

Polly.IM: auto-suggests Twitter responses to local business customers - greattypo
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/07/12/polly-im-helps-businesses-engage-with-customers-on-twitter/

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2arrs2ells
Hmm, I'm torn. On the one hand - this seems like a great use of NLP and
sentiment analysis, and I can see how this could be incredibly useful for
someone like a restaurant owner who can't monitor twitter 24/7. On the other
hand - I feel like this might be the beginning of the end of Twitter as a way
to talk to _real people_ \- who can do more than send out automated messages.

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roger_lee
Thank you for your feedback. We will take it into consideration, [name].

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samd
Twitter and Facebook give businesses the opportunity to _interact_ with their
customers. Using those channels as yet another way to talk _at_ customers is
wasting that opportunity. The best way for local businesses to use Twitter is
to actually use Twitter. Log in, respond to messages, join the conversation,
act like a real person and connect with your customers.

Polly.IM may be a useful tool if you're already engaged on Twitter, but if you
rely on automated responses to drive your "interactive" marketing you're doing
it wrong.

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iamvictorious
Polly.IM right now requires you to have a Twitter account and so most current
users are already engaging with Twitter. From our surveys and discussions with
our trial users, they all nonetheless feel like they could use some help in
categorizing tweets and helping with very routine stuff like distributing a
promotion to new followers. At the end of the day, many local businesses have
1 person running their twitter account and that person generally is the owner
who doubles as marketing if not everything else. Compare that situation to
American Airlines which can hire 10 or 20 social media managers and you
realize quickly why these folks could use some help organizing responses and
conversations with customers.

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greattypo
This is a side project by my company, PaperG, which is intended to help small
businesses. Most SMBs we work with try to manage social accounts, but quickly
get burned out trying to keep up and leave them dormant.

Polly.IM helps automate routine things (thanking new followers with coupons,
responding to check-ins, etc). It also helps identify and and suggest
responses to other things like compliments, complaints, suggestions, etc.
using our sentiment analysis tech.

Would welcome any feedback or suggestions from HN!

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jmjerlecki
I think a nice touch would be to auto follow or make it a selection that users
can toggle on or off. Let's say someone tweets at my business, I think it adds
a nice touch if the business auto follows the user who took the time to tweet
about me.

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iamvictorious
that's a great idea. we wanted to release a minimal viable product first to
get feedback and ideas for new features. our beta actually already yielded a
lot of helpful suggestions like allowing manual approval/editing as well as
enabling auto-generated coupons for new followers.

we definitely will allow more granular control going forward.

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kml
Looks like an awesome tool to help small businesses make sense of the
Twitterverse

