Like many people I know, I originally joined Twitter as a curiosity. What was creating the buzz? Why did anyone care "What are you doing?", especially strangers or people outside of my immediate circle of friends. Over the last four years, I come to understand the power of Twitter as a new digital medium, an immediate social community and a massive source of constantly changing knowledge, opinions and discussions.
But over the last 3-6 months, I've noticed something else. I work for a large company (current job & previous job) and the role involves a number of daily meetings with a mix of people that are active or non-existant on social media.
- On Twitter, I can choose which people I want to listen to and which people I want to learn from.
- In corporate meetings, I'm forced to listen to all conversations if I choose to participate/attend.
- On Twitter, I can quickly get feedback (RTs, Blog Stats, followers) about a new idea or piece of content.
- In corporate meetings, it's often weeks before feedback is received.
- On Twitter, good ideas can be quickly amplified and spread to multiple communities
- In corporate meetings, it often takes numerous repetitive meetings to reiterate a new concept.
- On Twitter, value is often created by how much you give back to the community.
- In corporate meetings, people often believe their value-add comes from how much of a fiefdom they can create.
- On Twitter, participants understand the give and take nature of the communications and communities.
- In corporate meetings, the audience is often mixed (users & non-users) and may not understand how social media communications can impact business environments.
I've found that Twitter has become the tool that I derive the most value from these days in terms of communications and knowledge gathering. It's becoming an interesting context-switch back to corporate meetings. Anyone else seeing this challenge?
