Twitter and Online Branding

Twitter is all about users answering one question: What are you doing now?

I had heard about if for a while, but wasn't tempted since Facebook status updates kept me and my friends plenty informed. Then today I read an article about protecting your online brand and it suggested registering your name on several social media sites, including Twitter.

So off I went into the heretofore unchartered: Twitter, Technorati, WordPress, MyBlogLog. I found all of these interesting but nothing special.

Then tonight I saw this on one of my Google alerts:

What's more stereotypically trivial than shoe shopping? Using Twitter, of course! Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company's profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales.

Of all the different types of social media the company uses, none are as interesting as its use of Twitter. Twitter may sound cliche, but it's not just about Twitter as one single service. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations. Zappos has bitten off a big chunk of that paradigm.

This article illuminates exactly how powerful social media can be and to what extent Twitter and the others can influence not only where we spend our time, but also where we spend our money.