Twitter is one of the those internet trends that bitterly divides those with nothing better to than comment on internet trends. Is it really just a “chorus of minutiae from morons” or is it “the next killer-app” . In all probability it’s neither, but it could it have positive uses for business? And what exactly is Twitter anyway?

Twitter is a service that lets the world know what you’re doing (via short messages of less than 160 characters) , and lets you ‘follow’ what other people are up. Depending on whether you’re generation Y or generation z, you can think of it as either broadcast SMS or your Facebook status on steroids. Some 6 million people now  tweet – among them Stephen Fry, Britney Spears, and John Cleese.

At first glance, tweeting and business don’t seem to offer each other much. But hold on a moment. That’s exactly what people used to say about blogging and business. But numerous companies and senior employees are now using blogs as a very efficient way to inform and interact with customers (a trend we first noted a couple of years ago).

While we’re still not convinced tweeting will be as revolutionary, we’ll be adding it to our site as part of our upcoming redesign. We already see it offering some benefits and hope we’ll uncover some unexpected postives as well. In the short term we’ll be using it for:

• Publishing system status updates that don’t merit a global email alert (e.g. a small percentage of client sites running slowly due to transient technical issue) 
• Communicating our availability (e.g we’re all on company training today – call our mobiles)
• Alerting clients to general internet / tech developments that don’t merit a whole blog entry
• Letting clients know about promotions / discounts in a way that less intrusive than a mass email 
• Showing first time visitors that our site is something we care enough about to update regularly 

We’ll let you know how we get along with twitter once the new site is launched. Until then we’ll be tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/osbornebrook

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 12:25 and is filed under web 2.0, web culture, web trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.