Many of you who read this blog are probably users of social technologies like Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr. I know I am! The interesting thing is the way people use the technologies. For business for personal or combining the two you'll never see the same usage pattern twice!

I'd love to share a story with you that I wrote about some time ago but felt was a great story to revisit. It's called, "How Twitter Search changed the Life of a man in a coffee Shop"  Enjoy!

The Coffee Shop Chronicles
About a year ago now, I visited a great little coffee shop and lunch destination in a small town just outside of mine. I began to work away on the computer as usual when a very well dressed gentleman sat next to me presumably stopping for lunch. After I finished banging out an email he seemed to get transfixed by my laptop screen as I opened up tweetdeck and asked me if that was twitter. I told him that it was a third party application but for all intents and purposes, "Yes it is Twitter". He went on to say that he had heard a lot about the service, but really had no idea why he would want to use it. And that my friends was the beginning of his love affair with twitter.

The Job
I went on to ask this gentleman what type of work he did. He told me that he was an independent pharmaceutical sales rep and that he was trying to get established with some local doctors. He had been at it for about six months and had regular calls, but most of his accounts were on the smallish side. I decided to do an experiment with him and run a twitter search on the name of some of the companies he repped for as well as names of some of the key drugs he was selling. So we went forth and created a real time conversational search using my tweetdeck client and he was amazed at what he saw.

The Search
The search immediately revealed that one of the drugs that he was told to push by his distributor was possibly going to be pulled from the shelves by the government due to complications of taking the drug. He was flabbergasted and honestly didn't believe what he was reading. I mean you can't believe everything you read on twitter....right? Well, like any other source you must look into the facts deeper. We clicked a few links and checked a few websites and sure enough this drug was in danger of being pulled. At that point this guys mind was completely blown and he left the coffee shop in a bit of a daze.

The Follow-Up
Two days after our first encounter I saw this gentleman again at the coffee shop and he approached me with a glow on his face that had not been there two days before. He proceeded to tell me that he called on a doctor the afternoon after we had spoken and that he was going to be making a fairly large purchase of the drug that we found was in question. He mentioned to the doctor that he might want to hold off and that he had done some research during lunch that indicated problems with this drug and that it may get pulled. The doctor thanked him and he went on to his next customer. The real magic came the next day when the doctor called him back and thanked him for alerting him to the news before it officially broke. The drug did get pulled from the shelves and the doctor was thankful for his insights. On his next visit to that doctor he was not only given a larger chunk of his daily orders, but was given three referrals of whom that doctor called personally in front of him.

A Month Later
About a month has passed and I have seen this salesman since. He is a regular user of twitter for it's search and monitoring capabilities and he told me that his income has increased significantly due to the referrals that stemmed from this early information. He bought me lunch last time I saw him and I was happy to let him.

How have you seen social media tools change someone perspective? Are you using social media in your daily work flow?