Like most old farts, I was reluctant to get into Twitter. Receiving Tweets struck me as a great way to invite more trivia and continuous interrupts into my crowded life. I don’t care what Tim O’Reilly had for breakfast or Dave Snowden thinks of his hotel room. I didn’t want to know.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, invest two and a half minutes of your time here:
If that’s not enough, here’s Twitter founder Jack Dorsey explaining how people and organizations are using Twitter.
A month ago Marcia Conner asked me, “What’s it going to take to get you onto Twitter?” Marcia is twenty years younger than I but twenty years smarter, so when she speaks, Jay listens. “It’s the most productive learning technology I’ve ever used.” Skeptical or not, I had to try it.
When I draw a blueprint of an ideal enterprise learning environment, it always includes an expertise location function. You see, lots of corporate learning comes from asking other people how to do things. The trouble is, we ask the person closest to us rather than someone likely to have the right answer. Getting blank looks instead of viable answers or, worst yet, getting the wrong answer, is a prime means of frittering away time on the job.
IBM has long been my model of getting this one right. When talking with IBMers about something esoteric, more than once they’ve told me, “Oh, John X is the person you need to talk with. Let check whether he’s got a minute.” An application named Blue Pages helps IBMers ferret out who knows what; a simple presence awareness app shows whether they are reachable at the moment and where.
Cool system but you probably don’t have one, do you? Even at IBM, and I’m several years out of date so this could have changed, Blue Pages wasn’t flawless. To make it work, everyone had to feed the beast. Many people didn’t update their profiles. I can imagine other perils: being the top expert in a hot area would feel like being the only girl at the frat party — too much attention.
A corporate Twitter network could overcome some of these difficulties. For one thing, Twitter grows a self-organizing social network. Nothing to fill out. When a question is thrown out to the network, people with time and energy can volunteer at answer. No more inundating the expert.
Twitter is growing like topsy but I expect many corporations will drag their feet on “allowing it.” A corporate Twitter network puts power in the hands of the troops, and that’s threatening to an old-timey officer corps. Not that this will stop young workers from bringing it into the workplace with them.
In early 1999, I told Cisco’s eLearning group that IM was going to become a powerful learning support tool. Unbelievable. IM was kid stuff. Yet three or four years later, IM was de rigeur at Cisco and it helped knit the organization together as it mushroomed in size. I expect Twitter clones to follow a similar trajectory.
My initial skepticism arose because I had put Twitter in the wrong category. Twitter operates in real time. It’s like a stream going by. It’s only a distraction if you’re watching it. It’s not something you go back to. It’s now or never. Unlike blog posts that will live online forever, Twitter is written in disappearing ink.
Twitter’s like have a private radio station that’s run by the people you care about. (You select who you want to follow in Twitter.) You’re a DJ there, too. Cut it on and you feel closer to those who are sharing their experiences. Need advice? You throw it out in the open. Trolling for interesting stuff. Wait a moment; something will float by.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey says Twitter is for connecting people through real-time updates that spark conversation and expose trends. I sense that it may be bigger than that. Just as blogs give us all a free, personal printing press to the internet, Twitter provides an instant, real-time connection to the people you want to be connected to.
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13 comments ↓
Jay,
I’ve gone back to Twitter 3 times in the last year trying to find a way to make it meaningful in my life and I still haven’t found a reason to use it. The last time I tried it was 9 days ago. My twitter status since has been:
“I need an HTML only Twitter badge for http://technogenii.wordpress.com, alternatively a widget - Twitter isn’t very useful to me otherwise!!”
At the moment, I can’t integrate it into something more meaningful. I can also plug my Twitter status into Plaxo & Facebook but I find that this is a duplication of Status. One of my friends wrote on his Plaxo status: “Steven is dumbfounded at the number of networking sites he has to tend to…” and I share this completely.
Linked In and Plaxo have the “What are you doing right now” feature as well, as does Facebook. I find that when I’m on these sites, I get a bigger picture of what people are doing, not just a one liner. Facebook I really reserve for my social life where as Linked In and Plaxo I use more in my professional life.
Recently, a friend of mine called me to say “hey, my Plaxo weekly updates sent me some blog posts from you. Wow - you’re really blogging!” and he realized we had many more interests in common then he thought. I guess could have written on my Twitter: “Kristina is blogging about…”
The point I’m trying to make is that I think there needs to be more real integration of these social networking sites. There is so much duplication and not enough specialization. Twitter is extremely specialized. It is the Status application. Other social networking sites should not just have a Twitter plug-in but rather team up with Twitter so that the status on their sites be fed in by Twitter. Then it might be less redundant. Then I might actually find it more useful. But on its own, knowing what people are interested in without seeing the bigger picture is but decontextualised sound bites to me.
(FYI, I can’t see the video though. Maybe the problem is on my end? But I found it by being sneaky and looking at the code - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o)
Kristina
Jay, it’s a bit like a microblog; you can just read, or you can respond. A bit more immediate, so it approaches a conversation. Guess there’s a continuum. Great post!
Yep, it’s a channel that captures the ‘flow’ element of 2.0. It’s part of the infrastructure.
For all the ‘connectedness’ elements it brings (e.g. business networking), it’s also extremely therapeutic from a social aspect. It’s where we vent and get a reality check on life (and often get support for personal events — birthdays, losses, etc.).
The value/limitations of online social exchanges was best described in a piece from one of my peeps today: http://twurl.nl/nzn76m
See particularly ““There’s a bit of a knee-jerk reaction that face-to-face is the gold standard,” Erickson says. She argues that online exchanges sometimes can be better. Because your online profile remains accessible, you can make a stronger, longer-lasting impression—and perhaps connect in person later. Conference attendees, for example, can learn about each other beforehand, making their face-to-face networking more targeted and effective than in the days of exchanging business cards around the punch bowl.”
For some reason, the YouTube video you are embedding is not loading in either Firefox or IE on my machine.
There is an enterprise-compatible microblogging system in the works, Identi.ca.
It’s federated, which means you can be part of your company’s instance (which I think is critical for enterprise adoption - companies need to retain their knowledge to an extent, not trust a third-party private company to store it for them) but also subscribe to people on other instances. It’d be like having Jaiku for your company, but also being able to get friends’ Plurk messages.
Great video and post, thanks for your perspectives. I’m sharing this on our enterprise blog thread about internal use of twitter
Random glitches are a plague. The imbedded video worked when I made the post. When I opened it up just now, the code had changed. What sort of gremlins are creeping around, altering my WordPress posts? Anyway, the original is restored.
Twitter, or just about any technology, may not be your thing. That’s not good or bad. It just means your context is different from others’. People who twit on their phones don’t need much integration to get something out of it.
Marina, thanks for clarifying what identi.ca is about. I noticed it, ironically, on a post by Dave Winer on Twitter this morning.
Does anyone have a case example of Enterprise Twitter or are we all just talking/Tweeting about it?
Jay - I just saw this post and thought of you: 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business by Chris Brogan
[http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/]
Hope it’s helpful!
Kristina, great suggestion. Thanks.
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