Coporate Social Media Done Right

Okay, I guess I cannot uphold the Twitter writing ban that Allen Stern of CenterNetworks proposed for this week ..

As many of us know, more and more companies are using Twitter as a means to reaach out to their customers.  We have seen JetBlue, Soutwest Airlines, and Comcast.  Comcast has gotten a lot of good press lately in helping out some complaining customers, to include one Michael Arrington.  I even saw this tweet earlier today form a customer fed up with their dsl and asking @comcastcares what they had to offer.

But I was not aware just how entrenched Zappos was into Twitter and using it to their advantge until I read a great post over at ReadWriteWeb.  Zappos has developed a great reputation in their customer service making some fanatical fans.  And obviously they get the fact that they can use tools like Twitter to make their service and customer outreach even better.

According to the post, Twitter has 198 of their employees on Twiiter anc very active.  Zappos has even gone so far as to dedicate an entire section of their website to Twitter.  They have one page that shows all the tweets with mentions of Zappos, a Zappos exmployee tweets page, a leaderboard of Zappos employees and how many twitter followers they have, and even a Twitter Quick Start Guide out up by their CEO, Tony Hsieh !

Other companies would do well to follow the lead of Zappos.  I am convinced it is the way of the future.  It seems the “flattening” of the world is removing some of the insulating layers between these corporations and its comsumers.  They are being forced to listen as the widespread use of tools like Twitter and blogs give the average consumer a voice that must make the old guard of these companies shutter in their corner offices.