The travel chaos caused by the failure of Eurostar’s trains this weekend has highlighted a major corporate failing with regard to social media.

Eurostar is one of a growing number of big companies which understands the value of social networking sites as a marketing channel. It has a presence on Twitter, which it uses to tweet special offers and update information.

But where was it on Friday, when thousands of passengers were stuck in tunnels for hours? It was passengers who were tweeting furiously to explain their predicament, beg for information and rage against the company that had so spectacularly let them down.

As BusinessZone.co.uk editor Dan Martin points out, Eurostar was absent. A PR crisis management plan that made full use of social media should have sprung into action, but it did not respond for 48 hours. Only subsequently did it start using its Twitter feed to provide updates, and its CEO Richard Brown went on YouTube to apologise.

Martin concludes:

“The biggest lesson is that customers don’t know (or care about) the difference between marketing and customer service feeds. All they want is answers and the company needs to provide them. The prevalence of mobile phones and other devices means that the power is in the hands of the customer and they can provide instant feedback no matter where they are.”

The success of the “Rage Against the X Factor” campaign to stop X-Factor winner Joe McElderry grabbing the Christmas number one pop single spot, is more evidence of social media’s effectiveness in getting a message across.

Set up a Facebook group and give people a good reason for joining in – in this case the desire to stuff the annoying Simon Cowell in his onward march to world domination – and you can have a mass movement on your hands. It wasn’t long before the campaign had spread to other social networking sites like Twitter, MySpace, and Bebo. The final push is said to have come from Twitter, where comedian Peter Serafinowicz told his quarter million followers to buy the single.

A lesson for businesses is that, to work well, there needs to be a good hook, something that engages the emotions. The message needs to be different and engaging, and ideally have some aim that people can feel they are contributing to. That way, there’s an incentive for them to pass the word on to their friends, and give the campaign maximum exposure.

The emergence of sophisticated data analysis was perhaps the biggest single development in marketing in the past fifteen years. The ability for a company to mine its own data, and enrich it with external data bought from other organisations, meant it could precisely identify and target potential buyers.

One of the leaders in business analytics software is SAS, which is now turning its attention to social media. It’s a challenge, though. Obtaining and analysing information about individual consumers – their demographics, interests, purchasing history and so on – is complex but do-able, as you are dealing with facts and numbers. But how on earth do you analyse something as nuanced as what people are saying about you in informal conversations?

Not that there’s any shortage of tools that purport to do this. Products such as Twitfeel, Twendz and Twitrratr use a variety of methods and approaches – text mining, natural language processing and sentiment analysis technology – to create a consumer’s-eye view of a company.

SAS’s Jennifer Major argues in a new article that sentiment analysis, though still in its infancy, is the way forward.

‘The simplest algorithms work by scanning keywords to categorise a statement as positive or negative based on simple binary analysis (‘love’ is good ‘hate’ is bad). However, such an approach fails to capture the subtleties that bring human language to life: irony, sarcasm, slang and other idiomatic expressions. Social media, which are by nature dynamic and based on unstructured forms of information, do not fit neatly into traditional database-driven analytics systems. You need reliable sentiment analysis capabilities that require the ability to understand many linguistic shades of grey.’

This sort of technology is going to become increasingly vital as social media’s impact on marketing grows. Major’s piece is worth reading in order to get a sense of what’s involved.

And any business that is serious about getting good data on its social media imprint could do worse than get in touch with SAS to see what it can offer.

The fact that search engines like Google are now incorporating tweets into search is a real game changer for brands and companies.

You might once have dismissed someone tweeting by saying ‘Oh, they have only got 20 followers.’ Now that no longer holds, because the results are coming up on a Google search.

To understand what this means in practice, read this interesting piece where experiments were carried out to see what impact using Twitter would have on research results in Google, and the implications for brands.

This development underlines the need for social media participation strategies. Focusing on static newspapers and magazines is no longer enough for companies who are concerned about managing their reputations. Equally, this presents some great opportunities for smart companies to use social media tools cleverly as a means to raise brand awareness and drive traffic to their sites.