He was scheduled for a flight and kept getting delayed (I believe it was JetBlue). After repeatedly attempting to contact them, he sent out a tweet saying, “what’s up with [airline]? I’m geting no response.”

Literally, within minutes, Southwest Airlines had responded and offered to help…even offering to comp his flight.

Who do you think the hero is in this story? There wasn’t a response from the other airline, but they did get some immediate, bad press.

Landlords will be among the first to get a clue the hard way. I saw one who commented that he sold his rentals because bad publicity on landlord complaint sites had made renting them nearly impossible.

In case any believe the current bad economy makes homes easier to rent (as I originally thought), the truth is the tight mortgage market has forced homeowners to rent and increased supply far more than the bad economy has reduced the demand.

I know a landlord who was born with a silver spoon and has never lived on only her own income. She has no empathy at all and harasses and throws out tenants with many years of paying on time because they ask for a week or two to pay after a lay-off.

Right now landlords have the power unless the tenants force them to use the laws which cost landlords money but still don’t really help renters. The Internet may change all that but it will take many years before the clueless realize why their business dropped off.

When I started off on twitter, I realized the need for effective utilization of this great tool and also @replied a lot of famous twitterers so that they could understand how they were misusing, rather mistweeting.

I got a few responses saying almost the same thing: we spend a lot of money in our marketing campaign. Why should we spend so much time as well.

Thoroughly misunerstanding the phenomenon which could ruin their future, they kept on chugging “how are you tweeps”… god bless them…