Subscribe & Follow
Advertise your job vacancies
Trending
Show more
Getting intimate (with customers) on Twitter
Depending on whom you ask, Twitter is either an inane waste of time or a brilliant communications coup. For those in customer service, it can prove to be truly amazing - a way to keep in direct contact with customers without any other distractions.
Twitter didn't do much for Ricardo Guerrero at first. In March 2007, the new tool was getting rave reviews from social media aficionados at the South by Southwest interactive media festival in Austin, Texas.
Guerrero considered this tiny new tool du jour very limited, at least from his perspective as a marketer of refurbished Dell products. No one was in control. Conversations started in the middle and trailed off to nowhere in particular. If he wanted to direct messages to "targets," they were free to "unfollow" or "block" him out. All messages were restricted to tiny teaspoons of text, no longer than 140 characters in length. Much of the chat was mundane reports on lunch, weather, or bedtime nighty-nights.
Guerrero nevertheless thought Twitter had a certain engaging charm. So with a few friends he started playing around on the nascent technology that was being offered for free from a podcast technology startup formerly called Odeo.
