Rational Security reports that southwest airlines is monitoring twitter streams to see what people are saying about their brand. This along with twitter spam is not a surprise, what is surprising is that anyone would be surprised at all. Many companies should be monitoring the social networks looking to see what people are saying.
The wonderful part about twitter is that it is transitory, it is hard to get a DMCA take down when the meme’s fly by so fast, and are collected in only a handful of sites, those will probably get the take down notice.
Social spaces are going to be monitored by companies, this should never come as a surprise. While it makes for some interesting news, and sensational headlines, smart companies are doing this, and working out the public relations spin machine to counter act negative PR. What will be interesting to see is if companies start flooding twitter with overly bright positive reviews of their service, oh wait, too late already, it is called twitter spam.
Keywords: public relations, twitter, monitoring, south west airlines, company, corporate, social graph, social networks
I had a similar kind of experience not that long ago… Trying to set up a SlideShare account to include a PPT in my blog. Turns out the Chinese were launching a DDoS attack at the time, and the site was performing horribly. I tweeted my frustration and 2 SlideShare employees got back to me in about 10 minutes with an update. They couldn’t solve the problem, but gave me enough info to know how to finish the blog so I could go to bed.
Of course, I feel quite special and loyal now, so I posted a rave blog the next day. http://snurl.com/26ntn
Now I’m working collecting these kinds of stories, because I think the phenomenon is quite interesting.