Twitter? At work? Yes please. Microblogging’s possibilities for internal communication

I’ve been using Twitter alot lately (what’s Twitter you ask? See here for a good explanation from Brendan Hughes). I have a modest network which is largely centred around my interest in learning through social media. Sometimes posts are work related, sometimes they’re not.  It seems to give me a snappy (140 characters or less) insight into what other people do on a day to day basis, and also serves as a rich resource for new information and ideas. 

While the benefits of extending professional networks outside organisations, or communicating with your market is well documented, there is a little less focus on the benefits of Twitter or a microblogging platform like Twitter could bring to an organisation if used as part of an internal communication system.  I mean, when you look at the commonly cited benefits of Twitter they go something like:

• updates are short so easy to scan
• collective knowledge creation
• establishing weak ties conducive to building social capital
• short constant news stream keeps people up to date
• and so on…

Now these are pretty universal, and don’t take into account the positives and negatives of implementing such a tool as a closed organisational environment – i.e. an internal corporate equivalent of Twitter, like Yammer.

While there are negatives, like losing a fresh stream of ideas from outside the organisation, for those organisations who need privacy and security, it’s a good idea.  In addition to the above, at an organisational level investing in some sort of microblogging tool also:

• allows for email congestion to be reduced (yay! )
• provides a tool for cross functional communication (isn’t it great when the left hand knows what the right hand is doing?)
• builds tacit organisational knowledge (you get to know each other, and the way others think)
• employee participation (paying attention to and recognising people makes them more productive)

And so on with the scary sounding words… Time to drag out my soapbox now.

Isn’t it a good thing to allow employees insight into each other’s jobs? To develop internal networks across geographical boundaries? To engage in conversation with each other? To break artificially created silos? To engage? Microblogging is just another method amongst a myriad of possibilities to allow these things to happen.

Some organisations are now recognising that employees use social networks as quasi equivalents of talking at the water cooler or wandering around to someone’s desk for a chat – and that social networks aren’t all playful banter and can facilitate meaningful conversation and knowledge creation. Now for the rest of them to catch up… soon… please. I love my external Twitter network, and to have one at work too? That’d be awesome.