It’s the latest, greatest buzzword. Every newscast now asks and commentator now asks you to follow them on it. Shaquille O’Neal is there, and so is President Obama; Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore both have real presences, and even the incoming President of ARMA International has joined the party. So what is the big deal about Twitter?

What are you doing?

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s a Web-based service that invites its users to answer the question, “What are you doing?” The catch is that you only get 140 characters to do this. That may not seem like a lot of space, but it’s based on allowing users to update their status with text messages from their phones. SMS has a 160-character limit, and Twitter keeps 20 characters of that for your username.

Here’s a better definition of Twitter that comes from Ari Herzog. Ari is a social media consultant, writer, and marketer, and when his barber asked what Twitter was, he responded, “It is part text messaging and part blogging, with the ability to update on your cellphone or computer, but constrained to 140 characters.” Note that this definition, without quotation marks, is only 137 characters.

One of the reasons Twitter has grown so rapidly is that it can be updated using your phone’s text messaging capability, through the website itself, through a client on your smartphone, through desktop-based clients, by linking Twitter to other websites like Facebook or your blog, or even by email or IM.

Twitter users can follow other users, but it doesn’t have to be reciprocal; according to FriendorFollow.com, one of many Twitter-enabled service websites, here are my statistics as of this writing. I follow 363 people, while 738 people follow me. Of those, I follow 4 that don’t follow me back, while 285 users follow me that I don’t follow back.

There are any number of reasons for that, which I will explore in a much longer article later in the year, but one of the key aspects of Twitter is this asymmetrical model where you can follow whoever you want and see what they are saying, and anyone else can do the same for your Twitter stream. You can make your updates private, but it’s not nearly as useful that way, and I don’t generally ask to follow accounts set to private unless I really know that person well.

The business case for Twitter

So let’s go back to Ari’s definition of twitter as a mix of texting and blogging. Twitter enjoys the immediacy and simplicity of texting while being a fundamentally public service. In other words, it’s not siloed like texting, or the nearest business equivalent, email. In fact, Adina Levin from SocialText, an enterprise wiki and social media company, describes enterprise microblogging (Twitter) as “more private than public Twitter, and more transparent than email.”

That makes Twitter the perfect application for one-way broadcasting of short, fairly transitory types of information such as announcements of meetings or promotions; quick commentary on a link (along with the link itself); sharing resources via links; breaking news about the organization or the industry; and informal polling (e.g. “What should we have for lunch today?”. This has not been lost on first responders like the Los Angeles Fire Department, who uses Twitter as a sort of reverse-911 system to keep its constituents informed. Granted, not everyone is on Twitter, so it’s not a replacement for more traditional systems, but it is an additional system to reach more people more quickly.

Most of the blog posts about Twitter focus on the fluidity and speed of Twitter as a collaborative tool. A user could make a request for information or assistance, such as “Whenever I open X tool I get Y error message. What gives?” If I know the answer I can respond very quickly; if I don’t, I can always forward to the people that follow me and perhaps one of them will respond. The request can be transmitted to a vast number of users very quickly.

Twitter makes it fairly easy to share links as well, and it is not uncommon for bloggers to link to their latest posts, analysts and vendors to Tweet links to new white papers, and so forth. Good resources get forwarded; bad or excessively sales-y resources don’t.

One of the very popular use cases for Twitter deals with presentations. This takes two related forms. The first is for users to Tweet key points or salient details of a presentation they are attending. Everyone following them can read the points and understand at second hand what the presentation is about, how it’s going, whether it’s a good, content-rich session or a sales pitch, etc. The second serves as a more immediate feedback loop and backchannel. In other words, while the presenter is presenting, users are Twittering instantaneous feedback based on the presentation. Either in real time or later, the presenter can respond to that feedback. Now extend that to a geographically dispersed project team on a conference call, and imagine that the feedback relates to a deliverable under discussion.

Twecords management?

We want to manage records according to their content and context, not according to media. That said, it is difficult to understand what types of records could be created in the space of 140 characters. The LAFD stream I noted above might qualify, but that’s probably the exception rather than the rule.

The first key consideration for Twitter and the RIM program is that it could be discoverable, just as any other type of information. In other words, if it’s relevant and it exists, it might need to be produced. There are a number of ways to do this, ranging from conducting keyword searches on the Twitter stream (public or private) to copying the Tweets from Twitter to e.g. a database or Excel spreadsheet (and there are services to automate this).

The next is to look at the compliance aspects, particularly with regards to data protection, privacy, confidentiality, etc. Just as a financial services firm wouldn’t send out insider trading information via email, or IM, or a postcard, so it shouldn’t do that via Twitter.

There are enterprise versions of Twitter that can be restricted to an organization’s employees or even installed within the firewall. These are not Twitter, per se, but many of them provide similar capabilities with the addition of security, archiving and retention, integration into the identity infrastructure, and better filtering.

Twitter today, Twitter tomorrow!

In order to “get” Twitter, you really have to use it. My experience with Twitter is similar to many peoples’ – I signed up, didn’t follow anyone, didn’t Twitter a bunch of useless inanities, and quit using it. It took 8 months for me to give it another chance; this time, though, I followed about 20 people whose blogs I read regularly and spent some time lurking, just following quietly. Eventually I started to see the different ways in which it could be useful to me personally and professionally, as noted earlier, such that given a choice today between email and Twitter, and losing one of them permanently and irrevocably, I’d choose Twitter.

Twitter’s not the right solution for everyone. It can be a time sink. You cannot follow everyone on Twitter and still do your job. But it can be a helpful resource for most people and I encourage everyone reading this who has not tried Twitter to give it a chance.