Sweet Tweet: What’s Twitter Good For?

September 15, 2008 | Written by

The first time I considered that Twitter might be useful was back in April, when James Karl Buck tweeted his way out of Egyptian jail (CNN).

Pretty useful!

I also think it will be useful in feeding these blog posts to RF Darius, and some of my colleagues tweet (especially in the UK), and a couple of my clients tweet, but I’m not sure how useful any of them have found it to be.

Below are five categories in which I think Twitter was/is/will be most useful:

• Breaking News: During the last Los Angeles earthquake in July, a tweet beat the AP by 12 minutes to break the news. Not sure how useful (safe) it is to Twitter in an earthquake or a hurricane, but airlines like SouthWest and JetBluehave usefully pointed followers to their dedicated Hurricane Ike pages. AA, Virgin America, and Delta seem to still be testing it out (United, Northwest, and US Airways don’t have Twitter pages to speak of yet).
• Content Quest: The staff over at PR Week occasionally pings their followers for leads (especially during summer). Judging from the "@" replies, Twitter = useful. CNN’s Don Lemon, and Rick Sanchez have used Twitter on air and shared viewer feedback. Sanchez even did a whole show using social networks (or are they social media….or social utilities?) to tell the news. Not sure this will be a lasting trend, but it seems to be a useful outlet for opinionated people.
• Feeding: Not only does this blog have a feed to Twitter, so do NYT, WSJ, and the FT, among many others and their reporters. Following them on Twitter can sometimes be more convenient than using a feed reader. Especially when you get instant updates to your phone.
• Bragging Rights: not to get political, but according to Twitterholic, Barack Obama has the most followed Twitter account with over 70,000 followers. John McCain, not so much.
• Customer Service: Comcast, has a customer service guy who seems pretty on the ball with responding to questions/complaints, but this tweetimplies a stressful life for him.

As corporations and their PR departments adopt new communication tools more rapidly, will they get ahead of themselves?

I think there’s real potential for senior executives to be thought leaders on Twitter (Zappos.com), but BusinessWeek thinks that Twitter + corporations = creepy and distractive. BusinessWeek did get some use out of Twitter when they rewrote their "Beyond Blogs" article, but there are a few other companies out there that seem to be quite confused: eTrade, Pepsi, Dell.

Will Twitter ever be used successfully as a corporate communications platform?

Will Yammer become Twitter’s LinkedIn to Facebook?

**UPDATE 1**
NPR on Twitter for customer service:
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/09/16/pm_twitter/

**UPDATE 2**
Twitter co-founder on why Twitter will not replace traditional media:
http://www.iwantmedia.com/people/people75.html

**UPDATE 3**

Extensive Mashable article on the prospects of corporate tweeting:

http://mashable.com/2008/09/30/enterprise-microblogging/