Twitter is not just for Ashton and CNN
For those of us on the web it was hard to avoid the competition between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to see who could get 1,000,000 followers on Twitter first. (For anybody that has not seen the information on it, just Google "Ashton CNN" and you will get plenty of hits.) So big deal... a media giant and a celebrity are playing out on the internet... what does that mean to us?
Looking at it from an HR perspective what it has done is raise awareness of this social networking technology. Being able to send 140 character update to anyone who is tuned in might, on first glance, seem to be useless in an office environment. However, looking more closely, I see a couple of different uses.
The first one is all business. It could make a very useful type of alert system. Having a team or organization following each other would allow one person on the team to instantaneously be able to let the rest of the team know "Customer so-and-so is ticked off today. Be extra careful in your approach" or "Congrats to Tim on his new certification" or "The Colorado office is closing down now due to weather". Of course all of those things can be done through email or instant messenger, but both methods are restricted in different ways. We all get so many emails that it might be a couple of days before somebody actually realizes that the Colorado office was closing down. For instant messaging, the sender would have to know who to send the message to for it to be effective. The direct, follower initiated (push) approach of Twitter is much more compelling.
The second use is a little more people oriented although it definitely has a productivity side to it as well. One of the most common issues faced by teams that are globalizing is the lack of feeling connected to each other. It is not that they cannot get things accomplished or work productively, but there is a missing team dynamic. What tends to be missing is the "water cooler" time or the gopher effect of people popping up over the top of their cubes to talk to each other for a minute about an informal topic; "I went and saw that movie the other day and it was great" or "My child was in his first play last night" or "does anybody know a good plumber?". Besides those types of personal connections, there is also the missing element of being able to ask the people around you "does anybody remember where the website for that policy is?" or "what was the name of that person in accounting we were working with?". Being able to tweet these kinds of things would create a more personal environment and feeling of being more connected to the team. That in turn leads to reduced turnover and increased effectiveness of the team.
There are still lots of drawbacks and questions and probably many other productive uses still to be discovered. But thanks Ashton and CNN for bringing this to the forefront for us to consider all aspects more closely.
