on 24 September 2009 
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Twitter has become an interesting playground for brands of all shapes and sizes to test their marketplace – or at least their followers.
Travel brands are no exception, throwing out links to new pages and products on their websites. It’s a quick and dirty approach which yields next to no fantastically empirical results yet can give some indication of enthusiasm – or not – for a new offering.
Step forward TripAdvisor, the hotel review site everyone loves to have an opinion on.
Today it put out the following message via its Twitter profile:
Some advice, please…If TripAdvisor had an iPhone application (besides Local Picks), what would you like to see? What would be useful? Thx!
The Local Picks iPhone app was launched at the end of July 2008, utilising some of the functionality it has in place for its existing Local Picks web service.
But perhaps TripAdvisor is now looking to roll out a full functioning iPhone app for the core site and is priming Twitter followers ahead of a launch, or is simply trying to find out what the community would like?
The move has worked, regardless of the motives: within minutes of the Tweet, loyal followers chimed in with their suggestions and a buzz created.
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Kevin: Aha, just what TripAdvisor needs…a little more buzz:)
Good use of Twitter for crowd-sourcing. I love when travel brands – particularly those that rely on UGC – listen via Twitter, instead of tweeting promos or press releases. The fact that they’ve created more buzz is an added bonus for TripAdvisor. Good PR is when you build buzz through all channels even BEFORE you launch. Tnooz did a very good job of this as well
Agree with Susan about this being good use of Twitter or any social tool to gather immediate feedback from the community. I’m sure it will be used by more companies as this space continues to evolve. Having a very large follower base, of course, helps to make it work. The topic of the question is another factor as people won’t respond equally to just anything being asked.