The Microblogging Workplace – Why Not?
My Twitter page is a wealth of information. If I were to hit refresh in intervals of 1 minute, I know I would get at least 10 more tweets with references to posts, articles, thoughts, questions, event notifications… everything I am interested in, from the people whose thoughts I value. It’s a chain of information passed on from the every corner of the world. My twitter page is my global knowledge repository. I can choose to find information on anything I am interested in, simply by searching for people who tweet about it, find them and follow their conversation. I never knew the real power of micro blogging until I became an active Twitter user.
The power of micro blogging applications such as Twitter lies in the fact that it is less intrusive yet very collaborative. I am able to shrink my messages to 140 characters or less, thus making it a concise and to-the-point communication tool. I am able to share reviews about a book I am reading or an article that I stumbled upon. The objective is to share with the belief that someone somewhere read it and it helped.
I have seen that it has always been a struggle for the leaders in any organization to create a culture of collaborative teams; for employees to openly share best practices, lessons learnt, queries, ideas, and thoughts; amongst fellow team members, across project teams and departments; in a common, efficient and non-intrusive way. But If micro blogging works globally to bring people together from the corners of the world to collaborate on a common topic, in an efficient non-intrusive communication channel, while building a knowledge-base on the fly, and easy to maintain… then
WHY NOT use micro blogging as a tool within the firewalls of an organization to achieve the exact same results?
Stay tuned for “The Microblogging Workplace – Pros and Cons” - Coming Soon!





about 2 months ago
Hi Raj,
while I agree that Twitter is a great tool to keep up-to-date and get valuable information about work-relevant topics in a very condensed manner it can also be a great time waster.
Two articles on efficient social network usage may help:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs//2009/09/23/social-media-in-15-minutes-per-day/
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/09/24/social-media-networking-time-budget/
Best regards and a happy new year to you!
Dominique
about 2 months ago
Hi Raj! I have been trying to encourage blogging and (eventually) microblogging in my own organization, but am currently having a hard time. The main barriers that I am running up against are the same ones that were used when organizations were considering giving employees telephones, Internet access, and email:
1. They’ll spend all of their time…[talking, emailing, surfing the Internet] and won’t get any work done!
2. What if they… [harass each other, unionize]?
3. How will we monitor… [what they are saying, how they spend their time]?
Hopefully we will be able to overcome these barriers in a manner similar to the way that the barriers to the telephone, email, and the Internet were.