Case study: Twitter as a productivity tool

Case study: Twitter as a productivity tool

by Mike McDerment - November 27/2008

Problem
A couple weeks ago we had a problem: we wanted to collect testimonials for a new version of our homepage. Collecting testimonials can be a real pain. First you need to decide who to ask and then sort out how to ask (phone, email, forum, blog, etc). Then you need to compose some kind of message (email, post, etc), send it and wait. All of this takes time and potentially interrupts people who don’t want to be interrupted.

Solution
We turned to Twitter:

Results
In less than 10 minutes we had 9 testimonials, and Jaco got a selection of those onto the new home page that same day. So a project that could have taken 4-8 hours – maybe more – took about half an hour. That’s a huge time savings, all thanks to Twitter.

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12 Comments (add comment)

Nov 27/08
3:44 pm

Damien says:

Also a good tool for pimping blog entries. Thanks for the turkey day chuckle.

Nov 27/08
3:50 pm

Mike McDerment says:

true Damien, true…

Nov 27/08
3:51 pm

Brian Jones says:

Twitter blog spam… Just bugging you guys. Keep up the good work.

Brian.

Nov 27/08
3:59 pm

Doug from Nullvariable Web Consulting says:

does this really count as a case study? seems more like a casual observation to me…. but then hey this is a casual observation =)

Nov 27/08
6:41 pm

Brian says:

What a luxury to have customers who twitter. We’re teaching ours email.

Nov 27/08
10:02 pm

Sahil says:

Twitter is fantastic. You can also set up an RSS Feed with search.twitter for your product name and get updates immediately.

I use it with Wipee List (http://wipeelist.com) and it works great!

Nov 28/08
10:47 am

Mike McDerment says:

@brain – I love pragmatic comments. You are absolutely right – not every company can communicate with their users on twitter yet, but there are many who can but don’t. This is one of my favorite examples:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=rogers+iphone
NOTE: Rogers is a Canadian telco

Dec 1/08
1:03 am

This Week in Browsing | Brian Dusablon says:

[...] Twitter as a productivity tool [...]

Dec 2/08
2:19 pm

billy says:

Just trying to understand the usefulness of Twitter right now.. interesting article.. Thanks

Dec 5/08
11:14 am

More Twitter Fueled Efficiency | CloudAve says:

[...] a vaguely similar vein, over on FreshBooks they’ve taken what would have been a long involved project for a marketing person, and turned it on [...]

Feb 19/09
9:18 am

The Blog Council | Freshbooks uses Twitter for testimonials says:

[...] See the full post. [...]

Jul 24/09
1:33 pm

FreshBooks uses Twitter for testimonials | Business Blogging Blog says:

[...] See the full post. [...]

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