More and more businesses are starting to not only monitor mentions of their brands on Twitter, but also responding to customers. This weekend I was interviewed for an article in the Toronto daily the Star, which covered that topic. The paper that is referenced in the article can be found on SlideShare and is also mentioned in this blog post, headlined “Broadcaster, Curator & Conversationalist: How businesses use Twitter”.
Isn’t there a fourth twitter category – which, for lack of a better term, I will call a Lurker – that is, a company that monitors its twitter feeds and tweets to customers in response to reported customer problems, without really interacting much on twitter itself? The Star article references this directly – where the writer was on hold and tweeted about the problem for an immediate response (not that that business model scales all that well, mind you…)
Hi Rob, thanks, you have a point there, that there are companies that are mostly listening to Twitter. I guess that some of them that do act on the information and talk to their customers offline, still have a degree of “conversationalists” to them. But yes, Lurkers may be a fourth category and I guess quite a few companies fit into this category. It’s just that we don’t notice them.