Intelligently Automate Online Conversations with Zingstring

Monika Jansen Oct 3, 2011 Tweet

There are tips, lists, products, and services plastered all over the web that can help manage your online conversations, but Minneapolis-based Zingstring wants to make it even easier.  For those times when you can’t respond to tweets, posts, and emails – maybe you’re in a meeting or traveling or, you know, sleeping – they created an intuitive, web-based interface that lets all of us non-programmers put together pre-programmed conversations that are triggered by keywords in incoming messages, including Twitter, Facebook, SMS, and others.

Zingstring sets itself apart from the competition by offering multi-step conversations: a reply generates a response, which can be replied to and generate another contextual response – a  true conversation.  It was built to scale, so as you grow, it can continue to handle an ever increasing volume of conversations between you and your customers.

The founding team of James Ostheimer and Nate Kadlac sent me 2 stories to illustrate how Zingstring works in their 2 main markets of customer relations and marketing:

Scenario 1: Let’s say you’re a big company, and there is a lot of chatter on Twitter and Facebook about your customer service – both good and bad.  To keep up, you can use Zingstring instead of hiring someone (or a team!) to handle it.  Just put together conversations for the most common keywords, and you can start solving simple issues quickly while referring the tougher ones to whoever handles your customer service. As time goes on, you can improve those conversations, and keep your customers happy while protecting your online reputation.

Scenario 2: You want to build an interactive Facebook-based marketing campaign that is fun and gains “fans,” so you build a daily trivia game with prizes. Instead of spending $50k on a dev team, you can use Zingstring to pre-program a multi-step trivia game that recognizes correct answers and rewards those who win.

Pretty interesting stuff!  If you are heading to Tech Cocktail Minneapolis tomorrow night, you’ll get to meet the team and see all the cool things Zingstring does, as they are one of our showcased startups.