Dreaming in 140 Characters
Lately we have been talking a lot about Twitter, its use, why to use, and how to use the program. Based on your feedback about Twitter, I am happy to include the article below in our newsletter this week.
The article was forwarded to me and was written by Jeanne Meister of New Learning Playbook:
New Learning Playbook™ is a blog tracking innovations and trends in corporate learning and talent management among corporations, universities and government agencies. New Learning Playbook is targeted to a diverse community of chief human resource officers, senior learning and development officers, human capital officers, chief talent officers, as well as senior executives who are exploring usage of the latest tools and technologies in learning to address business issues such as, attraction and retention of talent as well as development of high potential Net Generation managers.
The New Learning Playbook blog will examine innovations in building social networks, using digital media technologies such as weblogs, RSS, podcasting, vodcasting and wikis as well as integrating the latest methods of “action” learning and “metaphorical” learning in the “playbook” of attracting, developing and retaining Net Generation talent.
In the article, Meister discusses ways Twitter is being used on-the-job:
1. Think Before You Tweet. Yes it’s informal and only 140 characters but it is searchable and, yes, it can be googled.
2. Answer the Question: “What Is Interesting/Innovative” rather than just “What Are You Doing Now?” – Embed links to interesting content so all your followers learn what you are reading and what influences your thoughts on a topic.
3. Approach Twitter as a Social Learning Tool. It is participatory, collaborative and, at its heart, contextual. It may in fact be one of the best ways to instantly share knowledge among your network.
4. Explore how best places to work use Twitter to build their brand. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, was one of the keynote speakers at HCI event this week. He is a big user of Twitter with 218,906 followers. Zappos made the list in Fortune Magazine’s annual “100 Best Companies To Work For” list, and Fortune began and ended the article by talking about how Zappos uses Twitter to build more personal connections with people. Zappos came in at #23 on the Fortune list making the company the highest ranking newcomer for 2009.
In fact in Zappos Corporate Employee directory they have all employees ranked by the number of followers they have on Twitter. Now that’s an incentive to start sending tweets. Tony even created a beginners guide on how to get onto Twitter. You can find this at: http://twitter.zappos.com/start
5. Explore how your company’s public relations, marketing communications and customer relations departments are using Twitter. What can you learn from these departments in order to experiment with your own learning department? In the case of Zappos, they have transformed their public relations and marketing departments to use Twitter as the first way to connect to customers.
6. Join the dialogue. Follow me at www.twitter.com/jcmeister
Join “Social Learning Question Of The Day” on Twitter. We have 447 followers. A pdf of all the questions asked prior to February 2009 can be downloaded as a pdf. Thanks to Kevin Jones and Dave Wilkins for moderating this group.
7. Learn from “THE” social media analyst on this topic. As mentioned previously, one of the most qualified individuals on this subject is Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research covering social computing.
The article talks more in depth about Twitter, experiences, and has some wonderful links. Click here to view the full article.
Click here to connect with me (Justin G. Roy) on Twitter.
