Twitter in the Enterprise
by Patti Anklam
Fellow AppGapper Bill Ives has posted a great summary of the perspective that he brought to the Twitter Panel at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (wonderfully moderated by Jessica Lipnack, whose post you’ll find at this preceding link). I was deeply honored to be on the same panel, offering an enterprise perspective. I related what happened when the CEO at one of my clients requested a “twitter channel” for questions during an all-employee forum. A handful of people (64) in the 7,000-person company. Following the event, I was requested to conduct an after-action review with those who had actually twittered questions during the event.
The after-action review surfaced one of the primary concerns about using Twitter in the enterprise: security. While most employees are and will be sensitive to providing sensitive information about the company on Twitter, it’s always a risk. In this case, the corporate IT security folks had raised a (very big) red flag about using Twitter for the employee forum, but the CEO decided that, for this short duration experiment, the risk was manageable.
The benefits of having a Twitter channel during an event:
- People can ask questions as they occur to them while listening, so that they don’t have to wait until the end
- Twitter allows for a nice back-channel, in which people who have similar questions or ideas can discover one another
- The potential for anonymity in a Twitter ID lets people who are hesitant to ask questions in public have a voice
- The short form requires questions to be pithy!
At the E2.0 panel, we were asked about other benefits of using Twitter inside an enterprise. Here’s my short list:
- Situational awareness, both geographical (who is traveling to different company sites) and contextual (who is working on a particular problem type)
- Crowd sourcing: tweeting questions and getting answers from friends but also friends of friends (via the Retweet mechanism)
- Developing and maintaining relationships. Tweets help you get a sense of who a person is, and whether it’s a person you may want to collaborate with.
- Tweets with links, and especially retweets with links provide a good information filtering mechanism
I think that the challenges for enterprises who want to bring microblogging tools inside the firewall include:
- Migrating people who are already using Twitter to an internal tool. When people are using Twitter, they develop a natural style that lets them speak to their communities both inside and outside the enterprise.
- It is important for enterprise microblogging tools to enable the option to post out to Twitter anything posted internally.
- Integrating microblogging with social networking and collaboration applications that already exist or that are in plan. It is becoming hard enough to keep track of our multiple internal and external identities as we move about software platforms for connection and collaboration that we (okay, I) don’t need additional splintering of my conversational threads
- Companies should get started sooner rather than later if they want to do internal microblogging. Now is the time to experiment, and see how it will be useful, find the early adopters (who are not all necessarily GenY, btw), and let them develop a corporate style.
Use Precedes Strategy: The nature of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is (as often defined), “the adoption of Web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise.” The use of these tools therefore necessary precedes strategy. Experiments using Twitter or even home-grown internal tools are a good beginning.
