The influence of Twitter on offline life

Thursday, Jan. 14 2010 | Author: Darice de Cuba

The power of Twitter is playing a part of my daily offline life more and more. Stores I frequent here in The Hague have twitter accounts which even though I’m a faithful client they make me go there even more. There is the English only bookshop “The American Book Center” where I like to spend time browsing books. And when they have a discount on all books going on they will tweet about it so I know when I must make sure to go there.

I work freelance at home and have twitter running in the back, it only takes a tweet from “Lebkov” about starting the day with a nice cup of coffee and next I know I’m craving a sandwich and coffee and have decided to get my lunch there. Each week they have a special sandwich that isn’t on the menu and recently they added one of those specials that I liked to their regular menu. As soon as they tweeted about it I had planned when I would drop by to get a sandwich. So I can state those tweets do have an influence on me.

This is a great way to stimulate their business and build client relationships. We had a very snowy holiday here in the Netherlands, which the country couldn’t handle and it was nice that they tweeted if they where open and till how late. The bookshop also kept customers up to date by tweeting opening days and hours. Saves you from the disappointment of encountering a closed store.

And I don’t know about you but I find a twitter message to pass along info nicer then receiving a newsletter. I associate newsletter emails with annoyance while a nice and short tweet as something great and hip.

I want to know what would happen if they tweeted something like “10% discount to first 5 followers to come in withing half an hour”. I’m geek enough that I check twitter on my iPhone as soon as I find myself waiting somewhere. So who knows I might be close by in case of such a tweet.

It won’t be long before I become Sheldon Cooper, saying

You keep in mind that my sharply-worded comments on yelp.com recently took down a muffin store.

Instead of Yelp it will be Twitter. And instead of menacing the company I would be praising having had a nice lunch and/or coffee. I’m going up a level of geek, get my food because of twitter, take a snap shot of said food with iPhone, posting said shot on Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook boring my followers with what I had for lunch.