(originally posted in Dutch on August 20th, 2008)

Twitter is a nice example of innovation driven by technology. For those not yet familiar with Twitter: you can send messages (tweets) with a maximum of 140 characters, everyone that subscribed to your ‘tweets’ will automatically receive all your updates (most often via SMS).

My first encounter with Twitter left my clueless as to why anyone would want to use this. 140 characters? Receive updates via SMS? What is the use? Another great example of technology push: geeks will love it, but there is no broad adoption as the value is unclear to the average joe.

The value of Twitter for Organizations

I’m still not a real Twitter adept, but it is clear by now that organizations can no longer ignore what is happening in this new communication channel. Why not? As the the Cluetrain Manifesto already stated: ‘Markets are conversations’. Marketing and PR have changed by now, organizations can no longer simply broadcast their corporate message into the market. They need to engage in the conversation that is taking place. In order to do this step 1 is to listen (the Groundswell nicely elaborates on this as well). Key question of course is: how? With all the conversation taking place on Twitter, how can I monitor all these tweets to see who is saying what about my products or markets?

Step 1 – Listen: what’s being said on Twitter

Twitter is offering search functionality (after the acquisition of summize) which allows you to search through all tweets. This offers organizations the opportunity to regularly monitor what is being said about their product, markets and services. Take my old employer for instance, a query for Tridion will return a lot of results, here are two examples:

A positive example: “My apologies Tridion. One-hour support response for business hours only. Thanks to Andre for his assistance.”

A negative example: “Back from a usergroup meeting. Tridion is just as bad as it was 3 years ago….How can someone work with that crap?”

It does not take a lot of thought to come up with actions that you could take for these tweets. A good example of an organization that is actively using Twitter is Comcast. The New York Times has a good article on how Comcast is not just listening to the online conversation but also taking actions. The article also shows that the tone and style of the (re)action need to be carefully chosen. The online user might feel like ‘big brother is watching’, which will undermine the potential positive impact of the actions taken.

Step 2 – Joining the conversation on Twitter

This step starts by claiming your name on Twitter, which can be a challenge as anyone can register a ‘name’. As a result, many brand names have already been ‘hijacked’. This posting contains a good overview of brands and their presence on Twitter. As this post also shows, not everyone is making the distinction in listening and joining the conversation. My advise: get your name(s), actively listen, and use the POST method to determine if and in which way your organizations wants to embrace the conversation on Twitter. In short summary this means: first get the social technographics of your audience clear, then determine your objectives, and based on these develop a strategy & plan how you want to engage in the online conversation.