Now for those of you who aren’t on board yet, with how useful Social Media can be to your organisation, here’s an excellent example.

Twitter, largely regarded as the most spectacular example of social media gone mad, and which most corporations are still struggling with how it’s going to affect them, can be used to LISTEN to your audience, as well as broadcast to them.

One of our coders, Matty, just recently had this experience, and he rates it pretty highly. Matty is a compulsive Twitterer (Tweeter?) and you will generally see three or four Tweets from him throughout the workday.

He was expecting a replacement phone from Optus, and when it hadn’t arrived he made a post about it. (It’s the lower one, hilighted in this image.) Notice how he included the word “@Optus”? That targets the Twitter account with the name Optus, and makes sure your message shows up in their home page feed, whether they are following you or not.

What happened next?

10 minutes later Matty received a phone call from Julz, an operator at Optus’ customer service desk, and was given a live update on the status of his replacement phone, and asked if there was any other way that they could help him out. Then Julz wished him a good weekend.

Now THAT’s customer service.

And frankly, you can’t buy that kind of good  impression on a customer.

What does this tell us?

That Optus is listening. They are actively monitoring what is being said about them in the Blogosphere, and acting on what they hear. Not only does this ensure that they are giving their customers good service, but that they are making damn sure that they are part of the conversation that is going on about them.

They are actually invovled with and to some extent influencing the word of mouth that is going on out there about them. Not only is this a very smart thing to do, but it puts forward the impression that they are a forward thinking, intelligent, connected company. One of the businesses of the future.

Komosion has been helping one or two clients recently, with Twitter-based campaigns and Twitter accounts. Nothing that is live yet, so we can’t share it here. We’ve been using Twitter ourselves, though – to the extent of having a “Twitter Wall” up at both our early Christmas parties.

The “Walls” were a data projector, plugged into a laptop that constantly updated a Twitter Feed that was dedicated to our parties. The result was that anyone who knew we were having the party could send a Tweet to that wall. We got messages of cheer and celebration from our teams in the other city, apologies for not being able to make it, and posts from clients within the party saying what an excellent time they were having.

Feel free to contact us about how you can use Twitter in an inventive and effective way to open up new avanues of Digital Marketing for your company: you may be surprised how easy and successfil they can be.