See how these businesses use twitter
In an article published on CIO, a few business executives raised good points using twitter to their advantage, take a look:
Catching the Eyes of Business Users
Twitter has also led business executives and managers to think about how they might take advantage of the service to improve and streamline internal communications. Drewe Zanki works for Rio Tinto, a British mining company and oversees an IT group in its minerals division in Denver. He heard about Twitter by reading some of his favorite blogs and immediately became interested. He joined just a few weeks ago.
When he first signed on, he noticed that there was a lot of chaos in the amount of communication occurring, but he saw some potential business value.
“Often, the e-mails I get from CFOs or IT directors are half a line anyway,” Zanki says. “Being able to get your business case through in 140 characters or less could be very valuable for everyone’s time.”
Tim Davis, CIO of Popeyes Chicken & Biscuits, a fast-food chain, says that he joined Twitter back in April after making a commitment to stay more informed about social media.
“This spring I decided I needed to get educated as social media is just taking off and I couldn’t continue to shun it without investing the time to figure it out,” he says. “I also wanted to figure out how this all fits into business models.”
He began following the updates of bloggers, social media gurus and even found other Twitter users who shared his passion for cigars, a hobby for Davis.
Like Zanki, one problem Davis immediately experienced was some Twitter users overusing the service and dominating his cache of messages. “I had to quietly drop Scoble because he would spew out eight tweets within three minutes,” he says, referring to the technology blogger, Robert Scoble, who, at the writing of this article, has 28,336 followers. “Personally I don’t think that is the right use of Twitter,” Zanki adds.
David Elwart, CIO of South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, says that he has experienced similar problems since joining the service. “There can be too much noise,” he says. “Some of them you quit following because of it. But some people are really interesting and can turn you on to new things.”
For instance, Elwart began following a woman in California whose specialty was state parks and recreation. The messages the two exchanged over the service led to South Carolina state officials, at Elwart’s behest, inviting her to speak at their annual conference on tourism so the state could learn from her insights.
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For businesses, there would need to be more specific controls, says Davis of Popeyes Chicken. He says “the verdict is still out” on what a Twitter-like service could mean to his company. “I could see a company setting up a few Twitter accounts for specific types of communication [such as] system-outage notification and disaster notifications,” he says. “It would have to support hierarchies so that you could send one message to a team, a group made of several teams or higher levels. These groups could be departmental or geographically based.”
Popeyes Chicken started a user profile on Twitter to engage in conversations with other Twitter users about its core product. One tweet on June 19 asked another Twitter user, “Take a look at popeyes.com. It is REAL chicken marinated from the inside out. Not that chewed and glued processed stuff!”
Elwart of the South Carolina parks says he can see how his employees—spread out among the state’s 47 parks—may find such a service like Twitter helpful for broadcasting short messages that people have to see but don’t need to fill up e-mail inboxes.
“The welcome center of a park could say on Memorial Day that ‘traffic is heavy,’” he says. “It’d be a lot quicker to post [via microblogging] than writing an e-mail.”
The other upside, he says, is that the technology can be utilized easily on mobile phones since it relies so heavily on SMS text.
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