As a business technology leader, you’ve probably been scratching your head over how to use Twitter for quite some time now, and perhaps you’ve already taken the dive into it and launched a corporate-named profile, connected with some customers and fans and begun sharing relevant content. But if you’re expecting Twitter to become useful for your employees in their day-to-day interactions with their co-workers, think again.
“We are not focused on internal (corporate) communications at all.”
Dick Costolo, CEO Twitter
That quote comes this week from Dick Costolo (@dickc), who has been Twitter’s CEO since 2010. Recently, his thoughts on the future direction of Twitter and its use for businesses and within businesses have been widely covered by media outlets. One of the latest stories covering his thoughts about Twitter for use in social business efforts in the enterprise caught my attention. This past Monday in a meeting with Wall Street Journal editors and reporters:
Enterprise service providers require a high degree of user authentication. That sort of control isn’t part of the Twitter platform or philosophy, according to Costolo. He said the company has no intention of forcing users to reveal their identities, which is a basic condition for operating in a corporate environment.
– CIO Journal, Wall Street Journal
I believe this decision makes sense, given Twitter’s desire to remain the open and “free speech” social network – unlike Facebook and Google. However, it leaves a large opportunity open in the enterprise market, which is becoming increasingly attracted to the benefits social business collaboration and social business technologies. This opportunity is being snagged up by the likes of Yammer, Jive, NewsGator, and others that mimic the micro-blogging benefits of Twitter mixed with the document and knowledge sharing organization of the likes of SharePoint and IBM Connections.
These social business tools are positioned well considering the current opportunity in enterprise IT.
Global enterprise IT spending is projected to total $2.7 trillion in 2012. This represents a 3.9% increase from 2011 spending of $2.6 trillion. According to the report the three hottest areas of Enterprise IT spending will be focused around cloud computing, social networking and mobile technology. (Gartner)
Costolo goes on to say that by allowing these other companies to cover the enterprise social business markets with their technologies, Twitter is now able to laser focus on “one crucial corporate function– marketing and advertising – which he said is going very well.”
