Thoughts on Twitter and Business for Enterprise 2.0 Conference

Yesterday I was on panel at Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and my fellow AppGap blogger, Patti Anklam. Here is what I planned to share at the session. I ended up saying most of it but there was not time or it did not fit the conversation to say all of it.

There have been many creative business uses of Twitter and a lot have been written about them so I will not repeat that stuff here. In these comments I am going to share my own personal experiences of twitter with business. I mainly do two things for business. I serve as a paid journalist bloggers for two blogs on enterprise 2.0, FastForward and AppGap, and I provide consulting to firms and individuals on their business blogs and other uses of social media. I will close with Twitter’s impact on these two business activities.

First, I want to make a confession. I used to make fun of Twitter. I compared the endless stream of 140 character bits to Luis Borges' Library of Babel where, as the Wikipedia conveys his work published in 1941 conveys that, the "order of the books is random and apparently completely meaningless. Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the inhabitants believe that the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent thought. This glut of chaotic information was leaving the librarians in a state of suicidal despair. But somewhere there was a book, the Crimson Hexagon, that contains the log of all the other books and the librarian who reads it is akin to God."

When I made fun of the chaotic stream of chatter on Twitter, many of my fellow bloggers rose to its defense and urged me to join their conversations. Finally, I meet with several at a conference in Vegas and they showed me the Crimson Hexagon for Twitter, TweetDeck. Now I could bring some order to the chaos. I could segment the people I am following into manageable and meaningful subgroups. I began to use it more actively and discovered that it served several functions that I will describe. But I had to go to another tool to find value. One study said that Twitter provides the 37th best interface to its own data. This is one of two potentially fatal flaws that may send it to join Friendster.

First, I discover a lot of interesting ideas. I like the human filter aspects. When I first started my blog over four years ago, people knew I blogged and would email me interesting stuff to blog about. I said I had a human RSS feed and rarely had to go to mechanical RSS readers. Now Twitter serves this purpose even better as people I respect tweet about an article or blog post with links. As Dion Hitchcliffe said in a tweet, Twitter can serve as a useful filter as he would rather have info endorsed by people he knows. Twitter has become my main source for blog content but only through tweets that point to longer pieces.

Second, I use Twitter search as an alternative to Google search. It has not replaced Google, just supplemented it. Twitter search is for what is happening right now and Twitter makes it easier to engage the person sharing the content. I find it good for niche topics like agile development or cloud computing. However, Twitter’s range is fleeting and Google is still more comprehensive.

Third, like my blog, I use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I retweet interesting links I find from others and tweet things I find myself. Then I can go back to them to read later and perhaps blog on them. However, this is fleeting and exposes the second of the potentially fatal flaws with Twitter. It dumps its data index after three months so you cannot go back and find stuff beyond the rolling three month window. If I tweet about this conference or record links I had better convert the information to another format if I want to save it. In addition, the interface makes it hard to go back more than a few weeks away. Someone needs to do for Twitter archiving what TweetDeck did for immediate use or a better micro-blogging system might take over. I found my blog to be very useful in preparing for what I would say on this panel. Twitter was much less useful and only helped with stuff that happen in the past week.

I also used my blog to record my notes on the excellent conference sessions by Dion Hinchcliffe and Mike Gotta. But I used Twitter to let others at the conference know that they existed and received over 38 RTs of these alerts and a few came with nice additional comments. There was also a spike in page views for the blog with many coming from Twitter. The two channels complemented each other. Twitter does not replace blogs.

Fourth, like with blogs, I meet new people on Twitter and better engage with people I already know. I also can create greater awareness for what I write in other channels, primarily blogs. Twitter does not replace blogs because there is only so much you can say in 140 characters but it is good way to point to more meaningful content.

So how has this affected my business? First, as I mentioned before, it supplies many stories for my journalist blogger role. Second, I now advise my blog clients on how to use Twitter to compliment their blogging efforts. Just as I experiment with blogs to better serve my clients, I have been experimenting with Twitter for the same purpose.

I have learned a lot and that could be another session. But here is one example. With blogs it is important to think in terms of key words as one of the best ways to expand your audience is through search. You need to speak to search engines through these key words but not in a gaming way. You will (and should) get in trouble for this as HabitatUK found out. With Twitter, you can apply the same key word strategy but instead on focusing on choosing the right words for blog titles and other content, you focus on the wording of tweets and use hashtags in a meaningful way. I find that I often get new followers directly related to a hashtag I recently used.

But of course you need to provide some value to the readers you attract or it is a waste of time. I you are just offering another get rich on Twitter scheme you will only attract fellow travelers.

Twitter is currently raising the slope of unrealistic expectations for business and consumers. It has great potential but it needs to continue to improve or someone else will take micro-blogging to the next step.

Comments

[John Tropea]

Hey Bill,

I haven't used Google Reader for a long time. It seems all the bloggers I'm subscribed to auto-tweet their blogs posts.
Plus on twitter I get to have regular chat with them. RSS readers have their purpose, but they are not an ecosystem. I can only read in an RSS Reader, I can't post or comment, it's just not alive like Twitter.

And I don't have to go through all my posts like in an RSS Reader, it's like they are already filtered for me. If they are important they will resurface.

Blogs are more about content, filtering and reviewing stuff, and now Twitter filters that to another level (your network) so you just read the best blog posts.

Mind you, when I get back from 2 weeks holiday, I would probably consult Google Reader, rather than Twitter.

del.icio.us could of had a Twitter element. When I save in del.icio.us why not let me decide whether I want to add that link to my del.icio.us blog. Same with Flickr, when I save a photo, maybe I want to showcase it in my Flickr blog.

As you say Twitter is good as a help engine. Google is good for facts and ranking based on citations, but what about searching my RSS Reader or Twitter for ranking based on my network. And I can also ask questions to my network and reframe stuff to my context...I cannot have a conversation with Google results.

Here are my thoughts, see the end of the post about crowdsourcing your friends using facebook
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/05/18/sensemaking-pkm-and-networks/

Here's my review of help engines
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/04/01/social-search-help-engines-and-sense-making/

In my post about twitter 3 years on I compare Twitter to blogs, forums, etc.. (see sections "Different to blogging", and "So why are people more likely to tweet than to blog?")
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2009/03/04/twitter-3-years-on-and-why-its-the-killer-app/

Basically people that blog also tweet, but people that tweet don't all blog. My dad uses facebook status updates, but not facebook notes.
That's why I think microblogs will take off in the enterprise more than blogging. Especially when you can get quicker ROI eg. ask a question in the microblog network and get an answer.
I think project/team communication blogs will take off more than personal blogs.

The killer thing about microblog networks is I can do everything (I can link blog, share thoughts, have a conversation, read links people share) all in the same space...most of all I'm connected to people. Not saying the blogosphere is not like this, but it's not as explicit, and takes a lot of work to build.

I guess Twitter blurs broadcast and personal communications - in the same text box I publish thoughts and links, but also have personal conversations.

[bill Ives]

John - great thoughts as always and I certainly agree. I rarely use RSS readers anymore because of twitter. I also do not use Facebook much for the same reason. However, i rarely used RSS before Twitter since people used to send my interesting stuff thru email. No they do not I guess because of twitter. I like the conversational aspects of twitter but I doubt it would have all of its value without links as only so much you can say in 140 char. You cold not have made this comment in twitter but I can ink back to it. I will check out you links as soon as I get a chance.

[John Tropea]

I agree. Microblogs and blogs are complementary. Nowadays Twitter is the pulse and leads you to blogs. Before hand we had RSS Readers, delicious, digg, or lucky people like you who get fed emails. Actually when you think of it digg is similar to twitter in a link blogging way. But the killer thing about Twitter is it's not just about link blogging, I can converse, connect, chat with people...it really fills the human need of social interaction so nicely.

What is my web ID, is it my email, blog, Facebook or Twitter?

[bill Ives]

John I went from making fun of twitter to an addict because it allows for connections around content that is meaningful to me. But it does not replace blogs just opens a new channel. Thx Bill

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