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I have a twitter account and never post to it. I have a colegue who does and I kinda have it to see what they are saying.

Mark audio blogged about it and I'm pleased he did. I have just deleted it from my browser and now I feel free.

Blather, what a great word.

thanks Mark.

cruss's picture
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I am in a very different situation. I work for a tech start up and everyone in the company has a twitter account. One of our lead technical people even setup a "broadcast" account that could privately send something to everyone in the company. It's obviously used more by the technical staff than the marketing department and sales but they do use it. It's very interesting to know when your C level staff is going to be back from a trip over twitter. There have been times where this was useful, including someone sending out a "is there a problem with the server?" message that let me start finding a resolution much faster.

I don't usually post things to it or have it up during the day, I use it like Mark's suggestion on email. I check it twice a day for anything actionable and then ignore it while I'm getting my work done.

jclishe's picture

To add to what cruss said, I follow a few C-level execs that Twitter regularly and I find their comments rather interesting, and in some cases, insightful into how they handle certain situations.

mikehansen's picture

 

Some thoughts on the above two posts.

 

I can understand how the c-level twitter would be interesting, but is it worth the cost of the distractions?  If it eats up 1 hour of your week by the cost of splitting your focus from more important tasks, wouldn’t that time be better spent pouring through a couple of really good Harvard Bus Review articles?  I doubt very many C-Levels spend much time seeing what their mentors are doing throughout their day.  Successful executives are very protective of their time.

 

As for the tech company example, I do not see any example where twitter is more effective than e-mail for asynchronous information sharing.  Also, if there is a server problem that needs attention, I would really hope there is a phone-based escalation process that ensures that someone owns the problem.  Relying on broadcast twittering sounds like chaos where folks are equally likely to be missing the issue or stepping on each others toes.

 

Folks should be using less e-mail, more talking.  Another e-mail like thing in the workplace is not a bonus. 

 

Twitter is evil.

 

My .02

 

-Mike

 

Shimon Haber's picture

And this is Shimon Haber's Twitter account which he uses regularly. I have no idea why but Shimon Haber says that being active in many fields like journalism, novels writing, movie reviewing etc having Twitter account is essential.