Plumbers are on Twitter, sort of.

Earlier in the year there was much talk in Birmingham about getting people outside of the usual suspects to use social media tools, the poster child being Twitter, mainly prompted by Dave Harte, then of Digital Birmingham, who was tasked with getting more businesses to use digital stuff to do their business better. The example most often given was the traditional workman – builder, electrician, plumber, etc. Wouldn’t it be great if you could find one on Twitter, asked folks who spent all their time on Twitter.

The biggest stumbling block was why should they? Most of the work comes via word of mouth and their main form of communication is the mobile phone. Like the zine-producers of the 90s they’re already hooked into a powerful functioning social network based on reputation. What do they need new digital tools for?

Today we needed a plumber to have a look at the boiler, three days before Christmas during a cold snap. Plumbers are, as you might expect, a bit thin on the ground and Fiona’s usual source for such things was booked up until January. So, having built up a healthy following on Twitter over the last couple of years (as ever, that’s the critical part) I asked my network:

Within 10 minutes I had this response:

So what’s the difference between that and the standard list of “plumbers in your area”? These are recommendations, unmediated and unbiased, based on experience, from people who I trust.

Fiona, for it is her house and I have never been a home owner so should not be trusted with fixing parts of one, took this information from my social network and logged onto the social network where plumbers can be found. This social network is rarely mentioned on Mashable or Techcrunch but it’s really quite effective. You access it by dialing numbers on the telephone part of your mobile internet device and by talking to people using your voice. Of course, like all social platforms, it’s only as effective as the people you connect with through it but thanks to the head start we got from my Twitter network we were quickly tapping into Clive The Gasman‘s database. He was tied up but was able to recommend a friend who specialized in Fiona’s model of boiler. And the rest is more a story about fixing a boiler so I’ll spare you that.

A little later I tooted:

The plumbers were asking where she’d got their number from and rather than say “from a friend” she was being a bit cheeky. But it got me thinking. We spent too much time thinking about services and not thinking about the networks those services enable. Twitter allowed me to ask a few hundred people in my network to recommend a plumber in seconds. Those that fitted the criteria (living locally, trustworthy, knew a plumber, were online, could be bothered to reply) let me know in minutes. The telephone then allowed Fiona to query the plumbers network through Clive who took her criteria (make of boiler, symptoms, time required) and gave her a solution (call my mate). The two aren’t that different.

I used to joke that the Internet was just like the telephone only different and that we’d get used to it in the same way we’ve gotten used to having a mobile in our pockets at all times. While it’s more complicated than that it’s also kinda true. All these things are simply technologies and tools that enable us to connect with each other and, more importantly, ask questions. Sometimes the tech is old (garden fences spreading local news), sometimes it’s new. But the hive mind was always there.