TechCrunch has an excellent post on the Twitter adoption cycle. I’ve certainly noticed the same pattern described there in my own use of Twitter. I signed up made sure it worked with a few friends, didn’t totally get it and gave up for a while. Reading blogs like TechCrunch let me know that lots of people were using Twitter, but I couldn’t really get into it.
This started to change for me when I went to the Gartner Portal and Collaboration Summit. There I saw how by using hashtags (a mechanism by which users can categorize tweets so others can follow a conversation) an interesting side conversation can be conducted during presentations in an unobtrusive way. Some sessions even included the speaker(s) responding to tweets that were hashtagged at the conference or session.
My interest in Twitter really went up during the recent disputed election in Iran. By tracking the hashtag “#iranelection” it was possible to get raw updates from people actually involved in the protests and get some sense of what was going on. It was even more interesting to watch Twitter in conjunction with watching the cable news channels. One couldn’t help but feel like the news channels were lagging, reporting things that had been stated on Twitter hours before.
So, how does this apply in the enterprise? It’s funny, because the enterprise is one of the first use cases where I actually understood the value for what is now being called microblogging. The more I think about it, I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen greater adoption already within businesses. To me, the benefit is obvious for mid to large companies where you often need to know the answers to simple questions, but don’t know who to ask, or where short messages need to reach a wide group of people. A corporate microblogging solution can provide the ability to ask questions like the following:
- Who knows how to set up the printer on the fourth floor?
- Who do I talk to about requesting a new monitor?
- Who’s worked with customer X before?
It would also provide the ability to communicate corporate information such as the following:
- The all-hands starts in ten minutes in the main conference room. For remote employees, the webcast is at http://tinyurl.com/wtnaya
- Benefits open enrollment ends tomorrow! Please make your changes.
- Fire drill today in building 12 at ~3pm
Of course, I’m only scratching the surface here. Like Instant Messaging before it, it’s surprising how useful this deceptively simple tool can become. The only problem with Twitter itself is its public nature. Most messages can be read by anyone who knows the username of the writer. This isn’t ideal for enterprises that may not want such universal access by non-employees. It also limits the types of messages that can be shared to those that can be publicly viewed.
Fortunately, there are microblogging platforms that allow for a more controlled situation than wide-open Twitter. A few of us within Perficient have been experimenting with Laconica which supplies a Twitter compatible API. The api is important, because it allows clients built for Twitter to work with this internally hosted solution.
It’s also expected that the major vendors will be providing microblogging in their collaboration platforms in the near future, so it’s just a matter of time before these technologies take root in the corporate environment.
