Image by Choconancy1 via Flickr

You hear kind & loving voices on the boutique stereo speakers. Video from the CEO is playing telling you about the boutique, and all the wonderful things you’ll find there. You listen, and you’re entranced.

The visuals are heavenly and soothing, too…and just look! As you walk around, you see products from other women you recognize, or would like to get to know better, at least.

You’re so engaged, so impelled by the magnitude and quality of products at this boutique, you feel compelled to give kudos to management. So you search around a bit to find someone who works at the boutique.

No one yet.

You search a bit more.

Maybe if you open this door…Nothing.

Then it hits you. You’re there all by yourself in this huge boutique! Why aren’t there any sales people here, you wonder? You’d like to buy something here.

But wait! Did someone call your name? Yes! But it sounds very distant. You walk toward the sound and you find that it’s the owner. She’s calling to you from outside the store. She wants to talk to you. You tell her you were just inside enjoying the boutique, but she insists on talking to you outside of her lovely boutique. In fact, she prefers to talk to you from a competitor’s store!

Can you feel the frustration of this potential customer?

This may seem like the beginning to a short fiction story, but it’s a scenario I see carried out all to often with new social networks and online communities. The community manager of a new or recently updated social network community oftentimes prefers to chat with community members outside of the community entirely. Any contact with customers take place at other communities like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…all great networks, but competitors for your customer’s time. If your community manager is spending more time on these networks than your own, then your community is suffering.

In a recent Online Community Culture Survey, one of the top 5 most influential factors listed in a community’s culture was participation by the Host. And as women in social networks, this study agrees wholeheartedly with our viewpoints about the kind of networks we feel connected to. Network execs that instruct their community managers to pump out editorial information, then leave the brand community and convene elsewhere, yet expect community users to somehow feel connected with them have their heads buried in the sand.

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Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand — but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

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