Om and Frank Eliason of Comcast

Om and I met Wednesday night with Frank Eliason of Comcast, better known as the person behind @comcastcares. Eliason is a genuinely cool guy who started out as the person solely responsible for handling Comcast complaints on Twitter, and who now has a staff of 10. Each day, he and his staff look over some 10,000 blog posts, handle countless tweets — and then seek to do something about any problems.

Since he’s such a Twitter power user, I asked him what his favorite applications for the micromessaging site were. He said the original Twitter web site is his favorite, but he’s also a fan of Simply Tweet on his iPhone because he likes the push notifications. PeopleBrowsr, an app that helps businesses mine information from Twitter, is another one he uses heavily. As for CoTweet, which is in the news right now for charging businesses $1,500 a month to find information on the service, he said he wasn’t initially a fan, but that ever since the company has modified the application to keep track of conversations between two users over time, he’s been turning to it more frequently. The ubiquitous TweetDeck isn’t something Eliason uses, but he says some of his staff love it.

Our conversation was brief as he had to rush off to meet some of his Comcast customers (he notified them of his presence in San Francisco via Twitter) — a reminder that while online interactions are a nice way to initiate relationships, face-to-face meetings are still necessary to cement them.