If you’re in any position of influence in a company and you still haven’t made the decision to set up a twitter account [watch: what is twitter?] for your brand (product, or service), consider the following examples of how twitter brought consumers and companies together:

Not necessarily a b2c situation, but NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander (@marsphoenix). NASA gave it’s little Mars explorer a voice and used its twitter account to give live updates on the lander’s progress as it explored the Martian surface (and eventually found water). According to Discovery.com,

“When NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Services manager Veronica McGregor was tasked with delivering word of the agency’s first-ever robotic landing on Mars during a holiday weekend, she turned to the social-networking Web site…

Tweets at twitter.com/MarsPhoenix won numerous Internet awards and garnered nearly 40,000 dedicated followers — 2,000 of whom joined after NASA lost contact with the Lander in November.”

Next up, and a personal savior of mine, is Frank Eliason, Comcast’s Director of Digital Care (@comcastcares). Frank and his team use twitter (and other social networking tools) to offer those of us who hold twitter accounts another form of customer service; but instead of having to press a bunch of buttons and wait on hold for twenty minutes, Frank and his team are just a tweet away.

Here’s a perfect example of the truly unbelievable customer service @comcastcares offers: On Monday, December 29, 2008, Comcast in Ft. Lauderdale was running a system-wide test for the upcoming digital TV conversion. Well, something went wrong, and my cable and internet went out for a couple of days. Naturally, I promptly dialed Comcast and spoke to seven customer “service” representatives over the course of two days.

Only one of them was even remotely helpful, offering to send a repair truck out to my neighborhood to investigate what seemed to be a localized problem. Then, on New Years’ eve (of all nights), I remembered Frank- one tweet to @comcastcares (and a follow-up e-mail to his team), and someone from his department called me back within the hour. Let me say that again: within the hour. A half-hour later, a Comcast service technician was in my driveway, and had fixed the problem.

That, my friends is customer service; two hours prior to that, I was ready to cancel my service with Comcast- Frank and his team brought me back with a single phone call.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh (@zappos) has nearly 30,000 followers on twitter, and over 400 people in his company have twitter accounts. What does this mean for me as an online shopper? It gives the website I just bought a pair of sneakers from a face and a personality. I know that there are real people behind my order, and if something gets mixed up, a quick fix is just a tweet away. (Check out my previous post on the two companies.)

In fact, in the check-out process, you’re asked to leave a comment- I did, along with my twitter name (@joerib), and I got free next-day shipping on my order. Zappos now has a customer for life; it was that easy.

Finally, Clickz has a pertinent article about this very topic, written by Kate Kaye. Kate talks about how twitter is working for Ford Motor Company, Comcast, Zappos, and Dunkin’ Donuts (another one of my fav’s). Check out this other one by Lee Milkes of AdAge, too.

Convinced on adding twitter to your company? Here’s the takeaway:

1. It has to be sincere- a person-to-person communication. Skip the bureaucracy in getting tweets approved before sending.
2. It has to be instant. Use tools like search.twitter.com to find mentions of your company and take an active role in responding.
3. It has to offer your customers a way into your company. Need something resolved, or have a question? Your customers now “know someone in the business.”
4. It has to be constant. If you’re going to invest time in getting your customer base to recognize your company’s presence on twitter- keep it up. Your customers will recognize your disinterest in maintaining you account more negatively than if you never made the commitment at all.
5. Dell, Jet Blue, Comcast, Southwest Airlines, Dunkin’ Donuts, NASA, Zappos, and Home Depot all use twitter to connect with their customers (and the list goes on).