Twitter in the Enterprise

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Twitter in the Enterprise

By Martin English | December 27, 2007

When you see someone standing at a pod, you need to come face-to-face with that someone in order to start a conversation. When you see someone at a bar counter, you only need to come side-by-side. It’s the same at an art gallery, when you stand next to someone and break into conversation. The moral of the story is that side-by-side makes conversation easier, face-to-face can be threatening at the start, especially with strangers.

There is something about Twitter that is side-by-side empathising rather than face-to-face confronting.

Twitter has a role to play in the Enterprise, because:

1. It allows you to impose a publish-subscribe model on top of a bulletin-board-like system, which reduces noise and improves the signal as it were.
2. It allows you to publish (and to subscribe) in a platform-agnostic device-agnostic way, which keeps the communications process simple.
3. It supports teamwork and participation as a result, in a non-threating not-in-your-face way

As a result, there are many ways to get value out of Twitter in the Enterprise, ranging from problem-solving through to education and training, while improving overall communication and collaboration. Of course there are caveats. As with any other form of communication, Twitter can be misused. As happened with bulletin boards, it is theoretically possible for Twitter to degenerate into idle gossip, pump-and-dump, smut, whatever. But this time around we can stop it, far more easily than we could stop the desecration of bulletin boards. All we have to do is to stop following someone; all we have to do is to block that someone at the next stage.

Publish easily, from any device, anytime anyplace anywhere. Subscribe easily, again device and location and time agnostic. Keep the messages short. Watch each other, learn from each other. That’s what we can do with Twitter in the Enterprise. But we will only do it if we want to share, and if we have the discipline of learning.

UPDATE: from another post by from Confused of Calcutta:

Twitter seems to have merit when used as a communications vehicle in an emergency. What makes it different from other emergency communications vehicles? I think three things stand out.
One, it’s non-hierarchical, based on networks of people rather than command-and-control structures. Two, partly because of this non-hierarchy, and partly because it’s based on the web, it’s fast. Three, again because it’s based on the web and uses web standards, it’s cheap, efficient and platform/device agnostic.
Not surprisingly, Twitter proved popular during the California wildfires in October 2007, for all the reasons cited above. But perhaps a little surprisingly, the Los Angeles Fire Department decided to set up and use a Twitter feed as part and parcel of its emergency communications processes. I shall watch their usage with great interest. Thank you, whoever in the LAFD decided to be open about using such technologies.

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