I’ve been tweeting now for…like…I dunno. A few years, anyway. I think. I’m fairly certain that there’s some easyish way to find out when I first tweeted something; I might even be able to find out which day in whatever year I grabbed my primary account. But that’s a matter of curiosity, at this point. I do know that, as of this instant [and this'll change at the latest when I publish this and the system automatically tweets a link to it], I’ve tweeted 4,628 messages from @wastedinc—however long that wound up taking me.

Which isn’t precisely my point here. Though it’s related. Heavily.

I just saw someone tweeting generally about corporate accounts. Which is only technically about me, as a corporate account. But it’s all about me as a consumer with similar questions. Generally, he was wondering why approximately every Official Corporate Account at twitter.com seems incapable of interacting at any level above that of a simple, autoresponding bot. And I don’t have a good answer, personally.

And that’s despite having wondered roughly the same thing for a while now.

It could be [and has been] argued that there’s no wrong way to use twitter.com. There are more and less popular ways, I suppose; it’s becoming clichéd that people misuse it by tweeting what they’re eating at any given second. But there’s no official law against that within the EULA or anything. As a tweep, you can have an account and blather anything you’re capable of fitting into 140 characters [technically, you can go over that, linking to the end of the sentence, through a couple of thirdparty APIs]; people might complain when you tweet something inane and purposeless—my cats on fire and i see music; also omlete (sp?)—but no one can really point to a rule against it. You can do whatever you like. I think that, unlike with facebook.com, you can even upload shots of tits and things; I’m not aware of a rule against that.

But, whatever you’re supposed to tweet, as a literal rule, people have certain expectations. It’s kinda the whole Public Jury thing. If, for the sake of argument, you’re tweeting professionallyish from @walgreens, and someone tweets to ask how much Advil might cost and whether you’ve got any in stock at Third and Main, he might expect something like an answer; he might not expect something purposeless, like @HeadacheGuy: Thanks for contacting @walgreens, you can find your nearest location through http://t.co/WaLgReEnS

Let’s rewind a bit. Let’s predate the ‘net in any form most people could ever recognise. Let’s set the WayBack Machine to, say, 1992. Just for a paragraph or two….

Call it 1992. There I am, lurking at Perkins or VillageInn. Being a regular, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve sat right exactly here before, and I know the tablenumber. The bad news is that, since I’ve sat here before, over and over, the sum total of employees have become so used to seeing me that they don’t really see me anymore. I mentioned that syndrome in NotS, only thirteen years ago: as a regular, you’ll eventually become invsible—forgotten entirely about.

It’s 1992. So, being at Table Seventy-five, and ignored, I’d throw technology at the problem. I’d pull out my wonderfully tiny mobilephone [only about a pound, and no longer stuck close to irrevocably to the car], call the front desk, and report that Table Seventy-five was out of coffee. Again.

The first dozen times I did that, no one could figure out what I was talking about. I had to dare the manager to look over at Seventy-five, watching for the tall guy in black waving at him. Hi there; not joking: want coffee; look into it. Eventually, they caught on, and it became normal. Ish.

Technically, it’s still not normal today. But calling the front desk and telling them that LaptopGuy over here by the electrical outlet wants stuff seems archaic, if still more advanced than usual.

Why, I have to wonder, can’t I just tweet them. I’ve got the laptop and WiFi; I’ve got a Droid. And, if VillageInn haven’t got @villageinn, I’m calling that a problem on their end. But let’s suppose that’s the case, since it won’t matter in a minute.

Go back to twitter.com. Grab @villageinn4772, or whatever your internal store number is. Figure that out, and grab an account for each location. If you wanna be careful about it, grab @villageinn0001 through @villageinn9999, allowing for room to expand.

Having set that up, let’s go back to the restaurant itself. Add a little card amongst the sugar and ceaseless adverts for pie [one of these days, I'm gonna open a restaurant devoid entirely of any sort of pie, just to break the universe]; have it explain something very, very simple: You’re at Table Number Seventy-five [optionally, it can mention that the tablenumber will be on the bill, I suppose]; if you need anything, tweet your tablenumber to @villageinn4772, and we’ll be right with you.

Capture all tweets addressing @villageinn4772 and send them as alerts to whatever system. Anything mentioning @wastedinc goes immediately to my phone as a textmessage; I promise that it’s possible to do this. Once you get the alert that someone’s mentioning @villageinn4772, read the thing; note the tablenumber; deal with the content of the tweet.

@villageinn4772: Gremlin here; I’m in #75 and out of coffee again. Is it too late at night to grab something dinnerish?

Send a waitress. With coffee, since she knows about that. And then we can talk about whatever elements of the real menu go offline after elevenish.

Why do I have to talk about this all hypothetically in 2012? Why isn’t it already just a thing? Sure: if you’ve got @villageinn4772 online for anyone to access, you’ll get some useless spam, and maybe even a few pranks; but you’ve got a phone already, so you’re not real protected from any of that…except that people don’t use phones for much anymore. Not even mobile ones.

That’s the restaurantoid idea. The tweetomat. Want: tweet: get. Easy. You’d think.

There are other companies out there too. @walgreens don’t seem to answer direct questions, as a rule; they view incoming tweets as permission to spam links to their website, or whatever. Few companies have anything resembling what I’d call a Social Media Manager. I don’t doubt that scads of them have an SMM position, but few have anyone on staff capable of doing the job.

Let’s make this about me for a minute, so I’m not just slamming everyone else. If someone tweets me @wastedinc with an actual question [some1s posting rumur's about u!!!1 isn't a question], I can [probably] see it, read it, and potentially come up with a response to it. Whatever it is. If someone asks for clarification on today’s webcomic, I can respond with an answer, or at least a dialogue working out what the precise question is; if someone tweets me to ask whether I’ve got whatever TShirt in whatever colour, or why not, I can answer that without a braindead link to the website they logically already saw—at least, I can link directly to the shirt in that colour, and not to wastedinc.com itself.

Know who else can do that? @zappos. Or @zappos_service. Whatever their account is. What matters is that they actually engage people. Or at least respond like people should. You don’t see this with them:

@zappos: I was looking for black XHi ChuckTaylors, size 12. Have you got those? I can’t track them down. Thanks.

@wastedinc: Thank you for tweeting @zappos! We have many styles of shoes at http://t.co/ZaPpOs

Those guys actually stop to read tweets before seizing upon them like an Iranian sexbot suddenly given permission to exist.

Why is that [still] uncommon? Why are there corporate accounts at all, if their only purpose is on average to tweetspam the sort of thing we used to get in the Sunday paper?

Let’s go back a little further than nineteen ninety-two. Call it nineteen eighty-two. And I’m on the phone—a landline—to Target or ServiceMerchandise or whatever. Hi; I’ve been looking for this actionfigure, and I’m wondering if you’ve got one and whether you could hang onto it for me through the end of the day. Sometimes, I’d get someone to put me on hold and come back a couple minutes later with a real answer: Found you one; I’ll move it to Customer Service and you can pick it up anytime before nine; it’s three ninety-nine, by the way. More often, they’d come back and tell me: We’ve got a lot of actionfigures; you’d just have to come in and look through them. That’s when I’d ask why they didn’t have a computer telling them the answer; and they’d essentially ask what a computer was.

Back to 2012. Know what a computer is yet? Gotcha: trick question; a computer is not in the best of circumstances an autoresponder marginally more intelligent than your SMM which countertweets that you’ve got a website. A computer is a thing you as an organic entity can use to find the answer to my question, and then relay that answer to me. @zappos get that; most companies don’t. This is a flaw.

So, look into that, I guess. Look into hiring someone who can read and make sense of the words. Test these people out in advance. If someone asks whether you’ve got an actionfigure, or more coffee, or ChuckTaylors in black: answer the question itself; don’t just tweet the URL to the mainsite which is optimally already listed in your company’s bio. We know where your site is; your site sucks; we were hoping that your SMM wouldn’t; we’re disappointed.

Entirely unrelated, here’s today’s webcomic:

More later….

Gremlin has 7692 followers and 4659 tweets.