Twitter - the only communication tool your organisation needs?
The FT’s Lucy Kellaway, always an astute commenter on business life, has an interesting column today about Twitter
Kellaway has been following business leaders on Exec Tweets and says that many of them post tweets that are simply dull or embarrassing.
Interestingly, however, she doesn’t go on from that to deduce that Twitter is pointless. On the contrary, she says, Twitter may be “potentially the best communication tool there is”. The great advantage of Twitter, she argues, is that tweets have to be short. A good user of Twitter will be able to convey information that is concise, pithy and relevant.
Forcing everyone to say what they meant in 140 characters would deal with the communications overload “at a stroke”, she says. As she points out: “The bulk of internal e-mails are exercises in back-covering or throat-clearing, and so if they were forced down to their barest essentials it would become clear that there was nothing there at all.”
Imagine if your organisation banned email and forced everyone to use Twitter. Instead of having to wade through hundreds of long, dull emails that conveyed nothing, your managers would just have to follow the tweets of a handful of key people and obtain all the information they needed in a few single sentences.
But who’ll be brave enough to try it?
