@CorporateAmerica

While scouring through Digg a few days ago I came across this article by Marcia Conner about business leaders’ refusal to integrate Twitter into their communication mix. For those of you who are unaware, Twitter is a micro-blogging service allowing users to send out “tweets” which are text-based updates of up to 140 characters in length. These “tweets” can be received on your laptop or phone in many different forms (sms, rss, web, email, applications). Having gotten a taste of the struggle between tech-friendly early adopters and “old-school” business leaders this summer during an internship, the article got me thinking about the real usefulness of Twitter in a corporate setting. In my opinion there are many advantages to being open to Twitter integration and I hope to explore a couple of these advantages in this post.

Twitter is paramount to helping us to be more efficient. The first thing it could do is rid us of the pain of receiving a deluge of responses to a group email about a topic that you have no interest in at all. I fell victim to this in the past week. An event was announced. Nothing special, a weekend gathering between friends. The invite was sent, I declined, and then, like raindrops announcing a storm on the horizon, my inbox started to fill up with responses, both on and off topic, distracting me from my work and quickly forcing me to read through each mail to check for importance and then delete. This went on for 3 days!!! As the great Tom Petty screeched, “Darlin’, too many words have been spoken.” If you are like me, this scene is all too common. Twitter could have easily been used in this instance to facilitate planning: One tweet to announce the plan, followed by subsequent tweets from responders about the topic. This probably would not have led to less banal discussion about what to wear, but at least it would have taken that outside of the inbox and allowed non-interested parties to follow passively instead of actively.

Helping to alleviate email clutter is one major advantage. However, the real beauty of Twitter lies in the fact that it is an exercise in conciseness. Something which many corporate leaders, along with the general population, deeply lack. 140 characters, the length of approximately 2 well planned out sentences, is all you have to work with when sending a “tweet.” This forces you to think about what you say and to make your words count. Unlike meetings that last hours where the important phrases are often lost in the jumble, with Twitter, the jumble is erased so that all that is left is the essential point that one is trying to get across. It is my belief that this sort of to-the-point conversation is much more effective and meaningful to the recipients because they feel that the sender values their time and is doing all he can to avoid wasting it. It also leads responders to give their answers in the same concise and direct method. Twitter allows for simple and efficient collaboration on a grand scale. This means that problems are solved much more quickly profiting both from the lack of useless banter and from an increased listener base. In bringing more people to the table, Twitter also destroys information silos and helps to break down barriers between teams within a firm. Twitter can be used to quickly tackle small problems that do not really warrant a meeting or conference call. This saves time so that more important matters can be discussed during meetings and more time can also be given to employees to be creative and more efficiently complete their assigned tasks.

It is perhaps prudent to note that one of the major problems with Twitter in corporate situations has to do with the question of security as, like most social media, it is relatively easy to post things yet somewhat difficult to control who has access to them. Twitter still being relatively young as a service, I am sure that these issues will be addressed as time progresses in order to make the service more attractive to businesses seeking a communication solution. In fact, a Twitter-like service, Yammer, launched 2 months ago, has already gotten recognition for addressing this concern by using corporate email addresses for enhanced security.

Given the makeup of the readers of this blog, this post may be akin to preaching to the choir. However, I also have faith that if enough of us speak our minds and push for new tech solutions to be integrated into the classic business model, we can show the laggers the benefits of these technologies and improve the adoption rates in business. No matter what your opinion, let me know what you think @chodge89.

PS. Stay tuned for a future post about how businesses are using Twitter to stay in touch with customers.