I am starting to see a trend for companies using Radian6 and other social enterprise monitoring products.

Companies are responding to people’s complaints or queries directly through social media. Wake up everyone, it’s not the just the 1-800 Call Center anymore.

With social enterprise monitoring products, companies look for keywords such as their own company, other band names (i.e. competition), and mis-spelled names. By scraping the web, they find as many social media sites as possible to find negative and positive feedback.

The monitoring software allows them to drill down and find out exactly what people are saying or thinking about the company, good or bad.

By responding in real time, this helps improves the public perception of the company.

Success is making customers happy, one customer at a time. Hopefully, that customer will share their experience via Facebook and Twitter.  And that’s the power of spreading the message, virally.

The Facebook Fan Page

Another trend emerging with companies using social media monitoring tools are treating their Facebook Fan Page as serious as their own corporate web site.

Social media *is* an integrated marketing plan for any business.

By having a contest and engaging Facebook readers to “post on your wall” whether it’s a testimonial or uploading a video, that’s the community companies want to see.  And with 700 million users on Facebook, that’s a large sample pool to choose from.

But it doesn’t end there.  Eventually you’ll want to draw your readers to your web site and make those conversions.  Loyal  and repeat customers are the best customers.  I think everyone knows that.

Again, it doesn’t end there.  By using Heroku for Facebook, you can build real anything as a Facebook app, including a storefront from your goods, without even leaving the Facebook page.  Now you have two store fronts, one web and one Facebook.

What used to be a brick and mortar industry with real storefronts, sales clerks and cashiers changed with web ecommerce over a decade ago.  Now that revolution is changing.

However, will customer service agents and help desk call centers be a thing of the past?