Twitter in the Enterprise

For a while now I’ve been keping an eye out for blog posts on the topic of Twitter, more specifically Twitter in the Enterprise.  Today I came across one by Jevon MacDonald over on the Fast Forward blog and it inspired me to write what I think about the whole thing.

For a while now I’ve thought Twitter in the Enterprise would be a good thing.  We’ve knocked about a few ideas on an internal blog but nothing has really come of it yet.  A couple of us are looking into trying to use MS Communicator and exposing the “note” and it’s history in a SharePoint webpart.  We’ve also talked about what could Twitter.

  • Colleagues - My current note is, “Well impressed, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TpDxLfjHc&eurl” and a friend of mine has “All the ducks are swimming in the water, again!”
  • Managers - “Worrying about the lack of engagement my team have!”
  • Lab instruments - “I’ve finished my run now!” or “I’ve run out of mobile phase!”
  • Meeting rooms - “I’m empty right now.” or “I’m full until 2pm!”
  • Vending Machines - “Damn, I’ve just run out of Mars bars.”
  • Cafeteria - “Just cooking up Carribean stew and dumplings.”
  • IT Support - “Server X is going down tonight.”
  • Vendors - “Stuck in traffic on the M25. I hate driving to Kent!”
  • and the list goes on…

Hopefully you can tell from some of those examples that I’m definitely a proponant of Twitter or twitter style communication in and around the workplace.  I also started thinking about how we could sell this to the masses and get them on board.  I came up with a list similar to Jevon’s before I realised that most people in the workplace couldn’t give a flying haddock about twitter, much like they wouldn’t have a clue if a wiki came and smacked them round the face in an homage to all those happy-slapping videos people are putting up on YouTube.

So where does that leave us?  Do we just not bother with having Twitter in the workplace?  Of course not.  What we do is build something very quickly, very cheaply, get it out to the evangelists, hope their enthusiasm rubs off and then watch the thing explode in a frenzy of tweeting social lubrication that it is.  If it doesn’t then we haven’t lost anything other than a bit of time trying and to be honest we’ll probably save double that time by not hypothesising what on earth the benefits of Twitter in the Enterprise are.

Thanks to Suw for the “social lubrication” thing.  I liked it therefore I used it!

For a slightly more constructive take on things try…

4 Comments

    • Steve Blamey
    • Posted February 5, 2008 at 11:23 am
    • Permalink

    If you want to get some quick, private Twitter style communications you could try installing wordpress and the prologue template (http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/).

    • gleavem
    • Posted February 5, 2008 at 12:37 pm
    • Permalink

    Most people are so addicted to Facebook, including “status” I can’t see how it would fail to suceed…unless of course it was preened and poked and messed about with (and too many rules enforced) so that it became a nightmare to use like so many corporate sofwares!

    I especially like the mmeting room idea!

    • theshed
    • Posted February 5, 2008 at 1:40 pm
    • Permalink

    @Steve Yeah, I saw that the other day and had a little play around with it. It didn’t come as a surprise that someone had just reskinned a piece of blogging software to do something similar. At the minute we are trying to work within the boundaries of our corporate infrastructure. I don’t think it would be too difficult to reskin something in SharePoint to do the same but we’ll see where we get to. Cheers for the heads up though.

    @Michelle - The joys of corporate software! Getting the people to tweet is the technically easy bit, but the culturally challenging bit. The meeting rooms and machines will be the other way round.

  4. Good post. But as per http://www.texttechnologies.com/2008/02/11/enterprise-twitter/ , I think some more features are needed before Enterprise Twitter takes off, mainly in terms of targeting messages to specific groups of users.

    CAM

2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

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