In my last post I wrote some thoughts about how businesses are starting to use Twitter, the microblogging-what-are-you-doing-right-now service.

Well, my Tridea partner and avid Twitter user, John, recently had an interesting interaction that is relevant to that discussion. Yesterday afternoon John posted this: “I think threadless tee’s designs are going down in quality”.

Threadless is an apparel company that mainly produces T-shirts that are designed and voted on by people who are not part of their company. They offer incentives for participation like a cut in sales and some credit toward merchandise, as well as a coolness factor of having a design successfully chosen. And it works; there is a large community of designers and a strong and loyal customer base. In any case, it’s a company who’s product, at least design-wise, is made by customers/people-not-on-salary.

So minutes after John openly complained that he thought their quality was declining, their CTO direct messaged him to ask him what he thought they could do to improve their product. And that right there is why business usage of Twitter is increasing. People in all areas of a company, all the way up to the CTO/CIO/CEO positions are using Twitter to monitor their brand perception. Twitter allows them to plug in to the pulse of their customers in an unobtrusive way.

In this case, asking John for feedback on what could improve was not terribly intrusive to him. They exchanged some thoughts. The CTO walked away with some direct feedback from a loyal customer. John walked away knowing that his voice was being heard and that Threadless was actively seeking to improve their company by soliciting direct feedback via Twitter.

I think Twitter usage is evolving and will continue to do so bringing value to it’s diverse users. Stay tuned and I will keep posting on new and interesting developments!