I was talking to someone yesterday about a couple of case studies that show that Twitter can have some measurable business value. Thus far, I think it has been one of those vehicles that has simply made marketers feel good about themselves. I'm not always the biggest fan of brand awareness strategies that don't incorporate some type of call-to-action, so please forgive my jaded slant.

Anyway, the first case study is about Comcast leveraging Twitter for customer service responses. This blog posting talks about how Twitter can be a very effective mass alerting system for letting the public know about something (in this case, a Comcast network outage). After all, how did the story of Captain Sullenberger's Hudson River landing actually break? The initial source was an urgent tweet from Janis Krums who saw the plane going into the water. Last year, Comcast customers who had questions but did not want to listen to hold music on a phone system decided to vent their frustrations via Twitter. Comcast was smart enough to start listening, and they built a Twitter team that responds to some of these tweets. Is it absolutely rude and self-centered to simply throw a tantrum with your followers to get a response from your voice/data service provider? Absolutely, but apparently it's a sign of the times that we live in a selfish on-demand world.

Another great case study will be publicized more this week as French telecommunications company Orange and cloud computing leader Salesforce.com will announce a solution that they built together. Salesforce's solution contains a component called Solutions that stores answers to commonly asked customer questions and it can automate the response-delivery process via email or its portal feature. So, Salesforce built a Twitter "listening" application that can allow customer service representatives to search the Internet for tweets regarding their company's solutions and then they can ensure that the correct answer is being paired with its respective question. This press release explains it in more depth, and more Salesforce customers like Comcast and Dell will be leveraging the Twitter to Service Cloud app as well.

So, instead of listening to smooth jazz on your telephone the next time you have a service question, instead flip open your laptop and start shouting to your groupies. You might get a more accurate response in half the time.