As a non-famous non-power twitter user, I’ve now had three interactions with companies/employees that prove to me why twitter is great.
The first time was about a year ago with AOL mail after tweeting about it’s obsolescence when I saw someone in my class using it. They responded in a hurt tone asking why I disliked it and what was wrong with it. I had never considered the possibility that the fine employees of AOL mail could actually be out there listening. Lesson #1 in not underestimating twitter? So obviously I had to go try it for myself. I was proven wrong. It is definitely a modern email app with all the features you could expect like AIM integration and calendar functions. So we tweeted back and forth a few times and they gained my respect. I might not be a user, but I’ll still defend the app to anyone. Sounds like a good strategy on their end too. In my mind the fact that as a huge company, they reached out to a small user builds their humanity and really impressed me.
Occurrence number two was a few weeks ago and was really cool, but bordering on creepy. A friend of mine tweeted to asking if another friend and I wanted to go to a sushi restaurant (Sushi Rock). I waited a while to reply, but before I did, I noticed a mention from the restaurant itself encouraging us to “say ‘yes’” to the invitation. I always forget about the search streams available in some twitter clients, so I was pretty confused for a while. It was definitely cool for the restaurant to reach out like that and basically invite us itself. It’s never something that could happen in email or facebook, so that opportunity to interact is really one of twitter‘s strong suits.
I spent some of my day yesterday exploring Daily Booth. It’s an interesting idea and I really liked watching the live stream to see how different people use it: photo stream, blog, and crowd interaction. The one problem I ran into was that I had no way to discover the people I know on the site without individually searching all of them. Impossible. Lately twitter and facebook integration have been really great ways to solve this problem and connect users with the people they know. I tweeted that I just joined and was wishing for integration, so I could find my friends. It was more in the hope that people following me on twitter would tell me if they had an account than any expectation to hear from Daily Booth. But once again, never underestimate twitter. Later that night I got a reply from someone at Daily Booth saying that those features were in the works. What better way to keep me checking back than the news that my wish may soon be granted?
The more I think about it, these interactions with users/costumers are relatively painless for companies, but gain our trust through personal interaction and a human face for the company. In all three of these instances, my interest in the companies was raised and my loyalty increased. A few minutes to gain months or years of loyalty really shouldn’t be underestimated.
