When describing Twitter, I use a number of analogies. Most commonly, I think of Twitter as something like a slow-motion chatroom, or even a collection of away messages. I’ve got another one to add to this list: subject-only email.
This new analogy actually comes from my use of the iPhone, where the Twitter interface isn’t all that different from the mail interface. Twitter displays a sender and a brief message, which mirrors the sender and subject elements that you’d see in an email inbox. The main conceptual leap is that with email, there’s often a payload of information, tasks or spam waiting for you. With Twitter, you’ve only got the message (an an occasional URL as payload). This very fact is why I enjoy checking Twitter, and detest my inbox.
Thinking about Twitter this way helped me imagine enterprise integration of a Twitter-like service. I envisioned adding a “Twitter pane” to email clients – a pane for Twitter-like communication aside the inbox. This Twitter pane would act as an ongoing message thread away from the inbox, and its uses would be more conversational, informal and informative.
Imagine the scenario of a guest lecture. Let’s say you’re bringing in a friend to give a talk at your company. You send out the detailed email notice, and maybe a few follow ups. To attend this talk, your coworker must process the email, calendar it, and remember. If the talk is fairly last-minute, that coworker needs to be attentive to email information coming in just-in-time. In these models there’s no space for casual prompting – replying-all to mailing list to say you’re “going to hear Sally’s talk” is generally outside of norms. However, the enterprise Twitter affords a communicative third space – a place for coworkers to discuss, remember and remind one another of the lecture, by virtue of their discussion (and perhaps live-Twittering) of the event. In this sense, the enterprise Twitter surfaces the collective, prompting observers to action.
The enterprise Twitter gives rise to a new channel of communication that offloads from the inbox, and introduces new forms of communication. In offloading the inbox, one can imagine common/frequent para-social tasks like casual lunch invites moving to the Twitter channel. In fact, the public nature of Twitter might provide unique opportunities to meet others – it might be a little strange to invite a stranger lunch, but a “who is hungry?” message to the public might allow an ad hoc group to form. In new forms of communication, one can imagine messages that might not pass the listserv test (“Can someone help me with this Perl?”) getting passed to the semi-public of the enterprise Twitter. This presents the opportunity for new connections, more efficient work, etc.
The enterprise Twitter is most interesting for its potential vibrancy. Corporations have adopted internal social networks, and while these networks represent a more robust directory, I doubt many would qualify as particularly vibrant. This may be because corporate social networks don’t really address employee needs, rather addressing the needs of management in analyzing and diagnosing the “structural holes” of the organizations. An enterprise Twitter does address a very real problem – our ever-overstuffed, mismanaged inboxes – and it introduces a vibrant and relevant communication channel to the enterprise. The enterprise Twitter might just be the electronic, distributed water cooler of lore.
In implementing an enterprise Twitter, I’d argue that one would certainly want to follow the 140-character limit, allow private, public, and semi-public (conversant) threads. The enterprise Twitter would be inside-the-firewall, and would also follow the limited profiling pattern of Twitter (Name, Bio, Link). Political considerations should be addressed. Perhaps an arbitrary follow limit of 100 would be useful – this would prevent everyone from simply following upper management out of “respect.” Other potential benefits would include the enterprise Twitter as a news or safety channel (posts could go out regarding severe weather and so forth).
Although I’ve used the brand name Twitter thoughout this post, there’s nothing Twitter-specific about the practices I’m discussing. The enterprise Twitter is just a directory, sets of permissions, a messaging protocol and integration into the messaging client. If it sounds like a replication of email, the key differences are only the social affordances and the mental model.
This scheme is not without drawbacks. Primarily, the cost of designing and integrating messaging system is not trivial. I would respond that Twitter has introduced a new type of message, one that our systems and devices should support – therefore this integration is inevitable. Another drawback is distraction. Twitter is a notorious time waster, it is addictive, and it is always on. To this I would drawn an analogy of the modern inbox – it is never off, more corporations expect you to carry mobile devices – so a Twitter management strategy should fit into larger communications-management strategies.
Inside the enterprise, individuals rely on a variety of tools and strategies to stay in communication. None have the unique affordances of the enterprise Twitter, and few offer the common social bridging role of an enterprise Twitter. My thoughts are obviously preliminary, but if anyone is working on such a project or thinking of beginning one, I’d be very interested in your thoughts/feedback.
Tags: email, enterprise, social networks, twitter
I understand what you’re saying but I just can’t get past my anti-twitter bias as there are too many insipid, stupid tweets. I’ve seen creative use of it around the presidential campaign (though I’m a canuck) and some interesting real-time grassroots organizing, but in broad terms too many people use it for far too mundane updates.
An organizational twitter would need a lot of context to have a hope AND I’ve found explaining new social technologies like this (using, not necessarily viewing) to be challenging at best.
Twitter is still an early adopter technology and I don’t think it has the legs for much beyond that.
Then again, I could be completely wrong if it matures.
James, I think these are fairly common criticisms of Twitter, and I have a different take.
The reason I think an enterprise Twitter works is because it doesn’t require extensive mental modeling. Twitter has two elements – the sender and message, a pattern that users have mastered earlier.
To the context question, this is where I think Twitter excels. I’ve written about socially shared cognition – how I think that Twitter users are figuring out the rules and context through use. Instead of front-loading users with rules, the enterprise Twitter could be a simple, free space, one in which the “rules” are figured out inside of networks.
Some networks inside a company might only Tweet about research or interesting links, others might just Tweet about their lunches. As long as their tweets are within the norms of the group, then that’s fine. And I might argue that almost all conversation is good in the context of a enterprise Twitter.
What really gets me excited is that, unlike other enterprise products, the Twitter doesn’t require rules, training, or a complex roll-out. You’d just drop it in, and let the community start sorting it out.
[...] distill cutting-edge concepts into laymen’s terms has always been impressive and not surprisingly Fred’s done it again: suggesting we consider Twitter updates to be equivalent to reading subject-only [...]
Hey Fred,
Great post! (I love the look of the new blog, fyi). I have written a quick response on the Workstreamer.com/blog and will ping you offline. You’re touching on some hugely important stuff that we’ve been working on. Cheers!
Sam
Sam – thank you! I hope things are going well over at Workstreamer!
Thanks for the response Fred. I don’t entirely disagree with you and can see some benefit … if people were using it properly for contextually appropriate messaging.
My fear in enterprising it, is that it would mimic how it is often used in its broad application. Plus, I think it becomes a presentation issue for a lot of organizations.
For example, at my post-sec, there is no one intranet, but a series of disconnected web sites and then a bunch of stuff built on Lotus/Domino (don’t start me on that :-), so providing an easy-to-access place for people to be aware of group tweets might prove challenging.
I’m not sure you could count on standard users to set themselves up easily to receive tweets.
BTW, ever thought of allowing subscriptions to comments? I just happened to check back today because I like a lot of what you write about …
Cheers;
j
Enterprise Twitter could look a lot like MIT Athena Zephyr and to that degree I think it’s pretty much a proven model in terms of implementation inside a network. (i.e. I don’t think any of the features Fred has in mind cannot be done.)
And to put a different spin on James’ complaint, enterprise Twitter is the saviour of enterprise email, because it takes a lot of the short message traffic out of email, including, probably a lot of the “noise,” be it short, stupid, insipid social grooming, or departmental lunch announcements.
Twitter is just a better place for “X is going on in 20 mins time in Building Y.” Especially if you can reinforce the norm that Tweets are transitory. That was one great value of zephyr, there was no searchable archive, so that kept the channel “instant.”
My commmunications/development group (approx. 8 people) is using Twitter as our own little intranet. Before we would have these long weekly meetings and go around the table asking “What have you been doing?” Now we all say what we’re doing on Twitter and it’s working really well so far.
everything can become interesting after focusing on it for extended time. But vibrant?? I’m somehow ignorant it seems, still don’t see the benefit of disposable messages. Funny that corporations take twitter serious enough to worry about identity theft (http://xrl.us/oov4s). lol. Shows their vulnerably.
enterprise twitter is already working in many organizations with enterprise messaging systems and inbuilt grouping ability.
[...] Twitter, the enterprise’s third space [...]