the fire.

Unless there's an integrated, intelligent automated response system designed specifically for Twitter, this initial move into Customer Tweet Management is likely to be as effective as Sylvester was at catching Tweety Bird.