Before you answer this question, we should ask ourselves what status ‘Twittering’ really is. I’d like to call it a tool to update your status. Twitter or Facebook starts with updating your status. The basic idea of a status update is to share others what you are doing, what you are thinking of, or any other thing you would like to share. Some say that status updates is the same as microblogging. Whatever you would like to call it, it’s a means for one-to-many communication (or broadcasting). The question remains, why should you update your status?

One of the important rules is that it is always up to you to update your status. It’s not required to do so. There are pro’s and con’s about doing it or not doing it. It’s an activity that you’ll have to feel comfortable with. Another thing to remember is that in one-to-many communication it is likely to have more people in the audience than in broadcasting. So it is ok for people to keep track of other people there statuses, without updating theirs. Sharing and reading is voluntary, like it is with many communication methods.

The best known channel for this kind of communication is Twitter. Many people use it for their own needs, it can be for news, fun, nonsense, anything really. Good enough for personal use, when it’s not a problem that all ‘tweets’ are public, and are indexed by search engines. Not very attractive for usage within a company. As a response, there are many vendors that offer a similar service, but not for the public. For example, only people in your organziation that share the same email extension (you@company.com) are allowed. Services like Yammer, SocialCast and Present.ly are some examples. However, privacy and security concerns can still be problematic for many organizations.

I think sharing statuses can be really valuable when used in organizations, especially for organizations where employees that are geograpically distributed. It makes it possible to know who is working on what, in an easy manner. When applied rightly in intranets that people are used to, it can be a very effective addition to one’s work.

Some of the advantages of sharing status updates:

• inform your audience
• decide where to act upon
• get informed
• discover what is going on
• enforces involvement and collaboration
• form bonds with others from the community
• foster the ability to form teams

Disadvantages:

• inform more people than you would like
• it can’t give a complete picture of what’s going on
• people are reticent in sharing in the open
• can take too much time
• privacy and security concerns

The challenge is not in using such a tool, but in how to use it, or, better, in how to empower employees to use the tool best. How to overcome the disadvantages? It should fit in the daily work and routines of the people using it, it should not become an extra burden for the majority. That makes it extremely important how such a tool is introduced to the potential users. It is not about the tool, but about the people using the tool. This is something that is often and easily underestimated. Such a tool can only be introduced once. That one time is the chance to have the advantages overcome the disadvantages, and to have many people feel not too uncomfortable from the beginning.

Another challenge is that there should be some intelligence attached to the usage of the tool. Otherwise it would be a black box, very useful, but hard to understand and to act upon. For example, good intelligence makes it possible to identify social and informal relationships between employees, other than the hierarchical and formal relationships as they exist on paper. This and other metrics add to the richness of analyzing communication between employees, and can add to the understanding of other online and offline behavior, which ultimately can lead to a better business.