This information is 100% stolen from trendwatching.com

Here are some conversations that have been collected from twitter where big brands are monitoring the conversation and responding in real time to customer service issues.

Five years ago if your company had world class customer service that meant you had some good information on your website and customers could call your toll free number 24/7

Today? you can no longer afford to wait for customers to bring their complaints to you.  If you are waiting to solve problems you are losing customers. You must be proactive about listening to the conversations and responding in real time. Twitter is an amazing tool for this. Here are some awesome examples from big brands.

Let me just qualify that and say I am throwing in the big brands thing to show that this behavior is now mainstream not that you need a big budget.  We have clients doing this way better than the big boys with micro brands and micro budgets.  check out zarbees on twitter.

Chances are your company or cause is much smaller than these. Can you really afford not to be part of the conversation?

Ford is bravely entering the world of social media at full speed. To build buzz about their new compact car, the Fiesta, Ford is giving their branding and promotion responsibilities to 100 young web savvy people.

The best part of this plan is that none of these individuals has any advertising experience. They were chosen for their “social vibrancy” rating. Essentially, they were judged by their web presence and popularity – number of online followers and accounts on different social media platforms. They were also judged according to their creativity, film-making skills and ability to retain audience’ attention.

So here’s the deal, Ford is giving each of the 100 people chosen a Ford Fiesta to drive around for six months. They will be asked to document their experience with the car through Youtube videos, blog posts and other social media updates.

We always talk about the key to good and honest marketing is being transparent. Ford is taking this a step farther by not having any censorship over what is said and posted about the Fiesta. This is definitely a make-or-break situation for Ford. They must have thought of this, so Ford must be confident enough in their product to publicize this trial period. And if it goes horribly wrong, Ford still has about a year to redeem themselves before the Fiesta hits U.S. dealers.

Ford, we commend you for the unique grass roots campaign. It’s a great idea and will definitely build buzz and awareness about the Fiesta. For Ford’s sake, hopefully it’s positive buzz.

In one of our previous posts we mentioned that Coke had the #2 ranked Facebook page. Just like Nutella, Coca-Cola‘s fan page was set up by loyal fans.

The page was created by Dusty Sorg, an LA based actor, and he maintains it with his friend Michael Jedrzejewski, a writer. Neither of them had any idea that their fan page would become as popular as it is. It’s second only to Barack Obama’s page – pretty good. Sorg started the page in August and by December it had 1.2 million fans.

At the time Sorg set up his Coca-Cola fan page, there were already more than 200 coke related fan pages on Facebook. But for some reason Sorg’s page took off and continues to grow and currently has about 3.3 million fans. So what made this Facebook different from hundreds of others?

Michael Donnelly, Coca-Cola’s group director of worldwide interactive marketing, suggests that the difference could have been as simple as a professional look. “They chose a great image,” he says. “It was a high-resolution picture of a can of cold Coke, and it was just perfect.”

So it looks like Coke’s success in social media was totally accidental. While it worked for Coke, other companies shouldn’t wait for their fans to do the heavy lifting. “It gives us an opportunity we didn’t have in the past,” says Mr Donnelly. “It’s a great way for us to expose a huge number of people to what we’re doing at no cost.” Coca-Cola and Sorg now jointly administer the page.

It’s crazy to see that a fan’s Facebook page has become such an asset to one of the most influential and successful companies in the world. So for those who are still skeptical of the benefits of social networks, specifically Facebook, this is a perfect example of the impact they can have on your relationships with your customers.

We have already talked about the companies that screwed up this past year. Now we want to talk about those companies that are using social media the way they should be – to interact with their customers.

“Companies that focus on earning love will thrive during hard times, and kick ass when good times return.” – Andy Sernovitz

Most people are still in the afterglow of the huge Obama campaign and election orgy. Everyone’s expectations of the new president-elect are higher than ever before. They don’t have a care in the world – Obama will take care of it. Obviously, there is no way he can live up to everyone’s expectations. He might be dead sexy tonight and can do know wrong but he isn’t going to look that good when we all wake up sober and realize he actually is a human.  Thats when his problems will start, this summer when the economy is still declining and oil prices start to go up.  When people realize we are still in Iraq and getting more involved in Afghanistan how is he going to keep Americans from treating him like George Bush? The twitterverse will slowly start talking about real things, as opposed to being his most loyal advocate. We’ll have to see how he deals with reality when it hits. We might be a little premature on this pradiction but we think sometime near the end of 09′ American’s will begin to take off their “Obama Beer Goggles”

I am sure everyone and their mother has heard about the Motrin drama. Motrin launched an online ad campaign targeting “babywearing” moms that was supposed to empathize with the pain associated with carrying your baby in a sling.

The reaction was less than positive. Moms were mad, real mad. Tweets, blogs, and youtube videos were popping up like crazy about the offense taken from the ad.

For those of you who thought that ad was pulled quickly enough that a spoof couldn’t be made, I am about to put your minds at ease. This is our favorite response video

Obviously, J&J should have tested the ad before the launch. That was their big mistake. Although they are still getting a ton of negative fallout from it they handled the reaction well. They immediately apologized and pulled the ad; it was launched on Friday and by Monday, the ad had been pulled. The buzz about the ad continued throughout the week and mostly fizzled by Friday.

The Motrin story is becoming an instant case study for how influential social media is on brands today. It also proves that there are huge opportunities to use social media to improve your brand image.

Even though there was negative buzz about Motrin, the good thing is that the fact that people were tweeting and blogging about it proves that there is some level of passion for the brand. Now Motrin’s challenge is to take that passion and make it positive.

So you might ask “what would buzz.io have done differently?” Well as you have heard us preach so many times from this pulpit it is about the conversations with your customers.  Don’t wait until a crisis to start talking.  Have you seen Motrin contact the offended mothers and apologize? they probably lost some moms forever because of this but by having a conversation they might have turned some anger into excitement because they are a brand that cares.

It isn’t too late for your brand – get out to the conversations and start talking!