Twittering on

Today I was reading through a new piece for a forthcoming Melcrum research report about communicating with 'hard to reach' employees. The piece is from Aussie social media expert Lee Hopkins.

His comments about Twitter caught my eye. I must admit, from the little I've read about Twitter, I'd dismissed it in my head as some place people went to waste time chatting about nothing in particular. Earlier this year I read a flurry of blog conversations saying 'what's the point?'

So I was intruiged to see Lee talking about Twitter as a great way to keep in touch with remote workers who might have no access to a computer but do have mobile phones. I've not got my head around exactly how it works yet, but the idea seems to be that you set yourself up a profile page, send updates to your page via SMS, email or instant messaging, and Twitter instantly delivers the updates to specific, signed up users. Combine that with the fact that mobile phones can now connect to the internet, and you could send text links to on line videos on Youtube too.

So, I find myself in the same place I was with Facebook at the start of this year. I've suddenly switched from thinking this Twitter thing must be a pointless waste of space to thinking it sounds worth getting to know ... but I don't quite get it yet.

As with Facebook, I've decided the best thing to do is get in there and try it out for myself. I've just set up an account, thought of a 'this is the type of person who might be on Twitter' name, typed in Melcrum web guru Alex Manchester, and there indeed he is. So far so good. But I'm not quite sure where to go next.

Anybody using Twitter for work-related purposes yet? Or have any 'these are things to watch for' tips before I dive into using it and do things in my flurry of initial enthusiasm that I'll regret later??

Sue

Comments

[Alex Manchester]

I've joined recently as well, Sue, also after seeing Lee Hopkins use it. When Twitter was first launched I was quite negative, and I'm not traditionally a first adopter anyway. But the more I look into it, it's the idea of "ambient presence" that is interesting to me. I also think my use of Twitter has also has been spurred on by use of Facebook status updates (which are quite similar). Perhaps that broke down the barrier I had with it.

Plus, over time, quite a surprising amount of personality comes out of such short messages (from those you are following).

I do like it, although I don't use it that much, maybe once or twice a day. And it's mainly only people I've met through work who are on it. Perhaps my favourite aspect is being able to update from the web, my phone, and the IM-style interface on both my work/desktop computer and laptop at home. Very handy.

Another example of its use in business, although maybe not Twitter itself, is real time updates. For example sales teams - dispersed or otherwise - just getting updates pop up on their screens about various clients. It's very simple, very quick and easy to update your network, doesn't require much interaction, but keeps people in the loop all the same.

As with many social media tools, once you strip away the flash names and hype, and look at the underlying functionality, it's easier to see uses for business.

[Lee Hopkins]

G'day Sue & Alex,

Indeed, Alex's idea of use within sales teams is a brilliant use of the technology.

I remember Jessica Rabbit's famous line, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way." :-)

[Fiona Gibson]

I've not used Twitter but as someone who has to deal with how to communicate IT and other outages, I wonder whether this is worth looking into...

Fiona (the Laggard)

[Sue]

You are so not a laggard, Ms Gibson - you were the one who dragged me onto Facebook!

Both the sales and the IT outage updates are interesting ideas.

As I recall my thought process went when If first encountered blogs, RSS, social networking, second life, I'm now thinking 'hmm, definitely interesting - now let me see who's actually using it in practice and what it's doing for them'.

If anyone comes across a fellow comms person using this in their organisation, send them this way...

[Alex Manchester]

I'd be keen to know of some official uses as well, either with Twitter or it's Google-owned counterpart, Jaiku.