Ok, so at first, I thought what a stupid idea, a site where you just log in and answer one question and one question only, “What are you doing now?”.    How lame!  Well, 1 week later and 100 entries later, I’m pretty much addicted to it.

And I have friends that follow me and “What I’m doing now.”  Oh yeah, I also follow other people.  I’m a loser right?   Wrong!

Social Networking is the hottest thing on the Web now.  Why?  Because we are social beings.  We need contact, physical, emotional and, yes, virtual!

So why is Twitter so popular?   Curiosity perhaps?  I want to know what you are doing all day every day.  Sure.   But there is another take to Social Networking and to Twitter itself that lots of people are overlooking, the ability to use it for business!

For business you ask?   Come on! Are you going to have the CEO type in every day what they are doing in there?   Perhaps, if he wants, but that is not what I mean (I talk too myself a lot in this article, I noticed).  

You can use Twitter as an announcement engine.  Think about it.  You make announcements and people follow your announcements.  But what kind of announcements you ask? (good question!)

Here is an example of how we are using it at work for now.   We have a problem with communication within our department (Shea Media Services) which manages all of our company’s websites and our marketing department which create these huge campaigns that point users to our websites but forget to tell us.  Ooops!    I guess you didn’t think 50,000 users hitting our site all at the same time because you sent out an email was going to be a big deal to our servers?  Wrong!

So I recommended we use Twitter.  I created an account in Twitter for our company, made the account private, so only people we invite can follow along.   Then we trained certain people in the marketing department how to update that account.    I asked them to enter the campaigns they are running in the following format (remember, you have to keep it under 140 characters in Twitter):

[Website] [Campaign] [Users] [Date] [Time]

That way, if they are going to run a campaign tomorrow, they enter the following:

[WebsiteURL] [Newsletter] [150,000] [4/27/2007] [10:00am]

Then any of us in our department can follow and see what Marketing is doing.   I just added the RSS feed of the Twitter account to my feeds in IE 7 and told IE to update every 1 hour.  Then I just check.  If I see something big is going to hit, I warn our friends in the server department to add servers, or we prepare a backup plan in case we have issues.

So as you can see, that’s one way to use Twitter for something else besides just telling people what you are doing now (by the way, I’m typing this now, I’ll add it to Twitter in a second! ).

I’m sure there will be many more ways to implement Twitter in other productive ways.   For example, do you manage software development?   Why not announce new releases through Twitter?

The possibilities are limitless.

Until the next blog!

Cheers!