More on Social Networking for an outcome

Earlier this month I posted on how I used Twitter for a real business outcome, networking with Luis Benitez who I met through a shared interest in Lotus Connections.Recently another examples of the power of Twitter occured that I thought I’d share.There are many uses for Twitter (surprisingly many for something that only supports 140 characters), but one of them is kind of like the office water cooler — it’s for that off-the-cuff comment that you don’t neccessarily expect anyone to reply to, but you’re happy when they do.Recently, I tweeted “Is it just me, or is FF3 really unstable?” FireFox (FF) 3 is currently my preferred browser and I use it for anything I can, only falling back to IE when some internal sites won’t support FF but it’s been very unstable and driving me nuts!When I got up the following morning, I had the following answer from Ricardo Sueiras (who follows me) “yup, FF3 crashes for me on a daily basis.”Now this isn’t THAT amazing, I mean Ricardo follows me, knows me in RL (Real Life) and also uses FF. However when I re-connected I received a Tweet direct from @Firefox_Answers “Firefox crashes can be from add-ons Try Safe Mode http://is.gd/PCw

If fixed, disable add-ons one by one to find the culprit”When did you last feel that you were being listened to by a technology company (without paying huge support), and wouldn’t you love as a corporation in any industry to be able to turn the negative vibe of the water cooler into a positive experience for your brand? I’m impressed.How do they do it? Well Twitter search (formally summize) lets you search key words across all public conversations. It’s how I keep track of Lotus Connections and what’s happening out there and have made lots of useful contacts in IBM.Unfortunately despite following all the advice, completely de-installing and re-installing, FF3 crashes multiple times a day and remains highly unstable for me personally, although many others don’t have my experience so I wouldn’t let it stop you trying it if you haven’t yet.