The conventional wisdom about Twitter seems to be that it is great for posting a random thought about the news or getting some friends together for beer, but it can’t be used for anything that serious. I disagree. Microblogging can be a powerful communication tool in an organization.
Tweeting Tech Support
Chris Arkenberg wrote about a recent incident in which he called up AT&T/iPhone support with a question about whether iPhone Twitter apps use SMS to transmit data. He eventually got a hedged non-answer after 15 minutes of waiting, but it got him thinking about how people find answers to questions in business situations. From Chris:
All this had me thinking about the huge inefficiency at play with the responder trying to locate the specialist, get their attention and time, probably juggling multiple phone lines, to then give me one person’s measured response. I imagined a not-too-distant future where the call responder typed my query into a local Twitter-clone running on the tech support network inside AT&T/Apple. This query would immediately push out to subscribers – some required by their manager to subscribe to all tech support feeds, and others who just want to see the problems customers are encountering. I then imagined that some of these subscribers would run search filters on the messaging stream in order to be alerted to those queries they were most interested in tracking.
If a microblogging solution were implemented at AT&T, the post that said “Do Twitter apps use SMS” would have almost certainly been noticed by someone who knew the answer–maybe someone whose formal job is to track the feed, or maybe just an interested coworker in a call center halfway around the world. The person who had the answer to the question could easily post back, and the agent on the phone with Chris could have come to a conclusion about the original problem quickly and efficiently.
How to Fix a Copier
Bypassing the formal, linear process of an organizational hierarchy to get an answer to a simple but unusual question is an everyday occurrence, but is frustrating to corporate types. The people who depend on predictable behavior and outcomes that look good on weekly reports want to make sure that every employee has specific steps to perform for each situation that they come across.
Those of us who live in the real world know that creating a master book of answers to everything is impossible. Researchers who study how people do things at work have found that the informal interactions, conversations, and observations that happen in real world situations are how people figure out their job. Julian Orr, in his book Talking About Machines, shows that much of what people learn about how to do their jobs comes in casual, friendly conversations over breakfast, at the water cooler, or on a coffee break.
Technology as Leverage
If we think that most of what people know about how to do their job comes from informal interaction, why not leverage that informal interaction using technology? Twitter is nothing more than a technological means to broadcast those casual conversations to a wider audience, spreading information more efficiently.
Instead of three or four people sharing ideas around a water cooler in an office, there could be thousands of people following the company’s microblog sharing ideas, asking questions, and improving the way things are done.
