Twitter - Toy or Tool? posted by Craig Oda at Friday, July 11, 2008

A few weeks ago I got a call from a reporter who was writing a book with a section on the use of Twitter in corporate communications program. I was surprised. Up until four months ago, I thought of Twitter as a toy, a bit of time sink to chat about pets, the latest meals, and the latest reality show on TV. Before the reporter called, I had been involved in about three projects to use Twitter for corporate messaging programs. However, I had never taken a close look at how the programs were doing across our agency.

I checked up on Twitter usage across the agency and was given a big wake up call when I learned that one-third of our clients were using Twitter in corporate messaging programs. A well-known open source company that was using Twitter to promote a community choice awards contest really made me think hard about the changes I'm going to have to face with these new tools of online communication. One month into a two month promotion campaign, the number of voters had increased dramatically to 100,000. This was up from less than 40,000 total voters in the previous year. Increasing the number of voters is a primary goal of this ongoing campaign. With two weeks left in the program, we may push the total above 80,000 voters.

What changed? Why was Twitter a tool now for this company, not a toy? Although we're still in the process of executing the campaign and haven't finished analyzing the results, I have a few initial thoughts. Twitter is a great way to send short news updates to an existing community several times a day. In this example, Twitter wasn't used to build a community, it helped to focus the attention of some members of an existing open source development community on a specific action. In this case, they voted on the best open source software in different categories. Twitter was used to give updates on the process for community nominations and finalist selection by the community. Since Twitter helped more people to understand the process, more people felt invested in the outcome of the awards program and decided to take the time to vote.

Getting the phone call from the reporter helped me to think through how Twitter can be used. I've started to use Twitter software Tweetr and twhirl on my Mac desktop and recently installed the free application Twitterific on my iPhone. For me, Twitter has finally become a tool.