The Journal of Rockett Science

David Armano, VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass, recently posted a blog entry about how Zappos and Southwest Airlines are using Twitter to interact with consumers. Great stuff:

• In addition to linking to company blog posts and promotions, SouthwestAir (787 followers) sends nice messages to customers who mention Southwest on Twitter, and responds to their suggestions.
• The Twitter account for Zappos (1,974 followers) is used by the CEO, and features daily lightning-quick contests. (Posted on Saturday at 6 PM: “Twitter @zappos with your favorite non-shoe brand that we sell on Zappos before 610 pacific, I will pick a winner to get all 3.”)
  • Currently 79 other Zappos employees are posting on Twitter. Zappos displays all of the public Twitter talk about the company on its Web site.

After reading Armano’s post I discovered that GMBlogs also has a Twitter account (288 followers). Like Zappos and Southwest, they’re using it to engage people in conversation: Nearly all of their updates are either open questions for everyone, or public responses to individuals. Even when posting a link to a press release they ask, “What do you think?”

I’m guessing that these companies are using RSS feeds from TweetScan, a Twitter keyword search site, to spot whenever someone mentions them on Twitter and react. For example, here’s a TweetScan search for “Turbo Chicken”.