The Limos.com Forum Has Moved!!!

I came across a website today that really got my mind going as to how it could be used in our industry.

The Site is:
Twitter.com

It's the goofiest premis for a site you could think of. You basically use it to update your friends minute by minute what you are doing.

Playing with it I thought it could be a good tool to use within your local market to help with last minute emergencies and bookings. Imagine if you set up an account and every limo company you did regular business with did also. When you book a job for a 10 pack in 3 hours you send out an update like:

"Need a 10 pack at 4 pm today in Mayberry reply if you can do it."

This would go out as an update aon the web and a text message (if set up) to every owner or dispatcher and you would know in a minute who could do the run. No callling, no leaving messages, no waiting on return calls.

Furthermore if a company wanted to they could add every vehicles phone and make that a way to call for help if need be. Say a company does not have a dispatcher and the vehice has a break down with passengers in the vehicle. The driver could send out an alert to all local companies and or drivers:

"Break down 345 main st. mayberry - 5 passengers going to the airport"

Maybe a driver in the area with an empty vehicle and on his way to the airport could help out and avert a missed flight. Payment for the trip may be an issue of contention later on but these would be companies you regularly do business with.

Also set up right and the dispatcher using the web interface it would be a real good tool for keeping track of your own drivers status with customers (at pick up, POB, DROP ) as on the main web page you can see a history of the last 10 or so updates. Guess most of this could be done with standard text messaging but the site makes it very easy.

Hard to say how useful it could be day to day. May actually be more annoying, hard to say.

May also be good tool for assigning driver runs! First one to replies gets it!

Playing with it some more you can even have it interface with The Google IM product G-Talk so you can just have that little window open at the bottom feeding you updates of your drivers/other companies.

Check it out see what ya think.

I do not want to sound like we are not with the times because most certainly we are, but keeping track of all these "social networking" sites can get to be quite a large task. Think about it. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Yelp and every other new thing that comes along. Pretty soon we are going to have to hire an employee to stay abreast of just internet marketing or internet reputation monitor. I have a hard enough time developing the websites we have and keeping them updated to ensure they stay ranked well on the search engines, let along social networking. I do the majority of my internet marketing because I am too cheap to pay someone thousands of dollars when I can do it myself with a little reading and time.

Granted we have a MySpace page but that is just basically a placeholder that is not updated. We could go on about 100 social networking websites and say we could use this one or that one in this our business. I guess it all boils down to how much grunt work you want to do.


Jim

Steve,

I've been a Twitter fan for over a year now - you can find me as 'InTheLeftLane' over there.

Your post about Twitter got me thinking about the various elements of social media, so I put fingers to keyboard and came up with a short description of the tools that might be used in a social media effort.

There are many of them that will affect the visability of website or the search result for a brand.

Tell me what you think of the result at InTheLeftLaneOnline.