The tweet is more powerful than the sword

People are surprised that companies respond quickly to complaints and questions posted to them on Twitter.

I find the rapid response predictable, once you think about it.

E-mails are, for the most part, one-to-one messages. A complaint e-mail especially so. I'm not going to CC: friends on a complaint e-mail to my bank, or my insurance company, because that simply loads their inboxes with clutter. An e-mail is a private conversation between you and the company. The company can delay response or ignore it completely at practically no cost.

Tweets, on the other hand, are a one-to-many message. They are not a letter to a friend (or business) but are published to many people. They are viewed by one's followers, and some people have hundreds of thousands of followers.

If Twitter were that simple, then companies could evaluate the importance of the Tweeter and answer only those tweets from users with large followings.

But it's more complex. All tweets are part of the TwitterStream, and anyone can look at any message (just about). I recently tweeted about my bank and used a hashtag to identify them. The bank was not following me (and is still not following me, from what I can tell) but they found the message anyway, and responded. Tweets are public postings, messages published to potentially the entire world. Tweets with hashtags are advertisements, not approved by the marketing department.

With messages going out to the globe, a company has no choice but to respond, and respond quickly. If they don't, the next tweet might just be "hey, #companyX ignored my tweet. is anyone home?", which translates to more negative advertising.

I think every company, organization, and government office should be watching the TwitterStream for messages about themselves. You want to know what people are saying about you.