Nearly everyone knows about Twitter, but its uses are still be explored. Companies use it to market and sell products and services; some use it as a customer service desk. Twitter can also be used as a private communications tool. You can set it up to show your tweets (i.e. postings) only to those you approve.
It might be worth exploring how to use Twitter to communicate to staff as an alternative to email. Announcements, job postings, quick posts about a success, or a staff to staff inquiry, info about health benefits and so on might be better suited than traditional methods.
Emails get lost in your inbox. That announcement about a staff inservice or a change to the dental plan is hard to locate five days after it was sent. Organizations set up email accounts for all of their staff. Why not set up a twitter account that staff are required to use exclusively for organizational business.
Install an application like Tweetdeck on each staff person’s desktop and organization tweets will pop up in the upper right hand corner of the desktop. The tweet will get noticed and then disappear from view. The staff person can then go to the Tweetdeck application to see the tweet again. Tweetdeck will store over 100 tweets; if you need to go further back than that, you can see all of the postings/tweets on Twitter.
By the way, if your organization has a Facebook page, your staff can also show its wall postings on Tweetdeck.
In the view above, Facebook postings are in the right hand column, Tweets are in the middle. The left column is for direct messages I get from Twitter friends. This means that your staff could direct message one another as well.
If you have an Intranet, you could include an RSS feed of your organization’s Twitter account on the front page so that people could see the latest tweets from the organization.
Keep in mind that using social media will likely call for some policy and guidelines for staff.
For more info, contact me.
Interesting application, Mark. But I don’t understand why a company would want to put staff communications on a public social network for everyone to read. Shouldn’t this be done on a private service?
This would involve employees have a distinct twitter account just for work (using their work email perhaps as the log in). The policy would be all such accounts are tagged as private (click “protect my tweets”) which then allows only those you approve to see your tweets. It takes a bit of setup and a policy but all social media should have policies to govern what staff do and cant do.
Still a risk that staff won’t follow it, but so again is the risk with all social media.
Hope that helps at least a little.