My business partners and I have been trying to figure out the most practical applications for Twitter and how some of our clients can potentially leverage this popular social application. Yesterday I had a scenario come to mind that I think may be very practical.
Let’s say you run a school campus and you need to setup some sort of campus wide notification system for the purpose of alerting your students of severe weather, hazardous chemical spill, or worst case scenario like we saw at Virginia Tech a while back. The one thing that most all students are going to have these days is a cell phone. Since Twitter can setup to communicate through SMS on cell phones, and there are tons and tons of other Twitter mobile applications available depending on phone manufacturer and operating systems.
With this being the case, I can see how it would be advantageous for the school or university to implement an emergency Twitter account and have each student and member of faculty simply follow the school’s account w/ their settings being checked to notify them on mobile in the event of an emergency.
I will probably post some more of these ideas for practical Twitter applications in everyday business from time to time as they come to me.
Questions or Comments?