A must-read for intranet managers: Twitter = 17 things

April 22, 2009 | Comments(3), | Categories: Social Media in the Workplace |

“Twitter makes altruism the work of a few seconds”. This is a quote from Andrew McAfee’s blog post ““17 Things we Used to Do”. Maybe “altruism” is not the right word for enterprises, but the spirit of the word is definitely right on.

This post is a must-read for intranet managers.

Andrew concludes his post with: “I think it’s important …. to keep in mind that not all exchanges are governed by incentives, mutual benefit, or economic rationality. Sometimes they’re governed by simple neighborliness, and Twitter is an awfully big neighborhood.”

An enterprise is also “an awfully big neighbourhood” or should be!

I am still surprised that Twitter has not made a bigger entry into the enterprise neighbourhood. The data from the Global Intranet Strategies Survey from 2008 revealed that only 15 percent of the enterprises at Stage 3 (most advanced) intranets say that they are “testing” micro-blogging or “implementing it in some parts of the organisation”. Zero % have optimised it or extended it to “general use”.

Five percent of the enterprises with intranets at Stage 1 (least mature) are testing it, with 95 percent saying they are not considering it.

I expect the numbers to increase significantly this year. I sure hope they do!

Any of you out there with “Twitter behind the firewall” stories to share?

And, by the way, I should NOT be saying “behind the firewall”. That’s a concept that is changing rapidly as organisations are finally saying (out loud) that a lot of their project work involves external people, and that employees and external partners need to share information and therefore information systems.

So, any of you out there with “Twitter to help us do our jobs” stories to share?

3 Responses to “A must-read for intranet managers: Twitter = 17 things”

  1. Dorje McKinnon Says:
    April 22nd, 2009 at 11:38 pm

    Jane,
    Chris Brogan has a great post on getting managerial buy in for social media, in which he links to his case studies on Delicious.
    One of these is twitter used by a cancer research team in Texas (damned if I can find the link to it now. Can anyone provide it ?) where the team had given up trying to forward emails to those who might be interested and started using Twitter.
    From my perspective this was a great example of how social media can add value to an organisation by providing a medium for serendipity (more here on this and how it relates to golf)
    If you’re interested in case studies delicious has a bunch but they’re kind of hard to get through. To find the good ones you’re better off asking your followers on twitter ;-)
    http://search.twitter.com/search?q=twitter+casestudy
    and
    http://search.twitter.com/search?q=twitter+case+study
    Anyone want to come up with a list of twitter enterprise case studies on their blog / or in delicious ?
    Hope this helps.
    DorjeM

  2. Ray Dacteur Says:
    April 25th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    I’d love to bring a twitter-like in my entreprise ! btw I consider the term ‘micro-blogging’ not so accurate, as I consider it more like a n-to-n IM. And it deserves the goal since internal blogging is so difficult and has so different usages.

  3. Jane McConnell Says:
    April 29th, 2009 at 1:37 pm

    Hey Ray Dacteur – long time, no see! what do you mean by “n-to-n”? I can only think of “node to node”. Is that it?
    Tell me more about why you think “micro-blogging” is not an accurate term. I’m not sure I’m with you.

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