When customers can go online and help themselves, we've always thought of this as the best kind of service there is: self-service. But social media tools have made it possible for businesses to provide an even better type of customer service: crowd-service. Companies such as SAP, Lenovo, Verizon, iRobot, and Pitney-Bowes are now using social media tools to enable some of their customers to help other customers. CustomerThink's Bob Thompson coined the term "crowd-service," a particularly descriptive and appealing label, analogous to "crowd sourcing." (You can download Thompson's white paper "Crowdservice," sponsored by RightNow, at our Web site 1to1.com.)

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Computer servers at the Climate Research Unit, based in the UK's University of East Anglia, were recently hacked. Internal email messages reveal that the scientists who were entrusted by the UN to provide the most objective view of the climate problem were actually engaged in over-hyping the dangers posed by global warming, suppressing research findings which might either cast doubt on the issue or reduce the sense of urgency, trying to discredit dissenting scientists, and even rigging the peer-review process itself, to reduce the influence of some of the more problematic research studies and scientific papers.

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