Shopping with twitter at your side – the mobile social network in the simplest form

Shopping with your twitter swarm at your side – the mobile social shopping in the simplest form

http://twitter.com/Gernot/statuses/894599324

WEAK SIGNAL: Early adopters go shopping supported with micro blogging. The wisdom of the crowd works as the shopping adviser.

There is a lot of tweets out there, so I only sporadically look at my twitter stream. Today I accidentally read a short tweet, that made me curios. Just one word, a question “Buy?” (German: Kaufen?) and a short link to twitpic, a convenient picture uploading service in the twitter eco-system. Of course I followed the link and now have a look at the screenshot above. The buyer sent his question into the twitterverse and a micro conversation resulted in the encouragement of the transaction.

RELEVANCE: Social shopping could happen as a very simple form of mixed reality in the future. Just the smart phone plus the mobile social network of twitter.

Rather questions than a statement: Is that the real social shopping experience? What can you do as a retailer to support this behavioral pattern to your advantage? Should you? What is significiant for me is, that voice would not work, but the textual micro conversations of twitter do work – but only together with twitpic.

One could call this para synchronity, because it is not typical synchronous, neither asynchronous communication. The sender even does not know who will actually answer out of the crowd of his >600 twitter followers (a reason to apply the swarm concept). My gut feeling says: Social ubiquity changes the game.