10 days ago I started a Twitter experiment where I designated my Twitter account for talking about companies to see who would respond–

THE BEST– JetBlue–we’ve all heard the stories about JetBlue spying on their customers in JFK .  They really do pay close attention to the people who they follow–when I asked if anyone knew what companies listened out there, they were quick to respond, and give a list they found online of companies who did.

Zappos also is great, so i felt no need to bait Zappos to talk to me. They’re busy making people happy.

CitizensBank Canada, gave me an unscolicted tweet just to let me know they were listening, and we engaged in a nice conversation, after I asked how the hectic the twittersphere was during the banking cricisis.

citizensbanker @CompanyConvos Not as hectic as one might expect, but that may reflect the fact that we’re the Cdn bank (not US)

SURPRISE, SURPRISE–Tech companies also listen– Ning monitors every time their name is brought up–when I asked the community why so many Ning communities were dead, evanatning was quick to tell me why and tell me what communities were thriving.

Kara_atDell who I officially have a twitter crush on sent on this tweet: “Want to learn how to incorporate social media into your SB? http://tinyurl.com/4xrz2u “  We had a nice conversation about why Dell went out of their way to create such a great resource.  She said “We had a lot of fun putting it together. Motivation? Helping SBs use new tech to grow their businesses and better comm. with customers” You Can Learn from Dell Hell.  Dell Did

12seconds.tv, uservoice and suggestionbox also all were quite attentive.

Comcastcares who i confused with Comcastscares also responded to a tweet of mine, clarifying the confusion about the hijack. (read the names carefully)

BEER

Molson’s got a blog here plus a handful of active Twitterers. Their main PR guy, Adam Moffat is @moffat and has interacted with the Vancouver bloggers who wrote about the Vancouver Brew 2.0 event beyond the usual “come to my event” / “thanks for coming to my event” messages.

On a related note, I recently tweeted my frustration with Smugmug and Adobe CS3 crashing. Smugmug found it and asked me to email them with my issue so they could help: http://twitter.com/SmugMug/statuses/931558970

As for Adobe…not a peep.

@GoDaddyGuy is out there getting his tweet on–and is very responsive to @replies

ALIVE BUT NOT KICKING–

@detroitpistons @michiganstate Maybe you missed my @replies, but you probably just use twitter to aggregate your news…while it’s fun getting news from the state of Michigan–it would be more fun to ask about the injury report or the pre-game buzz!  Take it to the next level!

DEAD–

What really gets me going is the ammount of brands who have twitter accounts but quit using them–was the community a fun experiement and then you just gave up on your followers?  Stephen Colbert, Luke Wilson, Facebook, Delta, Wired, Typepad, you just quit on us… that’s sad.  Celebs get busy, Delta probably just got tired of the abuse, and Wired and Typepad I’m just dissapointing your not here anymore…

HAVEN’T CAUGHT ON YET-

99% of people have no idea what twitter is–and that’s okay.  At the moment twitter is something that companies can use to go above and beyond the call of duty.  If I had interactions with you in the past, I want to congratulate you for truly caring about our community.

As for the rest of you–maybe you read me bitching about how terrible Olive Garden Commercials are, or how much I hate Entrepreneur.com for their interstitial ads–you didn’t have to reply (although I baited you).  Yes, people found it creepy when JetBlue talks to you like god, while your sitting in JFK, so maybe every twitter user who says damn mozilla crashed, doesn’t want JohnnyboyATmozilla to come running to the rescue.

THE POINT IS THIS–it’s the 21st century, the tools are out there to find out what your customers want–and what the most passionate brand evangalists want more than anything is to BE INVOLVED.  Please–lower your corporate walls during this age of transparency and realize that no matter what you do, we’re watching and we’re talking.  The companies who choose to engage with their customers will find a way to co-create better brands like Zappos.  Those who do not will have a long uphill battle against the communication/information overload.  The good news is you’ve got a chance to make up for it and embrace our changing world.  Just ask my girl–Kara_atDell