Twitter – Maximizing its Potential for Business
Twitter.com, as we’ve said, is the tactic of zeitgeist. It’s the technological equivalent of haiku: tiny fragments that stimulate immediate interest in a greater picture.
Done right, Twitter is potent marketing technology. With a maximum message of 140 characters, Twitter miniblogs (known’s as ‘Tweets’) can be used to let followers know about a new blog on a company’s website or to alert loyal customers of sales and other incentive offers. Ultimately, it is a medium that can serve many business functions.
But there’s a flip side to Twitter that offers just as big an opportunity as the push of Tweets– and that’s the pull. By using any one or more of a number of Twitter applications, the service provides a tremendous opportunity for businesses to use Twitter both as an early warning system andas a listening post to what their customers are thinking and feeling. With the detonation of Twitter as a messaging service, the information is thick on the ground - waiting to be found and mined.
One of the most legendary stories of how Twitter enabled a company to respond in real time to a customer is that of Michael Arrington and his problems with his Internet provider, Comcast. Customer service had not been successful at resolving Arrington’s outage, but his angry Tweets soon got an executive’s attention – and successful action.
By monitoring Twitter through a service like Tweetscan, a business can nip problems in the bud – heading off a larger issue while creating a reputation for being responsive. This makes Twitter a doubly powerful tool for business.
