Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time

35 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

Gathering Market Information

On September 5, 2008 at 11:49 a.m. Pacific Time, Lee

Chisholm posted a message to Twitter: “Oooh, found

a duplicate transaction on Wesabe. Not cool. :O( .”

Wesabe

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is a personal finance site that uses Twitter to

communicate with customers in a number of ways, and

CEO Marc Hedlund keeps a close eye on Twitters about his

company (using http://search.twitter.com and @ replies

to the Wesabe account, http://twitter.com/wesabe).

On that September morning, when he saw Lee

Chisholm’s message, Hedlund asked his engineers

whether they already knew about the problem. They

didn’t. So he asked them to look into it, and he posted a

message on the Wesabe Twitter page about the problem.

“Most of the time people are so happy to get a

response, they’re surprised,” Hedlund says. “Like Comcast,

people don’t think anybody’s listening. So the moment

I say, ‘I’m listening,’ they’re like, ‘Wow, this is great.’”

Hedlund notes that often, the first post from a customer

will be “incredibly nasty,” but when he responds in a

polite way, the customer will reply with an embarrassed

and friendly note of their own.

Lee Chisholm wasn’t nasty, but he was complaining

when he posted about Wesabe’s duplicate trans actions.

His response that afternoon after realizing he’d been

heard? “Thank you @Grooveshark and @Wesabe for

monitoring Twitter. It’ ...