Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time

31 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution

Micro-Messaging

at Work

Twitter started out in 2006 primarily as a way for friends

and families to stay connected. But within a year, people

were beginning to use micro-messaging to communi-

cate with co-workers, customers, and other business

contacts. By summer 2008, Twitter and its cousins were

becoming commonplace at work.

Three general business-related use cases have

emerged: 1) communicating externally, including brand-

related activities such as customer service, marketing,

and PR; 2) gathering market information; and 3) com-

municating internally with coworkers. The first two gen-

erally occur on Twitter; the last one happens not just on

Twitter, but on other services, too. In this section, we’ll

look at the important trends in business adoption of

micro-messaging, along with some challenges.

Micro-Messaging for External

Communications

On Sunday, April 6, 2008, Frank Eliason, a customer

service executive at Comcast, was home installing ceil-

ing fans. It was a boring project, and he took a break to

check his RSS feeds, which he’d set to receive updates

when any post on Twitter included the word “Comcast.”

Although he’d been blogging for a while on behalf of

Comcast, he had learned about Twitter only recently, and

he was monitoring the service but had yet to post to it.

As it happened, Eliason looked in on his RSS feeds

just in time to ...