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?

The real Slim Shady is back. We almost forgot all about Eminem and all his drama but now he’s releasing his first album in the last five years, “The Relapse.”

We all knew it would happen eventually but I wasn’t expecting Eminem to build buzz so well.  The marketing team at Aftermath/Interscope Records has created a cool campaign to reintroduce the hip-hop star. You can read about the full campaign here. It’s cool to see that Eminem is marketing his album the same way big studios market new movie releases.

So far, the campaign is working. Twitter has been their main online outlet so far and within the last couple days Tweeters have been going crazy for the new campaign. There has also been a major spike in Eminem Google searches, comparable to the Google inquiries for his 2004 album.

Here are the official stats so far:

“According to Compete, Eminem.com reached 113,868 unique visitors during April, while the most popular of his tweets — which linked to Therelapse.com on May 7 — reached at least 41,704 people within just one week, according to an analysis of data provided to Ad Age by Tweetreach.”

Not too shabby.

Going back to the Google trends, the spike at the very end of the graph is a result of the ticket giveaway for his Detroit show. So far, this has been the only giveaway in the campaign, which surprises me. That could be because I just read an article about how successful Radiohead’s name-your-own-price promotion was in 2007. Eminem’s market are those who are most likely to pirate music. The album has already been leaked online, so it would have made sense for Eminem to make his campaign cater to that audience. Considering the success of his past albums, doing something similar to Radiohead would have definitely been doable.

But you know what? I’m just glad Eminem is back and well, despite his stint with prescription drug abuse. And we’re glad to see him harnessing the power of social media.