It might not be the best communication method length-wise, but Twitter is a powerful social search mechanism that even evil mainstream moneymaking corporations are starting to embrace as part of their customer service suite.  These messages have less delay than email, are designed to be accessed while on the go, get to the point quickly, and are a great opportunity to demonstrate superior customer service in front of other potential users (which is commonly referred to as "marketing" *grin*).

The easiest way to tap into these conversations is by subscribing to the RSS feed for your query on http://search.twitter.com, but there's no way to keep track of which messages have been responded to.  A customer service tool that I really like is called Get Satisfaction, which has a feature where you can monitor when people say your company name, then reply and manage the following conversation from their interface.  See an example here:  http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast/overheard/

I don't know if social customer service would duplicate any existing support efforts (I'm sure it would), but it can be a more accessible system to the average user, with bonus built-in publicity features.  If anyone else is interested in exploring how this would work for Fedora, I am more than happy to get the infrastructure set up and help you get started.

On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 9:33 AM, Jonathan Roberts <jonrob@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> [or, if anyone has a pointer -- help docs? a mailing list? an IRC channel? a
> wiki page? :) ... I can try an @reply to this person .. .]

Would suggest pointing them to:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-help

Or if you want to point them straight at IRC:

#fedora on irc.freenode.org

Or if straight at a mailing list:

fedora-list@redhat.com

> Thoughts?

I'm not really on many social networks like Twitter, kind of surprised
people use them to discuss stuff like Fedora in 100 and something
characters! I'd hope that anyone who uses them and sees something like
this would do exactly what you've just done and try to point them in
the right direction, not sure there's anyway we can formalise this.
Unless someone wants to do something like start monitoring #tags?

Jon

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