Making information work

I had a good discussion with a friend and colleague about what is “hot right now”. It was difficult not to answer “Twitter” immediately. His next question - “what is it good for” - is not as easy to answer. Particularly if you see it from a corporate communications perspective. Sure, informing family or friends about the way your day is unfolding is easy and cool with Twitter, but is there anything else? It has been argued (by me among others) that communications trends, tools and services always start in B2C, then B2B, to finally end up in corporate communications - but not always. We are very early with discussing corporate implementations here, but that is what is so exciting.

Lets break it down: what type of corporate communications target groups could benifit from Twitter?

Financial analysts? Probably not - companies could not use Twitter to disclose anything, and a financial analyst is probably not interested the information that companies can Twitter.

Journalists? Possibly - if nothing else to write a story about a company using Twitter. But if a journalist is able to subscribe to Twitter feeds from 25 high level corporate executives, I am guessing that there would be very little need to hunt articles. They would come by themselves.

Top students? Absolutely. In fact, I yesterday had a discussion with a colleague about the apparent crisis withing the IT field here in Sweden. The crisis is caused by a lack of talent, and dropping numbers in IT related school programs. He believed that a large part of the problem is the fact that high school kids think that a web or software developer sits and writes code all day. Imagine if 10 exciting web or software developers used Twitter to describe their days, and schools around the country encouraged students to subscribe.

So can a Twitter account be useful for an information department? Absolutely - you just need to know your stakeholders.

Update: Fox News seems to know their stakeholders - they have an official Twitter feed. They even integrated compacted URLs to ensure that we can get more information. Genious. Putting the information where the target group is, and making it easy to get more information, and to visit the Fox News web. Where, in turn, there is lots of related information. I can not say that I like Fox News, but right now they are on top of it. Textbook.

David