TechBait

According to this post at Network World, Best Buy is requiring a certain level of Twitter expertise in order to qualify for an “Emerging Media” executive role.  The funniest thing is that the company’s CEO, while having an account, barely would qualify to work in his own marketing department.  You gotta love that.

Twitter is a mixed bag.  For a long time I didn’t see the value in it.  Now I see value, but I also see a lot of useless chatter.  It is a VERY useful PR tool for celebrities to plug their agenda.  It’s a great marketing tool.  It is an awesome market research tool.  Twitter is like putting your pulse on the Internet.  I posted something last night about Microsoft adding value to their Bing search engine with some nifty Twitter tools.

So, back to Best Buy.  Yeah, sure, why not?  I think it’s great that senior management at these large companies are getting with the times.  It’s actually a sign of the times.  As the older boys bow out, the newer generation takes with them the tools of the modern age.  I would still rather that Best Buy do a better job with it’s floor staff.  I laugh every time I see commercials where they are putting up some alleged floor person who went above and beyond to help out a customer.  I wish that they would ship some of them over to the Best Buy store in Paramus NJ on Route 17 north, where you could all but keel over with a coronary before any of them notice you.

Microsoft has developed a system, “BingTweets” where users of their Bing search engine will be able to see live Twitter feeds related to the search topic at hand.  Brilliant!  You actually access this through the BingTweets.com URL.  This will not only return search results, but offer a kind of up to the minute buzz or pulse of the search topic.  You are not logged into Twitter at this point so you can’t interact with the feed.

Microsoft's BingTweets service

To make up for that lack of interactivity, there is a “Share This” feature which let’s you email, tweet, or post the results to social networking sites.  Also present is a box for trending topics, which gives the user access to people, places, and products.  This presents Twitter in a whole new way, and dare I say, adds another tool in the arsenal of those researching hot trending topics for marketing or PR purposes.