Corporate Twit?
Published June 28th, 2007 in GeneralI was interested to read Niall Cook’s commentary about Twitter, a tool that lets users send short updates limited to 140 characters to members of their network. Cook can envisage a day where:
Every employee has an account on an internal Twitter-like service (for the purposes of this post, let’s call it Critter - Corporate Twitter)…Whenever someone they subscribe to provides an update on what they are doing, they get notified. They can also inform the system what they are doing, thus notifying their subscribers.
Imagine the situation: I tell Critter that I’m just about to start working on a proposal for ACME Widgets. One of my subscribers (who I don’t actually know) sees this and responds that they used to work at ACME Widgets - suddenly a connection has been made that could help me, that probably wouldn’t have otherwise been made. As a result we win the contract, and I get promoted and a huge bonus (OK, I made the last bit up).
We have an open plan office, so our version of Critter is when we overhear our colleagues conversation and butt in with suggestions. When you think about it, Critter would actually have a lot of practical applications. However…
Is Twitter going to end up as yet another tool that adds to the workload? Stephen Davies has a fascinating post about the number of inputs he receives each day in the form of emails, newspapers he reads, updates from social networking sites, blogs he reads (ignoring all the phonecalls and client requests in between!) He calculates that he receives the following shocking number of inputs:
1634 inputs on average on any given day.
11438 inputs on average in a week.
594776 inputs on average in a year.
There’s a very interesting theory that tools which are meant to lighten our workload by making us more efficient end up adding to it. For example, when introduced the hoover was meant to make life easy for housewives across the world, giving them back all the time they used to spend sweeping around the house. However as it turned out, the hoover created even more work for them. All of a sudden new standards of cleanliness were established and the free time afforded to housewives by the hoover was spent on other household chores! Somehow I can see Twitter creating an extra burden also.
Or perhaps we will take a leaf out of Fight Club and use Twitter to pen haikus to our workmates 
:
worker bees can leave
even drones can fly away
the queen is their slave
By the way, if anyone is losing the run of themselves trying to keep up with the latest Facebook, Twitter or God-knows-what-the-next-Internet-phenomenon-will-be, check out Trevor Cook’s free download - a free guide to social media (explains what all this blogging, social networking lark, etc is in plain english)
Technorati Tags: Niall Cook, Piaras Kelly, Stephen Davies, Twitter
7 Responses to “Corporate Twit?”
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Thanks for the link, Piaras. I think one of the reasons that Twitter doesn’t add to the workload is that it is so easy to tune out - most of the tweets that I see are simply background noise (I use the Mac application Twitterific - I do not want an SMS every time someone on my network has something to say, and I can’t be bothered to keep checking a website). This is exactly the same background noise that goes on in my open-plan office. I tune out of most of it until I pick up something that might be valuable.
I’m with you on this one Piaras. I really think it might end up the case of going back to simplicity… Or at least being subjective in the communication platforms we use.
We’re still in the ’shiny and new’ phase with most of these new technologies and there’ll come a time when you have to weigh up the pros and cons of each. I think Tom Murphy’s Hype Cycle is a good way of explaining this as I have felt myself go through the ‘peak of inflations expectations’, ‘trough of disillusionment’ etc etc. with a lot of Web two dot oooh tools.
Do I think each will have their uses? Yes, definitely. Should each one be used by everyone all of the time? I don’t think so.
In the comments to my post you link to David Brain states that the ability to “switch off and do” will be a core skill in PR and I agree. Actually getting the work done without losing concentration is becoming harder. We have so many different ways of communicating would **another** one actually make us more productive?
Anyway, off to work now. Things to do!
Piaras,
Good post. Here’s my 2 cents.
I think Cook’s example is overly simplistic. In it he has someone on his network he doesn’t actually know. But they used to work for ACME and then, BAM!, he get’s the account. The opposite could happen too. The person he doesn’t actually know could work for a rival agency. He find’s out what Cook is doing and, BAM!, his contact gets the account.
I think you’re right on target when you mention information and work overload. The “next big thing” will be one service that can aggregate all this information (Facebook, Twitter, blog comments, etc.) and then send it to the appropriate PR agent or marketer based on keywords included in the message that is left.
Michael,
My blog posts talks about an internal twitter, so how could someone who works for a rival agency know that I was about to start the proposal?
Stephen - You’re right, switching off is definitely going to be a core skill for most executives in the future.
Niall,
You’re right, I overlooked that. Sorry. My reading was overly simplistic.
Too much input, not enough time!
Great Critter!!!
We develop meemi.com (like twitter/jaiku Tumblr) and in the our future there is a corporate version of meemi but in Italy it’s very, very difficult to explain this new way of communicating.
Salut!