Business Two Zero

The ”micro-blogging” service Twitter is heading towards the mainstream as a means to connect with a network of people you trust and admire for advice, and as a source of information.   It gets mentioned on the BBC, or even Fox News, but there are still plenty in the business community, or even the traditional IT and Communications communities who need some help in understanding what it really is and why it’s useful.  I was presenting to 60 people at a CMA event last week, and less than 10 hands went up when I asked who knew Twitter. I’ve been meaning for sometime to write some form of guide, but now one of my twitter friends has written one, so I don’t have to.

As a quick introduction, Wikipedia says:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.”

Twitter’s own website “blurb” says the New York Times calls Twitter “one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet.” TIME Magazine says, “Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app,” and Newsweek noted that “Suddenly, it seems as though all the world’s a-twitter.”

Dennis Howlett, over on IT Counts has said:

“Laura Fitton has written extensively about this based on her own experiences. When I was in Boston earlier in the month we met and were looking for restaurant recommendations. She Tweeted her 5,300 person network and within a minute, four recommendations came back. Voila! This may sound like a trivial example but I see it repeated over and over every day. Everything from “How do I answer this issue?” to “Help, I’m in trouble!” turn up and within minutes, people receive useful responses, often in the ‘direct message’ channel cof their respective networks. “

My friend Luke Razzell has just written an 11 page paper, which you can download here. The paper explains Twitter, with several examples, like Dennis’s above, of how you can get value from the service and your Twitter friends. It has good quotes, and plenty of links. It’s provided in PDF form to make it easy for you to use the web 1.0 method of emailing it to your friends and work colleagues, or even printing it out as a handout. It’s provided under the Creative Commons share alike licence, so feel free to share and distribute it as much as you like, providing you attribute Luke as described in the terms.

I wouldn’t suggest that your company has a “Twitter strategy” in the way that a few years ago you wouldn’t have had a strategy for a particular brand of email service. However, l do think that plenty of products will be incorporating the Twitter concept, which falls somewhere between Instant Messaging and email, and has enormous potential as a collaboration tool. SocialText have incorporated the approach with Social Signals, and it’s already in the roadmap for our product. I’d be very interested to hear about people’s experiences with Twitter and use of Luke’s guide.