I have been on twitter myself since 2008 and have both good & bad responses from companies who sort of all jumped on the twitter bandwagon thinking they could shout out their message in a one way stream without responding to feedback.

I have had a personal experience when I began tweting about an bad experience with @Sprint , not from the tag itself but from someone who knoew someone pretty high up at @Sprint who was on Twitter and they got wind of my rant. My issue was solved the following day and I received a folow phone call from an elevated level quality assurance person to review my issues and confirm they were addressed. For my this was astounding that my voice had traveled that far , that fast.

In another event, one of my followers expressed on twitter how upset she was when her Father died suddenly & she was having difficulty finding a way to get a bereavement fare on Delta Airlines. I began tweeting about that & was responded to in a few short minutes by a tag called @DeltaAssist . There were 2 occasions following that event that I directed my followers to try that tag directly.

These comapnies have been slow to understand it is a new game. I am aware that @Rubbermaid is responsive because as a longhaul truck driver I have picked up & delived loads for @rubbermaid as weel as their competitor “Sterilite” who I wish was on twitter because I have plenty to say about how they handle their Shipping & Receiving departments.

One of the slowest industries to adpat to Twittter & Social Media over all is the trucking industry which came onto Twitter like gangbusters thinking they could just tweet their false ads as they have been able to do through other media channels without reprecussions.

My personal mission was to go head to head with them & expose how they were misreprenting the truth expressly to lure people into an industry that has been compared to “Sweatshops on Wheels” by a book author name Michael Belzer and this is accurate for many of these carriers who came on twitter and for the most part have now let their tags fall silent as more and more real drivers have entered twitter to challange their false claims.

We have had very good interaction though with the truck stop chain @PilotTravel who took action after I began tweeting about a huge pothole in the driveway of one of their locations that had the ability to cause body damage to our trucks or at least shoft our freight and damaging that. This applies to many of the comapanies you list here because in fact, it is the truckers who pick up the raw materials & the finished products to transport them and if the shift or are damaged enroute, we are the one held responsible in many cases.

I will use this article for my marketing research paper because twitter is a valuable tool to hear what is going on. Those who say twitter is not important…. well , they just don’t understand what they VALUE is of listening.

Kudos to the Chicago Law School folks and to Zappos…Great work!!