I’ve gone on record as being a little dismissive of the utility of Twitter, this despite the fact that I was a reasonably early
adopter of it and use it pretty frequently.
I posted the other day about a nice service that uses both
Twitter and more traditional electronic communication channels (if that isn’t a
slightly oxymoronic statement) to ease the information gathering process between
public relations people and journalists.
In a vaguely similar vein, over on FreshBooks they’ve taken what would have been a long involved
project for a marketing person, and turned it on its head using crowd sourcing
via Twitter. Just the other day I was discussing the difficulty of getting
customer testimonials with some people. The person who was describing the
problem they’re having is the founder/CEO of a company doing back-end services
for e-commerce – they’re a hugely successful company with some big name
clients…. that unfortunately they’re having a hard time crowing about.
It seems their direct contacts are happy to provide a testimonial, but
getting one created through traditional means involves communication at many
different levels of the corporate ladder.
FreshBooks approach was to tweet a message asking for testimonials from
customers – mere minutes later they had a bunch they could use on their
website.
I believe that this sort of process could be extended – it’s understandable
that corporate communications will want to be involved when a long winded
endorsement is needed for an outside contractor – but what about using Twitter
to aggregate short testimonials for direct contacts within client companies?
Anyone out there utilised microblogging for this sort of function? We’d love
to hear your stories…
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Hey Ben! Thanks for this. We’ve definitely found Twitter to be a pretty useful tool for keeping in touch with our customers at FreshBooks. I understand your hesitance to use it in a business sense, though. My whole family thinks I’m nuts ; )
Rayanne Langdon — Marketing Coordinator, FreshBooks.com