Leo Laporte Jayne Hat 2.0 unboxing on TWiT live from Let's Knit2gether on Vimeo.

SXSW Knife Throw from Indy Mogul on Vimeo.

CAT’s Amazon Kindle 2 unboxing from eric susch on Vimeo.

Instead, I’ve been thinking over the past year how Twitter can be  valuable for collaboration not only within an enterprise but also between an enterprise and their customers.  There’s been web chatter about Twitter’s secret monetization strategy and my theory is that they may be heading down this commercial path as more enterprise marketing organizations are beginning to leverage twitter for brand communications.

I’ve been a twitter user for more than a year.  I’ve primarily used it as  a mechanism to update fans on what I’m doing and finding out what kinds of things are interesting to them so as to incorporate these ideas into the podcast.  I’m amazed at how quickly Knitters (yes, with a capital K!) have caught on to the value of tools like Twitter and Plurk and how they  manage to incorporate Twitter/Plurk into their knitting work flow.

Some examples:

• Cries out for help on pattern errors
• Show and Tell on completed projects
• Latest news in the industry
• Updates from conferences and festivals

These are just a few off the top of my head.

So how can an enterprise leverage Twitter?

It’s ironic that just yesterday the discussion came up about how our organization is using Instant Messaging for better collaboration within our IT process and business processes.  It’s more timely than email, there are broadcast capabilities and there is a sense of immediacy that email doesn’t provide. It also includes attachment possibilities like email but is lighter weight.

I think Twitter, (hosted on the intranet or externally) is an interesting approach as well.  Since Twitter is an Opt-In or Subscription based platform, it cuts down on spamming messages and really targets people or messages that are valuable to the subscriber.

For instance:

• Group activities can be announced as they occur this way all team members could subscribe to the group members to monitor broadcast current issues and status
• Senior leaders can use it to keep the enterprise up to date on their activities. It’s not as cumbersome to twitter as it is to blog for someone of this level.
• HR/Corp Communications organizations can update the enterprise on timely events and respond to concerns
• Project teams can coordinate around the world and share progress and discussions.
• Announcements to customers about product releases and announcements
• Communications to customers on upcoming events

Again just a few ideas.

What about in your enterprise, are you using Twitter now or can you consider other approaches and uses for Twitter in your enterprise?

I believe that the audiences for each of these are going to be different in most cases.  For example, I doubt that new media folks are going to care that I just finished knitting a sweater for my nieces.  On the other hand, the knitters don’t really care that I’ve just discovered the latest tools for setting up Business Intelligence and Analytics Data Wharehouses.

Both fields interest me greatly, one my occupation and the other my avocation.   So how does one keep them separate?

Let’s start with Facebook.  Seems like there’s no chance of separating here.  You must use your name to create a login.  You can not segment your friends or the status/content you post to target only certain friends.

Twitter is better, but annoying. I can create two Twitter Accounts, but the web twitter tool uses cookies so I have to keep signing in and out of the different accounts to post.  I can’t have two different browser windows up one with each Twitter account.  On top of this, I can’t figure out how to warn people to follow the other account until after they start following the wrong one.  Of course they’re not reading the bio to be clear about which persona is which.

LinkedIn seems to be the easiest as most knitters don’t use this site other than their professional persona, however, there’s not much “social” going on there anyway.  So who cares anyway.

What I think needs to happen is a new platform that defines your Profile of Persona.  When you sign up for a new social network you define the Persona for that network by pointing back to this Profile of Persona.  Kind of like a wallet with different pockets for different persona the way you have for separate credit cards.    Any chance of this ever happening?

Share your experiences.  How do you get it to work.

There are a few concerns I have  with this:

1. Advertising rates for online content/media is extremely low
   Somehow rates started very low.  Content sites used to practically give the advertising away for free to gain print or traditional media advertising.
2. Inventory for advertising is always growing to a point where it is a commodity easily come by
3. The current state of the economy is reducing the total ad dollars available.

So what are the other options?

More on this later..