Sep
by Adele McAlear. Originally posted at Marketing Monster
Crowdsourcing is one of the best uses of Twitter. Sure, it’s easy enough to poll people with questions or to ask for information, directions and recommendatons, but it’s another thing entirely when you’re in a pickle and need someone local to physically come to your aid.
Last night at about 10:30 pm, as I watched the Tweets fly by, I caught this from Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki), famed Apple evangelist, venture capitalist, entrepreneur, speaker and author:
A few of us re-tweeted his request, not that he’d need much help with 20,500+ followers, but you never know if people may have missed it the first time around.
Sure enough, within 8 minutes, the offer of help came in from Jerry Jones (@jetskier79):
Confirmations were made and, voila! Within an hour Guy had a magsafe power supply for a Macbook in hand. And what did Jerry get besides some good karma, Guy’s thanks and a few new followers? His good deed was rewarded with a signed first copy of Reality Check, Guy’s new book, set for release on October 30th.
As for Guy’s test, he wrote about his best Twitter story ever and documented the exchange with a smile and a photo.
How has Twitter come to your rescue? Let me know.
- Bookmark :
- Digg
- del.icio.us
- Stumbleupon
- Redit it
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
- Pingback by Communication, not LBS, Solves Local Problem for Kawasaki | Go and Track GPS Tracking on October 7, 2008 @ 12:54 pm
Comments
Leave a comment
-
Subscribe to Our Blogs
-
-
Here’s my story:
On my way to a Podcamp Hawaii meeting, I walked out of my home and just as I heard the final click of doorknob meeting frame I realized I had left my set of keys inside! Armed only with my cellphone, but no internet connection I tweeted my plea via SMS.
In 2-minutes I had several names and numbers to local locksmiths and even a ride to the meeting. In 10-minutes I was paying the locksmith, retrieving my keys and heading to my meeting. I must note that at least five tweets began with, “Not in Hawaii, but here’s what I found…”
I did the same thing the very next week — I had the locksmith’s number in my contacts already!
Wonderful story but I think I can top it.
Sarah Lacy was in Des Moines as part of her User Generated Book Tour and my wife and I were making last minute plans so at least one of us could attend the tweetup the night before the book signing. She was at work, I was at home with the girls and we were broadcasting our exchanges over twitter.
We went back and forth a couple of times on who would go and by the time my wife got home we still hadn’t come to a decision. However within a few minutes our neighbor popped over. She said she was watching our tweets and if it was okay with us she could watch the kids.
We were shocked and amazed. That night we found a babysitter over twitter and discovered that our neighbor follows both of our tweets.
Neenz & Rob - Thanks for sharing your stories. I think what is amazing is that there are so many people within the Twitter community who are willing to help, whether they’re oceans away, or right next door.