more uses of twitter: San Francisco Customer Service

Here’s another story about Twitter that isn’t just another celebrity to follow.

The city of San Francisco now allows you to send a message via twitter to their 311 service – a service that allows you to contact the city about a number of things including complaints and inquiries.

What will make this interesting is seeing the data – opening up the data and allowing everyone to see the issues going in and the responses coming back.  This is sunshine government at its best.

Of course the system isn’t quite that open just yet, but one can hope.

More Twitter use – Going to a concert?

Here’s another great use of Twitter.

Jimmy Eat World has a special web page that collects all Twitter data (ok.. tweets) that are relevant to each of their tour dates.

What this means, is that a fan can post a tweet (following a pre-defined format) and their post will show up on the web site.  They can additionally subscribe to the tweets, keeping up-to-date with what all of the other concert-goers are saying.  It’s a pretty cool idea of taking a public event, which actually tends to be not particularly interactive when you think about it, and adds a level of community that hasn’t existed in the past.  I mean, when was the last time that you really interacted with someone else going to a concert – either before or during (remember, you can tweet from your cell, posting updates during the performance).  If they weren’t one of your friends that you were going with, you probably had very limited interaction (besides synchronized arm waving that is).

Now think of the marketing opportunity – there’s a page with all of the people who are into this concert with a really easy way to communicate to them – and some of them aren’t even going because the shows are selling out *(need tickets?  .. boy, too bad I’m not still working at StubHub – there’s another opportunity they’ll never take advantage of)*

The more I’m checking out Twitter the more I’m impressed.

photo courtesy “Scamp” from the Jimmy Eat World website