Using Twitter as a real time business sales & marketing service

Pat Phelan is bored out of his skull waiting for his flight at the fancy new Heathrow Terminal 5. How do I know? He Twittered this. Well, an enterprising person at Boingo Wireless (also using Twitter) decided to use his/her initiative and make Pat an offer of a free wifi pass:

Twitter / Pat: Best ever use of Twitter fo…

Best ever use of Twitter for business @boingo saw that I was delayed in Heathrow and offered me a free wifi logon, really cool

Very, very, VERY smart marketing.

Which reminds me of this Crisp Wireless blog post I read (discussing Twitter) from a few days ago:

Evan Neufeld from M:Metrics explained recently that mobile is about creating multi modal access in a world where mass marketing is dying

I can’t wait to be able to Twitter with Vodafone. Or T-Mobile. I can’t begin to imagine just how much cash I’d spent with some companies if they deployed different methods of interacting with me. For example I was in the Vodafone store today nosing around to see how much it would be to add a Blackberry to my account. I couldn’t actually work it out. About 18 quid a month, I reckon. But I couldn’t work it out from the brochures and I didn’t want to take a ticket and talk to a sales person at that point. I’m ready to buy, now. Particularly since I just spent a whopping amount of cash with them. But I’m not ready to go out and actively purchase at the moment. It’s not such a critical issue for me. Ergo that 18 quid per month for 18 months (324 pounds) remains unspent. I’m someone from Vodafone calls, texts, twitters or instant messages me in the next 30 minutes, I’ll buy.

Otherwise, I’ll recognise that what I should do to solve my Blackberry issue is to go and buy one on eBay and use my existing tenner-a-month o2 account with it.