Rob La Gesse’s official title at San Antonio-based web hosting company Rackspace is Chief Disruption Officer. And he wears it with pride.

Formerly the Director of Customer Development, La Gesse earned the new title after waking up Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston in the middle of the night to address a customer complaint. For La Gesse, who joined the close-knit Rackspace team in 2008 after having been a client for seven years, customer care is a top priority, possibly even the first.

“Every company has to have someone who cares more about customers than their job,” he said.

In La Gesse’s panel, OMG, My Customer’s Pissed and Uses Twitter, he plans to focus on “the less obvious things we do on Twitter when customers are pissed.”

In addition to responding quickly to unhappy tweets, for example, La Gesse set up an email account, twitter@rackspace.com, so customers can privately explain their problem in more than 140 characters. Rackspace gets 15,000 to 25,000 mentions on Twitter per month, but La Gesse and his team love talking to people.

“Our social media plan is two words: ‘Be helpful.'” A quick look at Rackspace’s Twitter profile, @Rackspace, proves that’s true.

These are the kinds of things La Gesse plans to talk about Monday, March 14, at SXSWi. His is a one-man show — he called it a conversation — but La Gesse hinted that he may be joined by a few “A-list social media users.”

“It’s going to be a fun presentation. I’ll do something surprising; I always do.”