Mike’s Points

Okay, I’ve been dying to try to come up with a clever, catchy Twitter-related blog headline. (How’d I do?)

Anyway, with the Twitter chatter out there among the Twittter haters and Twitter lovers, I’ve thinking about it myself of late.

Twitter is nothing more than another tool. If/How it gets used will determine if it out-lasts its current 15 minutes of fame (though it seems like its fame is pushing 20 minutes). So, I thought of how could Twitter be used for the good of all mankind. And, here’ what I came up with:

• Internal use: For company-wide announements, why not Twitter them, rather than e-mail. Of course, these would be brief announcements (like the Outlook server will be down at noon for a five-minute reset). Though, with internal use, there’d be some licensing involved, which would allow the licensee to expand the dialogue box limit.

• What about integrating a Twitter box into a Wiki-like page or even a service like WebEx when collaborating on a document (presentation, etc.), rather than using a telephone.

• If you have all of your media contacts as friends or followers on Twitter, you can announce when news is posted to your online newsroom. But, isn’t that what an RSS feed would be for? That assumes you have all of your media contacts on Twitter.

• Twitter could be used to broadcast a play-by-play of a game to those who don’t have access to a TV, radio and the game is not Webcasted.

• Bascially, any need one would have to broadcast to an opt-in group a message (an announcement, direction, etc.).

Any others?

– Mike

Oh and yes, I’m on Twitter, too.

UPDATED: Approx. 11 p.m., July 29, 2008: Looks like the Adrian Insider blog pulled the posts about James Koren (some time ago), and the issue was resolved with Koren’s apology (in case you weren’t following it). Koren recently asked me to remove the link, like the Adrian Insider did. Though I don’t have a policy about it, I see no reason to remove posts, but will provide this update. I also changed the headline and post slug. And, in no way did I mean to imply that Koren is stupid. Just what he did was stupid — and he’s a big enough man to apologize for his judgement in error, as noted in the original post below. We’ve all made mistakes. Heck, even I make mistakes (gotta stop linking to that post!).

Courtesy of ToledoTalk and The Adrian (MI) Insider, there’s another example of someone — James Rufus Koren — making comments about work — this time a co-worker — and thinking only his friends would read it.

“This morning, I found out that people outside of my close circle of friends have been reading this blog.

Of course, it was never intended for readers outside of that group, and so there have been some posts - most notable “Delayed Talker” - that I never should have posted.”

Koren is a reporter for the Adrian Daily Telegram (which serves the city of my alma mater).

Of course, Koren has apologized, but will it be enough to save his job?

Guess J. Rufus will have to figure it out!

– Mike

Business Week’s Stephen Baker has an interesting and informative piece about how major corporations — like McDonald’s and Cannondale — are using blog technology to replace their intranets.

Here are quick examples of how the above two are using blog technology:

“Over the last month, Cannondale has opened its corporate Web site to 15 of its sales and marketing staffers. Each one now has the tools to file his or her own updates, press releases, photos, and news about the race teams Cannondale sponsors.”

and

“The first corporate blogger at McDonald’s was Chief Operating Officer Michael Roberts, who launched his internal blog last fall. He used it to spread information through the company’s global operations and receive feedback. Now, according to [Chief Information Officer Dave] Weick, McDonald’s is distributing blog access to thousands of employees, who will use them to report on operations at restaurants worldwide.”

While many praise blogging as this great social media, the real value is how the technology behind blogging will be expanded and re-purposed.
– Mike

Technorati tags: internal communications, blogging