3 New Twitter Toys?

If you’ve been following me on Amplify, you have seen me mention one or all of these. But since most people haven’t, I’m going to talk about them here for a minute, with a few extra editorial comments.

First up, Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions was nice enough to send me an invite code to hy.ly. It’s a service for providing customer support through Twitter. I had just had a customer service question, on a day I was swamped with requests, to my main account.

I haven’t tried it yet, but the tour looks awesome – it’s proactive rather than reactive and can link into your Customer Relationship Management software.

The reason I haven’t tried it is that I don’t get a lot of customer service requests to either of my Twitter accounts, and really, I don’t want to, not at the accounts I presently have. So I’m thinking, do I start a new one, or do I bite the bullet and start customer service at my less busy account?

Or should I keep things the way they are – it doesn’t seem very forward-thinking to keep customer service to email, phone and Zen Desk/other web-based help desk…. but there’s also the issue that now that it’s FINALLY working the way I want it to, do I really want to risk breaking it?

I’m really making an effot not to take on extra things just because they look super-cool and fun.

The site is soooo nice though. Makes me want to test it out. Thanks for the invite, Shashi!

Another site I liked was Live Intent. It makes a panel slide out from where it’s installed to let people sign up to your Twitter account without leaving your page. I like it because it looks slick. I’m not ready to try it because there’s no un-sponsored version – why can’t I pay $10 a month for the big brands not to share my space?

Maybe the cost would be too high for the average mid-level publisher? Perhaps.

Publitweet looks good too. I saw it on Scoble’s sidebar, and it was really fast-moving, with updates on the Tech world.

I was attracted to it because I want to make more of a move towards biz streaming, but a bit differently than I’ve seen it implemented. Publitweet looks more like the idea I had, though it seems like it’s not suited to follow mentions of just one site, name or brand. Although it does say it can do that.

And how would you edit the stream to make sure people didn’t just mention you to get coverage? Or do you build that in as a benefit?

Anyway, I think it would be cool if I used it to follow maybe my top 10 favorite tech companies, so I could pluck things from the stream to write about. That would be cool.

So those are my picks for the day. Right now, I have to go decide how big I want to Blog Daily Challenge to be, and how best to support the other participants.