With all the buzz about Twitter as a customer service tool and many well known companies diving in, you might be asking yourself, should your company use Twitter to connect with your customers. There are a number of things to consider as you answer this question but the most important (by far) is “are your customers using Twitter?”

If they are not, that will affect how you use Twitter. You can’t connect to people who are not there.

Mashable estimates about 12% of the US population will be using Twitter by the end of 2009 with 18% by 2010.

Consider where you do business. Some states have many more people using Twitter. For example, here is a ranking of the top 10 states in the USA based on their Twitter users

1. California
2. Texas
3. New York
4. Flordia
5. Illinois

With all of this in mind, what Telecom Carriers are using twitter at all, and who is using it as a traditional one way push marketing tool.

Carrier Support Twitter Accounts
@askintelletrace            Intelletrace Inc.
@verizonsupport           Verizon Business
@sprintcare                    Sprint
@talktoqwest                  Qwest Communications

Carriers with Marketing ONLY or unknown usage.
@lvlt                                Level3 – Unused Many Followers no tweets
@attnews                       AT&T – Marketing
@xolearning                  XO – Marketing
@Globalcrossing          Global Crossing - Marketing
@integra_cares            Integra Telecom – Many Followers no tweets
@grandecom                 Grande Communications – Marketing
@abovenet                    Abovenet Communications – Many Followers no tweets

No Twitter Accouts Found at all
Yipes
Electric Lightwave
Cogent Communications
Time Warner Telecom
360 Networks

Do the carriers with no twitter presence even know they are being talked about?  Are the Carriers with only a marketing presence doing a traditional PUSH method or are they actually using it as a tool? For the few Carriers Intelletrace, Verizon Business, Sprint, and Qwest Communications, my Congrats for being a telecommunications leader in support.

A great example is a post recently sent out here.  Are you following yet?  It describes an outage with Level3 and Verizon Business.

I have focused on terrestrial telecommunication carriers.  If you want your information to be added to this post, I will be happy to do it at any time.  Just Tweet me @dzerbe or Post a comment to this blog.

The IRIS payload from Cisco is carried by the Intelsat 14 satellite launched on 23 November 2009. The payload was powered up in orbit on 1 December, followed by network testing beginning on 17 December 2009 before the IRIS capability became operational.

Unlike previous satellite communications (SATCOM), IRIS allows the routing of IP packets in orbit across satellite beams. NC3A cites one of the advantages of IRIS over conventional satellite technology as being that it can route data between ground users covered by different satellite beams in a single satellite hop, thus reducing transponder use and increasing efficiency. Furthermore, the payload regenerates the received signals, improving the end-to-end signal performance and allowing a reduction in the size of sending and receiving terminals. IRIS will provide users with a mobile network allowing them to connect and communicate how, when and where they want, and that continuously adapts to their requirements without reliance on a predefined, fixed infrastructure, according to NC3A.   It essentially forms the backbone of a network for mobile Internet access anywhere in the world. Finally, the software of the router and onboard modem can be upgraded from the ground, increasing the flexibility of the system to implement future waveform and router standards.

NASA’s T.J. Creamer did the first tweet directly from space. At approximately 3:38 a.m. EST Friday, he wrote the first message ever posted directly to Twitter. “Hello Twitterverse!,” wrote Creamer, under the user name Astro_TJ.

NASA astronauts have posted Twitter messages in the past, but they first had to be relayed to Mission Control. Now, residents of the ISS can post directly to the micro-blogging site thanks to a new, direct Internet connection.

Creamer’s Twitter followers are becoming legion. He had about 5,000 followers on Friday, but that number had mushroomed to more than 22,000 as of Sunday.