Once upon a time, people mailed their holiday wishes to the North Pole and hoped for a reply on Christmas Day. Nowadays they are sending their wishes into cyberspace and are apt to get a reply in minutes.
America’s first Twitter Christmas got under way in earnest on Friday. Across the land, retailers and their customers used the social networking site to talk to one another about bargains, problems, purchases and shopping strategies.
After buying a new navigation system at 6 a.m. on the most frenzied shopping day of the year, Laura S. Kern of Los Angeles could not figure out why it was not giving her traffic updates. She sent a message to Best Buy’s Twitter account and within five minutes not one, but two Best Buy employees responded with fix-it advice.
In Bloomington, Minn., Mall of America used its Twitter page to tell consumers two of its parking areas were at capacity and that their best bet was to park near Ikea.
Twitter permits public communication via short, to-the-point messages. Many people use it to send mundane updates to their friends, but increasingly, the nation’s retailers see it as a business tool.
It gives customers a practical way to cajole a retailer, complain about something or ask questions.
A Twitter post can in theory be seen by millions, and thus packs more punch than an e-mail message or a phone call to a store. The big retailers are all scrambling this Christmas to come up with Twitter plans. They are designating tech-savvy employees to respond to the posts, sometimes by providing up-to-minute inventory information from a sales floor, for example, or by offering help with some balky gadget.
“It’s one of the greatest emerging communication channels out there,” said Greg Ahearn, senior vice president of marketing and e-commerce for Toys “R” Us. “This is a way people can stay connected with the brand in a way they’ve never been able to before.”
So far this shopping weekend, special deals have been posted on Twitter from stores as varied as Best Buy, J.C. Penney, Toys “R“ Us, Staples, Gap, Bloomingdale’s, and Barneys. (Links to the retailing Twitter accounts mentioned in this article can be found in the Web version of the story on NYTimes.com.)
For the uninitiated, Twitter.com is a Web site where each member has a password-protected page. It has a blank box for typing in a message of 140 characters or fewer, an act known as tweeting.
To see a retailer’s messages, Twitter users “follow” the retailer, which means that the chain’s posts show up on their Twitter home page when they log in. And the system allows users to send messages in the other direction, so that a retailer’s employees will see them.
