Melina Murray

There is a lot of talk about twitter all over the blogosphere. My first impression in watching someone use twitter was that it was weird and obsessive. Then I joined. And it was weird and time consuming- for a while. However, as I found people to follow and read what they had to say, my view changed. I realized that it opened a door to communicate with people I would not have otherwise. There are those who twitter what they are doing every half hour and there are more who post interesting article and blog links, who ask questions, who expand my knowledge base.

Then I started thinking about twitter in the workplace. Mike Murray’s post on Episteme got me thinking. He linked to a post from Text Technologies that listed more viewpoints and thoughts. I like the idea. It doesn’t necessarily work for all companies, but can add levels of communication that otherwise would not be available. Ann All at IT Business Edge has a post about Twitter in the enterprise that links to multiple other posts- great information and thoughts.

There are some kinks that would have to be worked out, but I am going with the idea that it is secure and adopted by all levels of management.

Lets look at a “protected” twitter account (yes, there are some fixes needed to make this happen). An employee can communication with multiple people at once- like a chat room. Remote employees could keep in touch with other locations. Different departments that may not have had any contact before could get to know each other, share ideas. Collaboration across teams could happen more quickly and easily. Company leaders could send updates, publicly congratulate teams/projects, check in for status updates, and, see their employees as people and not just “resources”. This is a big one. So many employees feel “out of the loop” when it comes to communication from the top. It doesn’t have to always be business related either, as noted on the Episteme post.

When it comes to public accounts, the uses are endless in terms of marketing, PR, and, yes, recruiting. Recruiters and hiring managers are now tweeting about job openings at their companies. Brilliant. Not only is there an ability to reach a wide audience of both active and passive candidates (and referrals), the reader gets a feel for the culture and environment by reading past tweets.

I, like many, am eager to see how this new style of communication develops in the workplace. If you use twitter in the workplace, I would love to hear from you.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2008 at 10:53 am and is filed under General. Tagged: company culture, corporate communication, recruiting, social media, tweet, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.