140Char

There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the Magpie Network advertising service for Twitter, and whether it’s a good or bad thing. Such as ReadWriteWeb, Jeremiah Owyang, and Techcrunch.

I bet the Twitter team are looking at the responses with interest!

But James Cridland picked up on an incredibly effective and authentic Word of Mouth event on Twitter. I’ll summarise, so you can go and read the full article, ‘Word of Mouse – @stephenfry sells bucketloads of Tweetie‘. Hugely popular celebrity and ‘proper’ Tweeter Stephen Fry mentioned some Twitter clients, received a recommendation for a paid client for the iPhone, posted a positive review of it, and gained a huge number of responses from people who appear to have paid for the client on his recommendation.

Who would have though that an influential celebrity who is authentically using a service could have a direct effect on a product? I’m off to persuade U.S. basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal he should be promoting 140char!

Great write up on a Coffee Shop using Twitter to take orders on the Pistachio Consulting blog. Order for the drive thru, or, use the in-shop wifi to order from your seat and avoid the need to stop working!

Combine that with a recent story I spotted in which a coffee shop/cafe had started naming their free wifi with names like ‘buyanothermuffin’ or ‘trythenewcoffeeblend’, and you’ve got two great ways to really drive sales and engage with the community!

And as someone who occasionally becomes invisible to bar staff, I’m eagerly awaiting some UK pubs to implement a similar system! I recently happened to start chatting to a pub landlord who was commenting that wifi wasn’t a gimmick any more for a pub because everyone has it – but suddenly it becomes more useful than ever.