girls laughing picture

37 Signals and other companies are using Twitter for support.

It’s a brilliant move because:

  • Every time I ask them a question, and I’ve asked several, all my followers see their name again.
  • Every time they reply to me they give their followers more information about their product.
  • It encourages short and to the point questions.
  • It give a visible, authentic demonstration of how a company treats customers.  If it was faked, it would probably look obvious and gross.

One potential downside I see is web indexing.  Twitter searches never show up in my search result but support forum threads often do.  Also, depending on how many questions you answer in day, it might make for a noisy tweet stream.

I think it’s a great tool and have been putting it to use with OpenShift.  It always makes me smile when people are surprised that @OpenShift answers their questions.