Tim McElligott Blog: Social Networking Phenoms Blowing Opportunity

 Facebook and Twitter have struggled to turn their statuses as social phenoms into real businesses with real, sustainable revenue. And they’re at risk of blowing the opportunity staring them in the face if they don't move quickly. It’s called the value-add and any "old school" software or service company would be jumping all over it.

They have a value-add opportunity in the Customer Care space. AT&T is just the latest large, consumer-facing company to adopt social media as a customer-care tool. The benefits so far are questionable because of the potential to get publicly flogged by one’s customers, but the upside is unknown, untapped and utterly open to some creative company (Convergys, Element Customer Care, Oracle anyone?) stepping in as a partner of social media and helping them solve some of the issues outlined by Sheryl Kingstone, research director for Yankee Group, in the article above. How do you monitor and manage the 5 billion comments written every week, report and quantify who said what, or maintain control over your corporate brand?

But there are more basic tracking, coordinating and operational functions that traditional call center technology companies can help social media companies bring to market as value-adds and help companies such as AT&T and Comcast make sense out of the fabulous but frenetic, knee-jerk lunacy of social networking.

Somebody help them before they become the next BBS.

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