MediaJoltz

Sitting watching the premier of Pushing Daisies last night (we have a friend who did all the 3d composite shots and wanted to show support) I saw a commercial from Orbitz that I have seen often-the person with the floating circle above their heads giving them updates on their travel arrangements. But this time something caught my attention-it said travel updates by real people!!

I had to go check this out. Orbitz, as of September performed an upgrade to their “Traveler Updates” program where now, you get the updates to any selected airport made by real people. Very similar to the set-up twitter has, someone writes about a topic ranging from security line, check-in, traffic-and it gets sent to you as an alert.

Orbitz even called it a community on the commercial. I think this is a great idea and that more companies could follow. You don’t even have to set up a new website or your own alert system. You could simply get an account with twitter.

Now when I mention twitter to some company owner I usually get the weird look like “isn’t that just a social communication thing like IM where people write useless updates about their day?” Well that depends on who you subscribe to. And while Orbitz isn’t using twitter, it is the same idea-and I think it can be useful in several different applications.

The Today Show has joined twitter and posts links to the video segments of their news shows. Thanks to Jim Long because now I only have to find the one that interests me and watch it instead of sitting through a whole show just to get one segment.

A laundry room at a college has a twitter account and updates how many washers and dryers are available.

The Los Angeles Fire Department uses twitter to inform of accidents on the road-which could help you avoid traffic if the radio doesn’t pick it up immediately as well as any other incidents that they are called to respond too. Interesting use of Twitter and they have 300+ people following them.

I use twitter a ton. I use it to keep up with friends, to gather information-it came in very handy when a friend Jesse Stay gave us play by play action on the BYU vs NM game while I was flying back from PME. I wish there was a BYU tweeter on so then all of Jesse’s non-byu fans wouldn’t get mad at him.

Right now I get updates on my phone about the weather in my area. But I only get it once a day. What if I was traveling? Sure I can check online or watch the weather channel, but I think it would be cooler if I got real time updates from people. What if the weather channel allowed for people of their area to post a weather report throughout the day so then I can get real time updates. A 40% chance of rain-well did it rain that day with 40%?

So how can a company use twitter? I want to forward you on to a great post by PR-Squared on an interesting way a Pharmaceutical company can use twitter and hopefully it can get your mind working on ideas too.

PR-Squared’s “Social Media Tactics” Series…Using Twitter to Create & Inform Communities