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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
