Twitter is being put to innovative uses on a daily basis. It is a fantastic way to collect group information very quickly.  I just found a great example from the US Geological Survey. The project allows people to report Earthquake tremors … in this way data can be collected in real time from a huge number of onsite reporters i.e. anyone with a mobile phone!

You can see how this can be generalised to many crisis situations. I was once involved in developing a flood warning system. One of the problems was quickly sharing the information about the ongoing situation.  Nowadays a twitter client would be the obvious solution. These are applications that could save lives!

Recently Twitter has been making the agenda in other ways. A recent case in the uk involved a video that was posted of a London Underground employee being abusive to an elderly customer. The video went viral on Twitter and made the local evening news. The employee was suspended. Three days ago a  Twitter campaign  against an article in the daily mail online resulted in all the adverts being pulled from the page in under twelve hours

Of course this is the stuff of political campaigning and people have been taking this sort of action for years. However what is really special about both these examples is the speed of response that comes via word of mouth messages.

For businesses the take home message from these examples is probably that we can use this speed to our advantage too! It is relatively easy to set up a monitoring system to check for any mentions of our company out in the online world. This puts the organization in an excellent position to manage quick responses to your clients. At SociaLNK we have seen many examples where this makes a real difference. There is nothing like a well managed response to build your reputation!