Twitter Promises To Publish Guide For Businesses


Twitter has been studying how businesses use and interact with consumers on its micro blogging site – but isn’t ready to talk about its work.

“From this research, findings, use cases, and best practices have emerged,” co-founder Biz Stone wrote Wednesday on the company’s blog. “We're putting together a document based on our studies and we'll find a spot on our web site to share it with everyone when it's ready.”

This odd announcement makes me wonder about just how useful this apparently well-meaning initiative will be. Twitter hopes to show how companies have adapted marketing and customer-service programs to the real-time Web. But are the benefits so difficult to find and hard to quantify that it is having a hard time explaining the business case?

In his blog entry, Stone highlights two companies that have found ways of turning Twitter into a business tool. But no details are available on the success of the efforts.

One is a cookie shop that notifies its customers when a new batch of chocolate chips come out of the oven. The other is Best Buy, which developed Twelpforce to let employees interact with customers who have questions about products.

It seems that so far businesses are in a phase of experimentation with Twitter. Many indeed are excited about using the site to their advantage, but don’t yet know whether there will be a payback.

So maybe the Twitter research will be interesting. Let’s just hope it is more substance than form.