I was on PBS Marketplace this morning talking about Twitter with technology & entrepreneur reporter Mitchell Hartman. We were discussing the future of Twitter and how it is moving into directions that is not obvious to many just yet. Here are a few quotes from the clip:

“Rodney Rumford is author of the book “Twitter as a Business Tool”: Programmers could find a way to tie into the machine-language level and interface that with real-world, let’s call them “life-hack” type of devices. This means machines communicating with other machines, plants or animals communicating with us. It also means we can interact with the computers that crunch all the data being collected every minute on Twitter.”

“Rumford says Twitter is allowing us to create new social intelligence about ourselves at breakneck speed. They’ve really developed the tube, if you will, for this data to flow through. And an easy tube to plug into. Rumford’s favorite new toy: a GPS mapping program that tracks fellow-tweeters in real-time so you can go meet them for drinks or a movie. If you can put your cell phone down that long.”

Have a listen to the audio clip from the radio program.

You can grab the full show notes and resources mentioned over at Marketplace:

As an interesting side note. The PBS reporter Mitchell Hartman @entrepreneurguy live tweeted his highlights from the show as it aired live on the radio. (we were both up at 3:49am Pacific Time for this)

Pepsi has done what smart brands will be doing in the future. Get out of the way and let the experience happen. Anything that a brand can do that puts them in the middle of facilitation, connection, conversations and exposing people with similar interests can be a powerful brand and marketing experience.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible in creating a unique branded experience that leverages the Twitter API and content for companies. The possibilities are endless. Creative ideation needs to take place to ensure that a compelling experience can be created that aligns with a brands core values and customers. We have service offerings that will create compelling experiences for brands and companies. Consumer brands and the entertainment industry needs to pay close attention.

Contact me and we can help your brand in these types of branded endeavors.

See what Pepsi had to say about what they were doing in Social Media at SXSW.

Screw the phone…  I tweet for customer service. I came across this video from Fox Chicago on how Twitter users are going to Twitter FIRST for customer service and support and completely bypassing calling traditional help channels such as phone support. The point that brands and businesses need to take away is the fact that people are going to twitter for customer service and expecting interactions ans resolution from the brands via Twitter.

Twitter for customer service and support is but one of many use cases of Twitter as a business tool. It just happens to be a piece of low hanging fruit in the twittersphere. I know that I tweeted @starbucks because I could not find out how many weight watchers points were in a mocha frappicino while I was trying to lose weight . They responded and tweeted me where I could find the information, nice! So is your company there?

What is the best interaction that you have seen via twitter for customer service or support? Please leave a comment.
This video is calling Twitter the cyber complaint window. Indeed.

I can say with certainty that Twitter is aiming for the mainstream. They are trying to move past the early adopters and heavy tech users. Why do I say this? Well just a few hours ago Twitter has started to “educate” their users with word definitions for words such as “Widget”. They started showing these word definitions on the home page of users profiles with short “Simple Simon” types of descriptions.

A widget in the simplest of terms is a self contained mini-data delivery device for web site content. They allow content to be distributed to multiple sites in a compact size. In the case of Twitter it allows your latest tweets to be displayed on your website or blog by simply cutting and pasting a code snippet.

Here is an example of a live twitter widget. Put one on your site and users will see your latest tweets as well as number of followers.

Here is a short video interview where Jeremiah Owyang who is an analyst at Forrester Research asked me “what is a widget” about 18 months ago. We talk a bit about facebook, but the concepts fully apply.