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Content Management

Visualizing the Flow of Tweets

I am looking at two very nice vids twitter posted on its blog yesterday. They are illustrating nicely how tweets from japan were posted, replied retweeted! Information has to move to create value. How does your organisation move information?

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and

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3k tweets en mijn smoking

Vandaag ben ik de 3000 tweet grens gepasseerd. Inmiddels sinds 2007 aan het twitteren en het heeft mij al veel goeds gebracht in de vorm van goede ideeën, nieuwe kennissen, werkplekken en praktische hulp. Genoeg reden dus om nog even door te gaan.

Vandaag heb ik een gesprek over social media voorbereid voor morgen. Voor mij betekent dit eens rondkijken op de social media sites wat de betreffende organisatie doet op dat vlak. Ingelezen over wat deze organisatie voor doelen nastreeft en wie zij zijn. Daarnaast nog wat belletjes gepleegd en verder gewerkt aan een eindproduct voor een klant. Voor mij wat onorthodox maar dat zoveel mogelijk zonder laptop om me niet te laten beperken.

Nu is het mooi geweest wat werken betreft en ga ik mijn smoking uit de kast halen. Zometeen heb ik de eer om bij de premiere van Rabat te mogen zijn. Het mooie Tushinski theater is Amsterdam is de plaats van handeling dus dat is sowieso al goed. Wetende hoeveel lange dagen en nachten er in de film gestoken zijn kan het alleen maar goed zijn. De trailer en de video van Sef verraden kwaliteit en niets anders. Check de playlist bij 22tracks!

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Business Processes Supported with Twitter

Earlier we posted some stuff about twitter. Today twitter has really hit mainstream in The Netherlands. So I guess it is time to look into how companies are using twitter to deliver value!

News
In terms of the groundwell strategies this a little bit of one way talking. Two examples are DWDD a popular TV news show and NRC a newspaper. DWDD only posts the people how are on the show in tweets so their followers know how is on the show that day. NRC tweets about new posts in their website containing a link to the site. For news the main goals is getting more visitors to the site and alerting people for new content.

Customer services
UPC is a Dutch example with close to 1500 followers, maybee inspired by Jetblue. The twitter stream is a way for customers to get in touch with customer support about problems with their cable TV. UPC is not as big as Jetblue, Jetblue has 1,5 million followers! Rijkswaterstaat is the dutch traffic agency that uses twitter to talk with the general public and explain projects and roadblocks. The twitter customer service is about another channel in the services mix.

Politics
D66 is using twitter for news events and discussion about policies.More political parties have discovered twitter, like PvdA and VVD. More or less politics use twitter as a mix between news and customer services.

Jobofferings
Randstad is posting joboffers on twitter through multiple accounts, you can find a buch of them using search. They segment in country and types of jobs. Some accounts are more popular than others. Other agencies offering this service are YER en Adformatie.

Discounts
Some companies give discounts to followers of specific people. Blogger Nalden is very popular in The Netherlands and companies give discounts to his followers!

Are there more business processes supported by twitter? There must be, so let us know!

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Twitter supports knowledge networking

Knowing who has the knowledge is more important then have the knowledge yourself. This businessrule we often hear in our interviews with customers. An the other hand we see that networkingplatforms are growing every day outside the companies (linkedin, xing ed.).

But how can we use both trends useful for our organisations so that we achieve a sort of knowledge network in the organisation? So that employees are knowing from each other which knowledge is available in the organisation. Who knows what?

An other trend that we observe is that people more and more working in networks. When people are working for your organisation they use their own network to get the job done, but they also enlarge their netwerk with new contacts outside of your organisation. So it seems also important to keep also the network alive when employee’s leaving the organisation? The people who leave the organisation have specific knowlegde, they also are a part of the network of the employees who are still working for you and the leaving employee has a network that is interesting for the organisation (a part of the network is build up in your organisation).

We think that twitter can help the organisation to combine the trends in a positive way for the organisation. Twitter can help to:

  • get many twitter friends and followers to get everyone involved (it is very easy to become friends)
  • read what your friends are doing and what is on their mind to get more knowledge or ideas form the twitter network
  • have an easy and fase way to get to know your coworkers and be known by the existing group
  • blur the organizational borders, twitter networks do not care about your job. So if you stop working somewhere you can still be part of the network
  • get to know new people and take a peek into their thoughts, so you can get new ideas and knowledge.

Is it hard to get above avantage? We think it is not, the implementation of the twitter-technology is a small change on your intranet. The most work will be to explain the value of the knowlegde network and the reason to twitter to your employees. But the most of them are using networkplatforms outside the company, so why would the change be big?

In the above situation, twitter is used as a social software but then applied in a business context. What are your thoughts on this subject? We would love to hear!

This post was made by @hendri_ende and @robberthomburg

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Can twitter support social structure in organizations

The basic idea of twittering is sharing social information with your friends. An example is hyves where you can let know what is on your mind by 140 characters (this is called ‘wat doe je’). All your friends can read and react to your short social/emotional message. This is more or less the same on twitter. But will this also work in our organisations? Will a worker ever put his social message in a Tweet and share it with the whole company? Does the rest of the company care about the Tweet of the salesmanager?

Maybe you have some doubts, but realise that the mental model in the organisation is that employees every day have their CCC ‘coffee-corner-chat’. And as we all know if you are seeking for the right information or you are preparing a decision in a meeting, the first thing to do is triple C. And because employees are known with sharing things with each other in their mental model. We expect that supporting this habit by Twitter, people will use twitter from day one. Maybe you should rename it to coffee-chat, so everybody know what twitter is.

For example:

I went on a biking trip this weekend and hit a tree. Monday morning in my coffee-chat I put the words ‘I’am hurt by a three’. Later that day Robbert sees me in the restaurant and asked me how I’am doing.

One of the best things about twitter is the possibility to twitter by more features then internet but also SMS of txt!

This very simple example shows how the social structure in your company can grow.
And yes we hear you thinking: will my people still work and are they going to socialize allday long. Maybe the first two days people are using it like mad. But they will start to be smart about it and only twitter useful stuff. Then your social structure will get stronger. And the positive impact on performance will happen.

So our advise, don’t wait, start today with introducing the digital coffee-chat. This is a great way to enhance the social structure of you company at no cost!

A nice video is here from MIT about twitter and ambient intimacy

this post is written by hendri and robbert

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Twitter for ideasharing

Should you use Twitter in your company to share ideas? Twitter is about what are you doing today, but what if you are brainstroming and getting ideas? The beginning of a new idea should be short and shared amoung people inside and outside the company. So far Twitter seems to be a good idea. People will react to your ideas or get their own new ideas. This is possible with twitter, you can send messages to people and they can post their own ideas. Ideas occur in all sorts of places, now only form behind a computer. Twitter can do this, allowing you to send text messages! But, what if I want to read all about one idea, or want to rate an idea of follow up on an idea. This cannot be done with twitter.

The thing is for the start of an idea twitter is fantastic, for the second phase of an idea twitter is to simple. But here is the great part, Twitter is open as all apps should be. Why not combine the simple but great Twitter funcionality and the functions of a site like IdeaFactory or IdeaExchange. Both being based of sites like digg. And start the discussion and rating of an idea over there. All the content about the idea is together and still online.

Start an idea on twitter, pass it on to another site when the idea seems good, react to it, rate it and make it! If you make this business idea happen think of me ;-). This is a great way to start an idea, collaborate on the idea online and share it with people around the globe.

this blogpost was made in collaboration with hendri van ’t ende