Can twitter support social structure in organizations

The basic idea of twittering is sharing social information with your friends. An example is hyves where you can let know what is on your mind by 140 characters (this is called 'wat doe je'). All your friends can read and react to your short social/emotional message. This is more or less the same on twitter. But will this also work in our organisations? Will a worker ever put his social message in a Tweet and share it with the whole company? Does the rest of the company care about the Tweet of the salesmanager?

Maybe you have some doubts, but realise that the mental model in the organisation is that employees every day have their CCC ‘coffee-corner-chat’. And as we all know if you are seeking for the right information or you are preparing a decision in a meeting, the first thing to do is triple C. And because employees are known with sharing things with each other in their mental model. We expect that supporting this habit by Twitter, people will use twitter from day one. Maybe you should rename it to coffee-chat, so everybody know what twitter is.

For example:

I went on a biking trip this weekend and hit a tree. Monday morning in my coffee-chat I put the words ‘I’am hurt by a three’. Later that day Robbert sees me in the restaurant and asked me how I’am doing.

One of the best things about twitter is the possibility to twitter by more features then internet but also SMS of txt!

This very simple example shows how the social structure in your company can grow.
And yes we hear you thinking: will my people still work and are they going to socialize allday long. Maybe the first two days people are using it like mad. But they will start to be smart about it and only twitter useful stuff. Then your social structure will get stronger. And the positive impact on performance will happen.

So our advise, don’t wait, start today with introducing the digital coffee-chat. This is a great way to enhance the social structure of you company at no cost!

A nice video is here from MIT about twitter and ambient intimacy

this post is written by hendri and robbert