I’ve recently been participating in conversations around how to select the most appropriate social network for your business. There are a lot of options out there. Should I create a Facebook application for product/customer specific networking? Jive and Leverage both have attractive UIs. Should we build our own?
One thing is certain. Engaging your customer community and embracing transparency will ultimately fuel your business and make your customers feel heard. Long gone are the days in which a company could spit out a product and not listen to feedback (unless you are Apple). You need to give your community the opportunity to engage with one another and share their opinions on what you’re contributing to your market, or else risk a coup. One should think of the platform as a giant suggestion box.
Mapping the social graph on to the web is a delicate thing. We are social creatures and when selecting which social network is most appropriate to strengthen your brand one needs to take into consideration the community’s intention; i.e. if I use Facebook for personal use, what value does it have in a B2B market? What is the shelf life of this thing? What do my users want to accomplish when using our social network?
With the advent of technology, transparency is crucial. You must give your community the opportunity to engage with one another and give good, bad and ugly observations on your company. Grin and bear the fire hose of information that cannot be ignored 
You are making the assumption that all companies care about personal comments of the few that have enough time to “tweet” or “comment” on their products. Large corporations (Fortune 500) don’t factor in “overly verbose individuals comments” into their product roadmap planning cycle… While it is self-gratifying to think your opinion counts, it really doesn’t. The all mighty dollar and portfolio positioning against competition is what will steer future product devl0pment at large firms.
Unless there is significant financial “miss” for a program… large corporations won’t look to social networking sites to determine product development changes. Only in desperation would a competent team look to the general public for insight. Most of society that takes the time to document their opinion is either overly aggravated by a service failure or is just an overly critical person that has too much time on their hands.
I particularly like your picture in this post… it accurately represents the opinions of individuals at large companies.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Josh, although I disagree with your point on documenting opinions.
Twitter is what you make it. You can let people know what you ate for breakfast, rant, rave or market a product. As the number of users grow, Twitter has evolved from just status updates to a two-way communication platform in the mainstream’s conscience. Look around. Everything has a hashtag. Whatever you seek to Tweet about, there’s a very good chance there’s a hastag created for that particular purpose.
I also wanted to highlight Comcast’s Twitter monitoring efforts around customer service: http://snurl.com/rycaz
The feedback sourced from social tools on the web might not fit into the initial product road map, but feedback on professional services is always valuable to improve quality and customer satisfaction.