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I tried to sign into Skype earlier yesterday with little success. After several failed attempts and about 10 minutes of trying to diagnose if there was a problem with my setup, I decided to try my luck to see if Twitter could shed any light on problems with Skype.

What ensued was an interesting discovery that led to this article about what it takes to get information about your products and services distributed in a timely and targeted way.

Time Sensitive Information via Twitter

A simple search on "Skype" in Twitter led me to discover, within about five seconds, that the problem was indeed with Skype, and the trail of tweets suggested the problem was widespread.

It wasn't until I tweeted for information about the yesterday's tsunami news that I noticed some very important distinctions.

The first major distinction was the recency of the information. Google displays news from as recently as 25 minutes before. This is quite impressive given the task involved in crawling, indexing and making the information available in a searchable form.

Twitter on the other hand, contained a string of Tweets from as recently as "less than a minute ago". This is much more impressive and if you need to take immediate action on important news, then Twitter might just be the service for you.

What was more impressive however was the way in which businesses are beginning to use Twitter in targeted ways - based on specific events that are unfolding and being discussed. Look carefully at the fourth item. If you follow the link contained in the tweet, you'll find that it leads to an online video store with the opportunity to sign up and download a movie.

Morality issues aside, (how one could even think to profit from the terrible events that occurred is beyond me), what makes this particularly interesting is that this company has tuned into a specific event and commented on that event with the express intention of driving traffic back to their website.

In any other setting, the practice of tuning into world events and being topical with your tweets, would be considered marketing genius.

To do this you'll need two things:

• Tune into what's going on and also have a very clear value proposition for your products and services.

  This means knowing your target market and the type of events that could could affect them and how you're able to help them.

• Find a way to quickly and easily inform your target market of your products and services at the time they are most likely to need them.

  Doing this via Twitter means you either need to be online or using a service such as Chime (a Twitter SMS gateway from Locatrix) that lets you send a simple SMS using any old mobile phone and have it appear as a tweet in your Twitter account.

If being #1 is important to you and you need to create instant publicity wherever you are, then you absolutely need to Contact Us and have us work with you.

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