I had the occasion to work with Biz Stone, one of the founders Twitter yesterday and it is always fascinating to meet the people behind new innovations and hear the stories.  The reason for this meeting was Biz coming to speak to 20 CIO’s from large companies at the behest of InfoSys, and my facilitating the meeting. There were two interesting things that came out of the discussions I wanted to share.  The first being my observations of Biz Stone as a human being, the second the topic of Twitter in the enterprise.

For most people, names like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos symbolize examples of heads of the technology state.  Biz Stone is certainly in that group in that Twitter is on an inexorable path to being as widely used as any other Web application.  I was thinking about the fact that I was talking to audiences about Twitter when it had 100,000 users – now it has 175 million registered users and is growing quickly.  Biz mentioned that this number does not really reflect the true reach of Twitter because people can use Twitter without actually tweeting, or having an account, so that actual number of users daily is as hard to judge as the average number of Google users a day.
In person, Biz is clearly young, intelligent, and artistic.  In fact, he was a graphic artist before he became a technology leader.  He started in the blogging field, and then by accident (his words) ended up riding the Twitter explosion.  His goal was to solve specific problem he has which was the desire to blog simple comments or observations without feeling like he had to write paragraphs of text.  He also wanted these thoughts to be able to be delivered to any device instantly.  He and Evan built the capability, and it exploded.  Everything else that Twitter can now do has been an unplanned byproduct of the original problem they wanted to solve.  Funny how that happens in the technology space.

Biz is also a person that seems to really care about people, especially his users, and employees.  I was impressed that he is a good example of the leadership style we are likely to see out of the Gen Y generation.  The hallmarks being a high call for social responsibility, creativity, fairness, and democracy of ideas.  He refreshingly lacks hubris, the standard trappings of a CEO, or greed.  His belief is that he must create value before profit.  Meeting him gave me hope that the next generation will pull the world in a very positive direction.  One example of that is how little he seems to worry about how corporations will use Twitter, or maybe it would be more true to say, that he does not view businesses as a bank to be robbed.

That leads me to Twitter and the enterprise.  So I was facilitating a meeting of CIO’s and before Biz came into the meeting, a few of them expressed that they still did not see why Twitter mattered.  They could not see any reason why people would share information with each other in a forum like this.  I was a little taken aback that this opinion still persisted among technology leaders, but alas it does.  When Biz was asked how Twitter could be used by large organizations, he focused on three areas:

1 – Companies can use Twitter search to find what people are saying about products, executives, or competitors.

2 – Companies can use it to see what the zeitgeist is of employees by following their discussions and seeing what they are talking about at this moment

3 – Companies can use the new sponsored tweets and topics to promote products

He also mentioned that his definition of Twitter is that it is an real time news and information network.  Highlight on real time.  That means that organizations can use Twitter to monitor what people are saying feeling, or sharing right now at this moment, and that is a new dynamic.

I would add my own spin on that and say that it should be incredibly clear to organizations that Twitter provides the potential for a huge river of real time information on every element of an industry.  If you never used it to send even one tweet, you could simply use it for market intelligence.  The fact that large companies don’t understand this simple model boggles the mind.

How about you?  Still wondering how to get value from Twitter?  Seriously?

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com