It did not take long at all for Framingham, MA-based retailer Staples.com to recognize the potential of its Twitter account, and turn it into a vehicle for marketing insights and customer relations, as well as a choice sales engine. As an example, consider the fact that on last year’s “Black Friday”, (the day after Thanksgiving that is said by many to be the biggest shopping day of the year both online and offline) a coupon code at Staples.com somehow malfunctioned. A mild panic ensued.

There were thousands of customers online who really wanted to use that coupon in order to take further advantage of holiday sales. The use of the Staples Twitter account worked wonders in controlled all the comments of upset shoppers who could not get through via telephone. People began to send tweets about the subject, and Staples tweeted back, answering questions and smoothing things over by doing a little damage control.

The Staples brand now has 32, 200 followers, and the company has hired 20 Twitter representatives to tweet back to Staples customers. In order to encourage consumers to follow the brand, Staples has had many sweepstakes programs where new technology products were given away. In order to enter the contest, people had to follow the company on Twitter. At times, Staples required a retweet as a method of entry, but to date the company has not settled on any one way to hold a contest as an initiative.

Staples cannot yet compete with brands of choice to Twitter users like Zappos.com and Dell, both with millions of followers. Yet Staples is using the information from Twitter in order to train employees to help the brand’s tweets popping up on a regular basis. They wanted a virtual voice that was warm and soothing, like a real person, and this is what they got. Twitter representatives for Staples help their followers find the things they are looking for, and then assist them in buying the item or items by providing a link to the web page where these items are. Staples is also collecting tweets that are relevant to their merchandising and marketing plans for the future.

Studies by Edison Research have shown that people who use Twitter are more apt to interact with brands than those people who use other social networks in order to interact with different brands. Fifty-one percent of Twitter users said that they follow one brand at the very least on that social network.