More Twitter use cases
Monday, I posted about four Enterprise Twitter use cases. Episteme responds that that’s all well and good, but what’s really important is that Enterprise Twitter would lead senior management to communicate in a human way with the team. I agree completely, and think this is one of the big reasons Enterprise Twitter could be an improvement over email for many uses.
That post also illustrates a use of public Twitter. It came about because @mediaphyter found out about my post on Twitter, then passed it along to some friends. What’s more, while attempting to do so, she alerted me — also on Twitter — that my blogs were down, leading me to call my hosting company and get them back up.
And that leads to yet another use. I need to change web hosting companies. So I went to the best source, the Web Hosting Talk forums, where one of the lead recommendations tends to be A Small Orange. To its credit, A Small Orange runs a forum in which customers may complain freely. And there are indeed a number of recent complaints, which might or might not have been indicative of a broad pattern.
So I posted a query about A Small Orange on Twitter. Very quickly, @jljohansen suggested I check with two fellow bloggers who were both users, @doshdosh and @pistachio. I did, and both told me they were leaving A Small Orange due to uptime problems.
And that’s why I plan to switch to DowntownHost instead. They have a great rep on WebHostingTalk.com, and have been wonderful in presales. I just wish somebody on Twitter used them so that I could be surer …
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2 Responses to “More Twitter use cases”
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Curt,
The interesting thing about the use case you mention me in is that I’ve never used A Small Orange. In fact, I’ve never been to their website. But, she had mentioned her issues on Twitter so I was able to recognize the name.
Twitter is an good tool for Transactive Memory. “Each person doesn’t need to remember everything the group needs to know, after all, if each person merely stores in memory information about who is likely to have a particular item in the future.”
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/tm.htm
I have, on multiple occasions now, read a link by someone on Twitter and gone back through their archive to find it again. I don’t remember where it was but I remember who (most of the time). This is a powerful case for Enterprise Twitter acting as a way to aggregate Institutional Knowledge that often gets lost when people leave companies.
I was introduced to this concept in 2 posts by Gord Hotchkiss relating transactive memory to search.
http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=707
http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=712
It too often seems like twits have diarrea of the mouth and constipation of the brain.