Twitter: The True Voice of the Customer on the Web

When it comes to delivering information about products and services and getting instant customer feedback, the hottest tool out there right now is Twitter. Twitter is the micro-communication service that gives users an opportunity to express their thoughts in 140-character "tweets". It s a big hit in the social media world, and many companies are benefiting from it.

In fact, 20 percent of all tweets now contain requests for product information or responses to the requests. In ads, many companies now display the logo of an animated blue bird holding a sign that says follow me.

According to Associate Professor Jim Jansen, at Penn State University, People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with products and services.
And he goes on to say that "tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services".

Jansen's research team investigated microcommunicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. The results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology. The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study, looking for tweets that mentioned a brand and why the brand was mentioned, and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.

With more than six million active users daily, and predictions of more than 20 million users by the end of 2009, Twitter is now seen as the "next big thing" on the Web. Even though Twitter is still in its early stages of adoption, businesses are starting to make profits from it, using it in creative ways to market their products. Jansen's study is among the first in the area of micro-communication within the business sector. And the research team is now conducting a focused study specifically on how companies manage and use their Twitter accounts.

Ricoh Innovation's WBR (Web Business Research) group is actively "tweeting" to attract users to its beta software trials. WBR is also monitoring Tweets that include the word "Ricoh" to capture the voice of Ricoh's current customers.

Information Source: businessbriefings.com October 2009 issue