Twitter to the rescue
I’ve heard of people using Twitter to get help from people nearby. Guy Kawasaki needed a power cable for his laptop while staying (if memory serves) at the Hotel del Coronado. A nearby resident read the tweet and offered to drop by with a spare on his way to work.
But I don’t think it has ever gotten more local than this:
At Ragan Communications’ Social Media Conference in the Wynn Encore hotel, a few participants were live-tweeting sessions. There would have been more live-tweeting and live-blogging going on had it not been for the $45,000 price tab for WiFi in the meeting rooms, so those live-tweeting were using their phones or had digital broadand on their laptops.
Conference staff were wandering from room to room making sure all was well while others stuck around the registration desk, where a laptop was tracking the session hashtag, #socmedlv. One of the staff suddenly noticed this tweet:
The Ragan staffer was able to rush down to the meeting room, a few hundred feet away, cancel the rest of the session and get care for the speaker, who eventually was fine (we heard it was a severe case of travel exhaustion).
While somebody in the room undoubtedly would have gone out to get a conference staffer, seeing the tweet saved several minutes. Had it been a heart attack instead of travel exhaustion, those couple minutes might have made all the difference.
Another unintended positive consequence of Twitter, wouldn’t you say?
03/12/09 | 9 Comments | Twitter to the rescue