Chances are that by now you know what Twitter is. Famous for its massive following, infamous for its outages, Twitter is a micro-blogging tool made popular by tech-addicted Gen Yers who just have to alert the world whenever they’re about to cross a street or order a sandwich or tie their shoes. Hit refresh every five minutes and continuous status updates from masses of friends (both real and of the Internet variety) provide endless hours of amusement when waiting in lines, walking to work, taking long car rides, etc. (Side anecdote: I was having dinner with a friend a few weeks ago and found out that dining just behind us was Patrick Wilson. As we were led to our table, the friend had seen him and updated her Twitter with the information. During a lull in our conversation, I checked my Twitter feed and that’s how I realized we were mere feet away from a celebrity. We were sitting within his earshot so to say his name out loud would have been horribly uncool.) But celebrity sightings aside, Twitter has more serious purposes as well: Twitter Will Come to Current TV for Debate Chitchat
Earthquake in UK? News Broken on Twitter
Obama and McCain Sending Official Reps to Debate on Twitter Twitter has even been known to thwart potential international incidents! Initially dismissed as a pointless tool for ego maniacal young people who think the world is interested in their every exploit, micro-blogging has emerged as a serious tool for enterprises to use to encourage brand engagement and for internal corporate collaboration. The CEO of Zappos is somewhat of a corporate pioneer Twitterer. Comcast even has a dedicated professional whose responsibility it is to monitor the Internet for Comcast bashing and respond; his Twitter feed is full of responses trying to placate unhappy Comcast customers. JetBlue’s Twitter feed (with over 4,000 followers) posts airline updates and responds to queries and comments from customers. So intriguing is the idea of enterprise micro-blogging that several companies offering an internal solution have come to fruition. Yammer, which was launched at TechCrunch50 and won their top prize, is an example. Yammer boasts such enterprise clients as Cisco and Xerox. At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, I met with Intridea whose latest project, present.ly, offers a simple, customizable Twitter-for-the-enterprise solution. Employees can use services like these to tap the collective knowledge pool of their company for help with an assignment, to circulate corporate news, or to post status updates on projects. According to TechCrunch, Yammer signed 2,000 organizations up to the service on the day it launched. Clearly, micro-blogging isn’t just for the techie with the over-inflated sense of self anymore. It has already started to permeate the enterprise world as an effective corporate tool – both internally and also as a way to engage with customers. We see this trend growing as micro-blogging becomes more mainstream and users continue to bring the technology to work with them. | 
