9.29.2007

Twitter meets Corporate America

I'm posting this to find people working on cracking the same nut -- I need to share ideas and I need to share my pain.

I work for the Man.

I'm selling Twitter internally as a solution to some enterprise channel needs and it's a slog. First, it's free -- very hard to sell. Second, it's outside -- what if it stops? Third, it's hard to understand -- what are you talking about? or worse, they listen hard and still don't get it but think they do and start talking about it in a way that just won't be successful. But god bless em, they're trying.

Underlying these small barriers is the big, intransigent one: the people I need to persuade don't understand the concept of Channels.

Oh, BTW, here's a magnificent discussion of Twitter on the threshold -- if you're interested in Twitter, you should not miss this. I am a big Blue Whale Labs fan. But, hey, Stowe and Greg, your wonderful PDF White Papers do me more harm than good in the corner offices. I need less truth and elegance and more "ROI solutioning." (I kid you not - When I hear it, I imagine the speaker slowly dissolving entirely into a liquid medium: I took Chemistry at Berkeley and I know what a v.t. form of "solution" is likely to mean. I took Linguistics there also. )

I'm telling open-minded people to think of Twitter as a kit of Zoobs. It's a bundle of tubes that can be connected to many types of junction (one to one, broadcast, many to many, back and forth, etc.), ending up at most types of communication hatches (phone, web, SMS, RSS). And it's pretty non-denominational.

It's too open and too free for the corporate person, however smart, to grok -- at least right away. There must be a catch. It's clearly something that IT should approve, but if they don' t need to be involved...or do they. People get fearful.

Anyone else trying to do this?

1 comment:

  1. I just came across your blog post on Twitter. I love the way the folks at Linden Lab (makers of SecondLife) use Twitter, specifically, my brother-in-law and his colleagues. They are developers and they twitter about what they are working on, issues they are having, things to do, and of course random thoughts that aren't work related.

    For my "bro", not only is it a way to tell other people what he's working on, it's a way for him to remember it himself. And the group uses it for person to person conversation as well. I've been following it a bit and appears that they've developed their own, pretty unique internal language - which I guess is true of any organization or community, but by following someone else's twitter like this gives a completely objective rather than subjective (and unsolicited), view of someone else's world.

    Ahh, so much I'm on tip of thinking about for Twitter uses but it's getting late and gotta go for now.

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