Time to Tune into Twitter?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com What if you could peer into the minds of some of your most influential customers? Online shoe store Zappos.com is using a new tool that could offer a window into an informal focus group of vocal, tech-savvy customers. And it’s free. The tool is Twitter, a service that allows users to send short updates about what they’re doing to computers or cell phones – a kind of all-in-one tool for hyper-speed blogging, social networking and instant messaging. Check out the “Twitter in Plain English” video on the right. Zappos has been monitoring customer satisfaction on Twitter using a software it developed on its own. You can check for mentions of your company with a free search engine called Tweet Scan, which trolls through Twitter comments looking for keywords you type in. For example, here’s a twitter from “eurotransient”: “It took only 16 hours for Zappos to send me my new bag. Are they messing with the space-time continuum or something?”