B2T (Business to Twitter)
I was reading an article on Spend Matters, by Jason Busch, and I had an idea. Jason was writing about Twitter entering the B2B Mainstream. Now to be honest I had heard about Southwest’s proactive use of twitter to monitor and shape how their customer experience was being perceived. And like many things with Southwest’s business, I find it to be touched with brilliance. So as I read about it, I was suddenly struck with a much deeper way that twitter and twitter like technologies could be used.
Initial Idea for B2T
First, I need to explain the background of the idea. I know that not everyone on twitter is, er, human. Yep, we have “people” that are not real flesh and blood on twitter, tweeting away about what they are doing and why you should visit their site, or buy their product. Shocking I know, but some of them have quite a large following. (other twitter bots I think)
So then I thought, (again, in context to the airline example that Jason was blogging about), “Hey, what if I could follow a flight on twitter? Then I could know when it was due to arrive! When it had landed! And where to meet my buddy in baggage claim!” (Yes, I think with lots of exclamation marks.) But I still think this is a cool idea. Each tweet could have a short statement about the flight status and a link to the airline’s page for people that needed to look up more about it.
Okay, then I had my second thought about how to use this. You see so far I was still thinking, “customer service by managing the twiterverse” which is fine, I am a customer expecting good service as well. But then I put this together with another connection. “What about Order notifications?”
B2T Expanded to Supply Chain
This is where Jason mentions a supplier monitoring their reputation and customer attitudes by following Southwest’s example. But I thought, “What if Dell, let me follow my order on twitter? I could know when it was shipped! When it would arrive! And even know updates like delays, or arriving early!” (Again, I think with lots of exclamations.)
Have worked on supply chain systems that sent out many email notifications. Some users liked these, and some didn’t. Using a twitter model, a user/customer could follow the orders or processes that were important to them on a case by case basis. BPM could be followed in the same fashion. And so forth, just by clicking on the follow like on the checkout confirmation page or equivalent.
What do you think?
What are other ways that you can integrate twitter with e-commerce, B2B, or Supply Chains? I want to know your ideas. And also, what do we call this? (“B2T”, “B2Tweet”, “BtweeB”, etc)
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