We have all heard about Twitter and Dell. A customer service coup of sorts that jacked up sales with a claim in December of ’08 that $ 1 million in sales could be contributed to Twitter efforts.

Want someone to take you seriously?  An effective (if inelegant) way of getting attention is to flash some cash.  That practice may also, as it turns out, get you a link from Google.

Tom Peters suggested that for many big companies the words "We’re No Worse Than the Other Guy" could be the company motto emblazoned in gold letters over the entrance.

He was describing banks but according to a recent survey on customer service the cell phone companies are the lowest on the totem pole.

Lots of stories have swirled over the question of will they or won’t they bid in the FCC’s 700MHz wireless spectrum auction, but Google now looks like a lock to pony up some cash.

Amazon.com has launched "Customer Video Reviews" which allows customers to use video to express and share their opinions about products sold on the retailers Web site.

It’s been so long since I’ve done a Goofus and Gallant post that I’ll remind everyone we point to marketing and PR stories that demonstrate how to and how not to.

Consumer Engagement is not a metric that can be measured in the same manner by all businesses and therefore there is no such thing as an optimum engagement score.

Consumer Engagement is also not simply captured on your website, it’s calculated using all touch points in a consumer’s (website, search engine, blog, banner ad, offline media, etc…). Consumer engagement has to be defined by marketing teams and appropriate stake holders so that it can be correlated to repetitive interactions by the consumer.

Brian Eisenberg of Grok.com took a well placed swipe at the Delta blog.  Brian ran the text of the post about how Delta gathers customer input through the customer focus ("We-we") calculator and found these results:

When it comes to taking care of customers, there are no mysteries; only the desire to invest in and support an effective customer service presence stands between companies like Google, and the joy they can deliver to people.

Wal-Mart is taking a step backwards when it comes to online customer service. The retail giant said it would no longer offer its customers the choice of being able to speak to a customer service representative if they have problems with an order.

A study of email campaigns presented at the Shop.org Summit contended that marketers aren’t doing enough to maximize the return on their efforts.

I am behind reading my blogs and just caught up today with a great post from last week on grokdotcom that demonstrates how hard it is to get action-oriented information from customer surveys. Follow the link above to read the post—I’ll wait right here.

Scary, isn’t it? When you think about how many questions you’ve asked customers and how little information you might be getting back.

It’s fun being called delusional by customer service. Today, LinkedIn is trying to make me feel like I’m in that Jodie Foster movie Flightplan where she claims her daughter was kidnapped while on an airplane and everyone else thinks she’s nuts. The movie wasn’t supposed to be very good (it scored 38% on the Tomatometer), and I’m not sure this blog post will be any better, but I can at least empathize with Foster’s character based on the previews.

Supermarkets and search engines tops Harris Interactive’s consumer poll this year, which sought out what industries best served the needs of their customers. Tobacco and oil companies scored the worst, joining airlines, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance, and HMO’s as the biggest overall losers in the past 10 years.

Over the past ten years, just three of the 21 industries measured have seen a positive increase in customer satisfaction, and in the past year, just six did, according to Harris. Fourteen industries went down this year.

U.S. mobile users say their service problems are handled more efficiently than in the past according to J.D. Power and Associates "2007 Wireless Customer Care Performance Study."

Office products retailer Staples has launched online customer reviews from PowerReviews.

Wal-Mart today said it is adding customer reviews and ratings on its Web site.

While browsing websites for gift ideas, I am constantly seeing the awesome potential of multimedia. Now that there are multiple social websites for almost every kind of media, the potential for customers to be exposed to your experience is limitless, and really inexpensive.

Bango has released statistics that show that the United States use of the mobile Web has increased three fold in the last year, making it second only to the UK.

MoveOn’s executive director Eli Pariser called MySpace a "serial censorer of user-generated content" and presented a litany of complaints about the social networking site’s practices.

There’s a constant debate about the “best” way to earn online income, and the simple answer is that there is no optimum path to achieving this goal. But one thing is certain, the deeper the engagement with your visitors, the more you’ll benefit.

Here’s why: The whole system of Internet Marketing profits is based on effort and engagement.

Witness-

Web advertising (text links, banner ads, Adsense) has a back-of-napkin payout of about 1-10% against your time and resorces.

Uber customer service snafus like Jet Blue aside, a business is bound to catch a customer on a bad day – or vice versa. This can spawn a fiery blog post which, in plain view of Google, can morph into an issue with “negative fiscal ramifications” for the business in question.