It's easy enough to send a vanilla tweet when you mean to send a direct message, as most forgiving people will admit. As in many of the controversies that attend any news event generated by the BBC, the fact that an appointment was mistakenly communicated to the world via Twitter before an official announcement was made highlights normal human fallibility rather than gross incompetence, or technological ignorance.
What interests me is the fact that anyone within an organisation would choose Twitter - in either public or private mode - for internal communications. On the one hand, it's good to see social media (presumably) being used to improve the way staff collaborate. On the other hand, you'd want to hope that organisations already had effective systems in place for doing just that. I can't help wondering why a manager would choose to discuss a staff appointment via Twitter direct messaging rather than email, IM or good old phone.
Perhaps new forms of communication, with their informal styles, attract traffic precisely because there are fewer cultural constraints around them. While every corporate email comes trailing a lawyer-approved disclaimer and a plea to save the forests, Twitter is awash with effing and blinding. I doubt that anyone in a line management post in an organisation with established HR processes would write an email containing a casual value judgement about a member of staff; Twitter's 140-character, real-time style seems to encourage that most dangerous of qualities - honesty.
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Having attended corporate 'stoke-you-ups' on the virtues of social media, I sat there asking myself the same questions having been using it for a lot longer than the trainers. Call me an old curmudgeon, but the irreverence of social networking in the workplace has sometimes sat a little uneasily with me. I'm not sure where the 'mashup' ends - at the APIs, or our lives, fusing both personal and professional domains into a gooey mess.
ReplyDeleteStill, we've all done a 'Peter' ourselves at some point, I'm sure. I myself have been prone in the past to SMS calamities, texting the wrong person altogether resulting in several 'comedy' situations. And aggression.