Customer Support or Lead Generation via Twitter? It is now possible with the free Social Networking Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Available for download early next week!

What do people do these days when they don’t get the right customer service or buy a bad product? Yes, probably complain about it online. Some do it via blogs but more recently people have been doing this via Twitter.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service where users can post and read online messages (also known as tweets) that are limited to 140 characters. Tweets are displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications such as Tweetdeck or Twitterrific.

Comcast, Ford and Starbucks are great examples of large organizations that noticed this paradigm shift in consumer behavior early on. They joined twitter and other social networks and started monitoring customer gripes. With their presence on the web they are now able to pro-actively engage in conversations and in case of problems make an attempt to quickly resolve them.

For a while now, I have been telling my partners and customers to be present on the web. Not only with a great looking website, but engage in customer conversations using social networking services such as Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter in combination with CRM.

This is also known as Social CRM as defined by Paul Greenberg; a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.

With the new Social Networking Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM organizations are now able to monitor and analyze customer conversations. Provide them with real-time updates, drive customer satisfaction and identify new opportunities. Click here to see a demonstration video.