Do you use Twitter? I do. John does. Many people use the popular online service described by wikipedia as “a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send ‘updates’ (or ‘tweets’; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application.”

I use it to keep up on the lives of friends I made at SXSW, industry folks, associates/coworkers, and people who I generally enjoy hearing about. It’s a nice tool to keep up with casual and close friends alike while not requiring me to engage in an actual phone conversation (I’m not a phone person.)

However, companies are starting to use Twitter. I’ve been “followed” (when someone subscribes to your twitter feed) by a few Zappos.com employees recently and though I thought it was odd, it didn’t prompt me to lock down my Twitter feed. You see, I’m a fan of Zappos…their mantra is to have the best customer service of any website, and when customer service is your #1 priority, you rarely tick people off.

Comcast, on the other hand, has started using Twitter as a way to try and control damage to their brand. Michael Arrington posted a few weeks ago about an unpleasant experience with Comcast and how they picked up on his anger via Twitter and stepped up to solve his issue. Arrington astutely points out that while they were able to solve his problem shortly after he made his complaints public, consumers who don’t use Twitter still have to deal with their crappy customer service hotlines.

I think business usage of Twitter will continue to evolve. Companies with poor customer service will use it to try and put out bad brand-experience fires while smarter companies will use it to monitor how their brand is perceived and what kind of trends they can capitalize on. Used wisely, companies can really hone in to a casual-yet-public display of the likes/dislikes/wishes/wants of trend setting customers.

If Tridea ever decides to launch a business twitter account it will be not to extinguish bad-experience fires, but to connect more directly with our clients and to further build on the communication principle that we hold as one of our tenets!