Marty St. George, Senior VP of Marketing and Commercial at JetBlue:

Our Twitter desk is a much more economical way to communicate with customers than handling emails or phone calls; you can handle for our five Twitter streams at a time vs. taking one phone call at a time. Normally we have seven people who spend time on the Twitter feed, and none of them full time. And we have multiple disciplines [participating], someone from TrueBlue, someone from corporate communications, etc; it’s all people who have different skills.

We built a database of most common questions and answers and it’s not often that people have to make a phone call to someone else within company and say “hey we got this tweet, what do we do with it?” People call it social media but we actually see it as the opposite of media; it’s direct communication with the brand on a one-to-one level.

(Via PR Communications)