Twitter is a great medium for sending free SMS (mobile text) messages. For those reading this not involved in the mobile industry, SMS is expensive, both in terms of cost, and time to set up.

We here at TwelveHorses.com consult to businesses about mobile messaging, Twitter, and how to integrate with these technologies. Here are some ideas that we’ve seen, and some that we’ve pitched to clients.

In your Restaurant, you have a “For coupons and info, send Follow MyRestaurant to 40404 from your cell phone” Then on Tuesday evenings about 5:30, when things are slow around dinner time, you Tweet “Free desert with dinner tonight if you mention this coupon.” In this respect, you hit all your interested customers, right at the dinner hour, wherever they are.

You’re a ski resort. You want to inform your skiers at the time they specify when fresh powder has reached x inches deep. To facilitate this, you build an application to send mobile messages to your interested skiers when snow reaches a certain depth. They sign up to follow your ski resort’s twitter with their phone, and you use the Twitter API to send them direct messages at the time they specify when the fresh snow is the depth they want.

You’re an online auction company, and you want to send out tweets for items that are undervalued 30 minutes before the auction ends to drive up prices. You integrate the Twitter API with your application to send those alerts out as public tweets, and invite people to join that twitter for killer deals.

You’re an airline. You have flights that have known empty seats. You integrate with the Twitter API to send out tweets 4 hours before a flight with empty seats and the heavily discounted price you’re willing to sell those seats for.

You’re a stock broker. You want to very quickly inform your clients about great stock deals. You have them sign up to follow your tweet, and as deals come through that you think they need to know about, you tweet them, and your clients receive the results.

You want to generate buzz about a new TV show on network XYZ. You announce prior to the show how to sign up for the show’s Twitter, and during the show, you have the director tweet the inside scoop on what’s really happening, almost like a directors commentary, but live with the broadcast of the show.

Really, the possibilities like this are endless, and can be tuned to your specific business model.

With Twitter, your message gets to the customer wherever they are, and with information that they want to know.

Clint Goudie-Nice
Architect / Senior Software Engineer

This morning, as a stream of Twitters went flying through my IM client, I noticed that Phil801 had mentioned a live video feed. I saw a few of the SLC Twitter crew comment on the quality, so I clicked through to check it out. Apparently, Phil801 had helped setup a Politic 2.0 and was broadcasting a live video feed conversation with Congressman Chris Cannon. Immediately upon viewing, I recognized the shape of a bald head sitting front and center:

I continued watching to confirm my suspicion when I caught this:

Yup. It was none other than our own Steve Spencer, President of Twelve Horses. Weird how Twitter led me to Steve. I’m not sure if this is the power of online social networking or just working to make the world even smaller.