Posted by Tom Krengel
on 05/08/09
Twitter is often dismissed by "serious webizens" as gimicky, and little more than a collection of musings by limelight starved chatters, but like me you may discover that it can actually be put to work as a valuable support resource for personal or business use.
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Twitter has captured a lot of media coverage lately as it seems everyone from politicians to entertainers to writers and editors of popular media and mainstream journals are all "tweeting". Because so many of us are still trying to wrap our arms around the concept and best uses, we see it most often characterized as a site for sharing ideas as well as the omnipresent status updates, “At a sidewalk cafe, sipping a latte.”
But what if Twitter was used to solve a very real support issue?
A friend of mine recently ran into a problem with a client application failing to run because it required that Internet Explorer 5.5 or later be installed. The oddity is that his computer was was already running IE 7.
We poked around a little and found that Internet Explorer was missing its version information. And we knew enough to know that missing version information causes problems.
Even though a click of the IE help menu displayed the IE 7 splash screen, the necessary version information was not present. Without the browser version number, neither Windows nor other applications can confirm that it’s a compatible browser.
Before going through the motions and hassle of removing and then reinstalling the browser we opted to source the Internet for a solution. I spent a bit of time on Google and posted in a few favorite newsgroups and forums, but nothing immediately presented itself as a solution.
The my friend suggested posting a tweet on Twitter. Within a few hours I received a tweets with suggested help and advice from several "followers", one in particular with a link to a document online that had our solution. As soon as we followed the steps outlined, and restarted his computer, the client application installed properly and he was up and running.
Sure, Twitter has been tagged as a “social” network — and you may not immediately think of it as a business resource — but my experience tells me it is much more than a means of social interaction and can be of tremendous value in sourcing information for business use. It's millions of users have hundreds of millions of opinions, ideas, advice, and yes, resources to share. Like me you may benefit when you tap into that breadth of combined resources and knowledge.
So the next time you have a question or dilemma like the one I described (whether it is business related or not), give your Twitter followers a crack at it, you may just find that the answer - comes to you!
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