Being a software developer in a previous life (when there was only 1 version of the web, and networking either meant CAT V cabling or getting drunk with you work friends!), I’ve become so excited by the possibilities of Twitter that I find myself spending considerable time researching this amazing new product. From an initial position of scepticism, I am now well and truly convinced that Twitter will change the way we communicate and do business with each other.
It’s grown to a reported 6million+ global users and with 10,000 new accounts a day, its arguably reached that magic point in its life called ‘critical mass’.
There are no doubt, some seriously concerned people at Google right now. Potentially Twitter could become the defacto web landing page.
The global economy lies in tatters, traditional business sectors are seriously screwed, no-one’s lending money and, I think its fair to say, its not going to get much better for many many months.
But can Twitter really help a company to re-discover the importance of their customer? Conceptually the answer is yes. Twitter facilitates immediate, direct and well thought out interaction, the likes of which we have not seen before. In its vanilla form, however Twitter may too general to be used as an effective corporate communications tool. If messages could be sent to a more targeted selection of your followers then it could be a very powerful. Perhaps it’s too early in the life of Twitter to consider leveraging it to provide service to existing customers, but as a cost effective way of delivering a message it’s power should not be under estimated and companies need to think about clever ways of leveraging this tool (JUST received this link via Twitter – Top 10 Companies using Twitter!!! Maybe I’m wrong….)
It’s clear that Twitter is already being thought of as a tool that can generate new business and in some cases, I have no doubt companies are making dollars from Twitter. But what would need to happen for this tool to be considered as THE way of finding new customers and generating business? Firstly and most importantly, the quality of the lead. There are 3rd party apps out there that help you develop your Twitter audience. But exactly how qualified are these leads? I can automate the following of a group of people based on a limited set of attributes, and hope the follow me back. That’s about as complex as it gets.
How about if I could say “Find me all the day traders in London, that follow Mr x, have 30+ followers themselves with a follow/following ratio of between 0.7 and 1.3″ I’d say that was much more targeted. Taking that a step further, what about a search tool that indexed users web links and previous tweets in order to make that available to your search? Secondly, the User Interface needs work. Now I know apps like TweetDeck are dealing with this, but Twitter really needs a way of organising conversations (think iPhone text messaging). I read (again on Twitter) that a certain eBay founder (Pierre Omidyar) is working in a Twitter client called Ginx that looks have addressed this issue.
Wow, food for corporate thought!
Someone I follow on Twitter sent me an @ reply wondering about this along slightly similar lines.
The question: How can you add value, reveal personality and build networks, was posed in the context of using Twitter to build your profile. Of course a profile can be a personal one or a corporate one.
From my time a while back working in corporate internal communications (before Twitter took hold)it would have been an invaluable internal communication tool – much better than e-mail as Twitter not only makes it easier to broadcast information but makes it easier for people to find it in the first place.
Having said this, corporations would need to have secure internal ‘Twitter Hubs’ or all sorts of ‘corporate secrets’ could find themselves broadcast to the world! However, the saving in server space and shorter time spent creating Tweets rather than e-mails might be attractive to large corporates. No more huge e-mails taking up loads of employee time to compose and then sitting on servers bunging up space.
If companies can advertise and promote themselves well internally, the external communication follows easily.
Just a thought, will the day come?
An interesting angle – using a micro-blogging tool to aid internal corporate communications. I love the statement – “If companies can advertise and promote themselves well internally, the external communication follows easily” – and from someone who clearly understands the world of corp comms.
I can certainly see the day when a micro-blogging app (note I’m not calling this app Twitter..) could be used as a hybrid mailing/IM/Knowledge base tool.
One of the USP’s of Twitter is instant communications, but that message is only received if the other user is logged in. There is no guarantee that the intended reciepiant reads the message, unless you use the @ function – and then in essence you are talking about email.
The thing thats struck me about Twitter which you’ve picked up on, is the simple fact u only have 140 chars to play with (you can see how verbose I am when faced with no limits!!). Forcing people to understand that less is more could change the way people communicate internally and that is a cool idea.