Twitter: A Real Time Pulse Of Customer Satisfaction

Sydney, Australia-based web developer Michael Air recounts how his “light bulb” moment about real time search came as he was looking for a new hosting company. Instead of looking on Google, he consulted Twitter about a specific brand. “Ten pages in and 99 percent of comments were saying how bad that hosting company was,” he told Murdok.

Twitter, then, becomes a kind of collective representation of the consumer mind and the current consumer mood.

“You’re able to tap into a real time pulse of customer satisfaction. It’s incredibly powerful. The fact that you’re tapping into this real time gives you a very good feel for a company right now. Have they been pleasing their customers this week? Last week? An hour ago? Blogs were going in this direction but you just can’t tap into a live pulse the way you can with real time Twitter.”

That type of consumer information power seems destined for abuse. Despite Twitter’s aggressive spam fighting, blackhatters have targeted the site specifically for