So Much For Mentioning Businesses On Twitter

If Salesforce.com's beta customer service program that includes Twitter works as described in this PCWorld blog post, I may impose a permanent moratorium on using company names in my tweets:

Salesforce.com today announced a beta program for its Service Cloud that incorporates Twitter. The Service Cloud is a program for businesses that takes advantage of online knowledge bases, communities and social networks to provide customer service and help. Now, the Service Cloud will scour the Tweetosphere for tweets that apply to a particular business. Customer service representatives could then interject themselves into a Twitter conversation to provide immediate help.

Help would be one thing. If a Twitter user is complaining about a problem with a company's product or service, and the service rep is able to provide assistance...well, one hardly could complain about that. I might even try it with a phone company whose name rhymes with the word Horizon.

What would turn me off is blatant propagandizing or, worse, arguing. "No, our company never would do that. It's not our policy. Cleary you're misunderstanding what we do." Maybe most customer reps are savvy enough not to engage in that kind of debate on Twitter, but not all. And what about those who are given mandates to aggressively promote (and/or defend) the brand on Twitter? PCWorld's Ian Paul draws a good analogy:

[I]magine having the same discussion in a cafe, where a customer service rep on a break happens to overhear you and helps out. If it happened once, you probably wouldn't mind and would be happy to have a fix for your problem. But what if every time you talked about any product in that cafe, a customer service rep or salesmen was sitting next to you and jumped in with some advice.

Answer: It would get old, really fast. Who knows, maybe Alesforce.comSay's new feature will inspire the implementation of code language on ItterTway. It could happen.