To some, Twitter is just a “fad” a way of sending 160 character messages to - hopefully - large groups of friends or “followers”. Messages that you often see quoted for their benign content “I’m waiting for the train” or other such potentially world-changing events.
However, to others, Twitter has far more potential than many have yet to realize and this applies especially to corporations.
So, what is Twitter then? An interesting question. At it’s core, Twitter is messaging infrastructure. Exposed for usage through APIs or Web GUI. Messages sent into the Twitter “bus” are routed to your subscribers - or followers in Twitter-speak. Messages can also be sent directly to a singe receiving party (direct messages) and replies can be written that can lead to threaded conversations around certain topics.
So why is this infrastructure important from a corporate standpoint?
• Knowledge workers are spending an increasing amount of time “on” Twitter
• Twitter messages “Tweets” are becoming increasingly important for a knowledge worker in the amount of information she consumes each day. “If it’s on Twitter it must be important”
• The growing pool of Tweets is increasingly becoming a source of knowledge. In much the same way blogs became the “poor mans CMS” some years ago
• Search tools (such as “Summize”, officially acquired by Twitter yesterday) will increasingly leverage Tweets as a source of information
• Tech-Savvy and younger people are increasingly moving to Twitter as a source of information. In order to reach them you will need to be on Twitter. Publishing content out on Twitter is a way to reaching a particular audience segment.
• “Breaking events” hit Twitter first - if your news isn’t on Twitter then soon, it may not be news at all
• Twitter is a good way of arranging spontaneous meet-ups, finding out if your meeting partner is on-time or stuck on a flight somewhere and even for broadcasting alerts or log entries to specified recipients
It is no secret that Twitter is having growing pains. To me this is just another sign of the impending implications Twitter (and maybe similar services) will have on the way we communicate and the way corporations need to communicate. The adoption rate shows that Twitter is being driven from the consumer side. The increasingly mobile consumer - using their new shiny 3G iPhone with Twitter application - will just add to that growth.
Of course Twitter is far from supporting certain aspects of corporate communications but the growing number of services and applications being built on top of the infrastructure and in particular the available API s will soon allow Twitter to be better suited for corporate use. Add to that the fact that integrating your application into the Twitter infrastructure is relatively easy and it is easy to envision the potential.
In just the same way that blogs and RSS are not suitable for all types of corporate communication, Twitter certainly isn’t a one-size-fits-all type of application. Nevertheless, Twitter is rapidly approaching a major tipping-point that should cause it’s adoption to rise even faster than we’ve seen in the past year. Something that will keep the Twitter architects on their toes for a while.
For companies looking to build out their “Web 2.0 strategy” (or whatever you are calling it) - it makes absolute sense to look at Twitter now and make sure the strategy incorporates a Twitter strategy. Your competitors are probably already twittering.