HootSuite, Get Satisfaction Tighten IntegrationHootSuite, Get Satisfaction Tighten Integration

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One of the first apps to integrate with the HootSuite social media monitoring dashboard is getting an upgrade for deeper integration.

Get Satisfaction is refreshing its contribution to the HootSuite App Directory, turning it from a relatively simple feed into a more sophisticated plugin. The first level of app integration HootSuite introduced allowed third-party products and services to display their feeds on the HootSuite dashboard, alongside feeds from Twitter and Facebook. HootSuite plugins have more ways of connecting to other feeds.

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In the case of Get Satisfaction, its app originally allowed HootSuite users to monitor and respond to discussions in Get Satisfaction customer communities. The addition of plugin functionality will make it easier to answer questions or comments from social media contacts using content from a Get Satisfaction community. Or, if a social media contact is raising an issue that hasn't been addressed previously, the social post can be used to create a new topic in Get Satisfaction. This can be done for comments classified as praise or new ideas, as well as questions and complaints. Even if a social media contact doesn't join the Get Satisfaction community, community managers can ask the participants there to be a sounding board and help inform better a response on social media.

HootSuite sees this as a way of helping its customers integrate social media with customer service processes without the need to log into multiple applications and switch between them.

Earlier this week, both HootSuite and Get Satisfaction announced integrations with Yammer. HootSuite's integration with Yammer does not yet include plugin-style integration.

Get Satisfaction CEO Wendy Lea said she wants to increase the value of her own product by partnering with leaders in adjacent software categories. "HootSuite has become a real standard," as an affordable social media management tool, she said.

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Social media make the customer more powerful than ever. Here's how to listen and react. Also in the new, all-digital The Customer Really Comes First issue of The BrainYard: The right tools can help smooth over the rough edges in your social business architecture. (Free registration required.)