What Is Zappos Doing?

As most brands debate the merits of and policies around blogging, some digitally-adept CEOs are further ahead--140 characters ahead to be precise. Yes, they're twittering. And with each tweet they're both mining and sharing insights, and communicating directly to the digital elite that they "get it" or who appear to be early adopters.

Online shoe retailer Zappos has almost 200 of its employees twittering. Zappos even tells you how many followers each employee has. The most popular twitterer is CEO Tony Hsieh with more than 2,700 followers. His tweets about what he ate for lunch, a conference call with MC Hammer, his passion for Red Bull, and going on Oprah. He also tweets to ask if people like the company's new TV ad, to ponder whether he should open Zappos.org, to lament waking up one day and finding his company server had gone down, and to tell all his followers to quickly twitter their favorite pair of shoes and company value so he could give some products away.

Hsieh believes in it so much he twitters about trying to convert people to it and he even posted an essay and instructions about why and how to twitter. (Sounds like twitter has its own brand advocate on its hands!).

This might not be for every CEO, but without a doubt, he's stepping up the game in cultural relevance. Granted, it's only one tactic from the brand-building arsenal, but it's an interesting first step to becoming more of an open brand-- one that's on-demand, personal, engaging and networked. If you care what Zappos is doing or other fav brands or friends, time to get twittering  to be in the know.