Imagine:
You work in a large financial services organisation. A sheik walks into your office and says “I have $10m worth of business for you managing my sharia compliant Islamic investments. I’m going to get a coffee and if you’ve found an expert in murabaha investments when I come back in 30 minutes you can have the business”. You have 30 minutes to find the expert within your organisation:
Without Twitter
You go running around the office shouting out that you’re looking for a sharia expert. You try randomly phoning people in your address book. You send out random emails to people you know. You run a search on your servers for the word murabaha. You scan your company phone book for people with Islamic sounding names. You run a Google search. The 30 minutes is up. The sheik’s back. You sent 20 emails, made 20 phone calls and got nowhere. The sheik thanks you for your time and leaves to go to your competitor.
With Twitter
You twit that you’re looking for a murabaha expert and ask all your contacts to mine their networks. You would conservatively estimate that anyone who’s spent a couple of years in a large multinational organisation will have developed a hundred contacts. Maybe only 10% of those 100 contacts are actually at their desks and monitoring Twitter but that those 10 actually go on and relay the message to their 100 contacts of whom only 10% (conservatively speaking) are online at that time. In the space of a minute or two you could have done the work of a 1000 emails or phone calls. Maybe there was a murabaha expert in your original contact list, Mr X, but you didn’t know that Mr X was an expert in murabaha and they weren’t monitoring twitter at that time. You may miss them with your first twit but someone down the line of twits knows that Mr X is an expert in this area so they email you and let you know. The half hour’s up. The sheik’s back. You’ve dragged Mr X out of their meeting (which was important but wasn’t worth $10m) and you got him on a conference call ready to wow the sheik with his knowledge of murabaha.
In short, twittering is a fantastically efficient way of mining the knowledge of a network without having to make one call or write one email.
This is a brilliant case study, Charlie. I hadn’t really “got” Twitter until reading this.
Good example.
But you neglect to mention the productivity loss of those incoming Twitter messages. Such a system could very easily be abused, there needs to be a way of managing the distraction and profiling incoming alerts so that it gets targetted.
Hello All,
You got to check out cyn.in Desktop as a twitter for enterprise.
cyn.in Desktop is integrated with cyn.in collaboration software. Users are created in cyn.in main site and their access rights are provided to them based upon their role in the organizational hierarchy.
If it is implemented by a company, then only work related activities takes place and that increases productivity. Employees receives activity streams ( e.g. tweets) only from the people they are working with and have permission to collaborate with him, this does not allows them to abuse the system. cyn.in desktop recently covered by ReadWriteWeb : http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/new_from_cynapse_activity_streams_on_the_company_desktop.php