The FT carried an excellent piece on Twitter yesterday. Compare it to the shallow nonsense of the Times ‘article’ I linked to in a previous post and you can immediately see the difference between journalism and fluff.
The FT piece quotes John Seely Brown on how Twitter ‘extends peripheral awareness’. This seems to me to be exactly how Twitter and similar social media tools need to be used by businesses. It’s too easy to get hung up on the idea that, unless you become totally committed to using the tool 24×7, it won’t generate business value. At the other end of the scale is the notion common in companies that any use of Twitter will be somehow distracting.
The idea of peripheral vision – and especially extending peripheral vision – is well known to martial artists. The key idea here is to be able to focus on a goal but be increasingly aware of what is happening around you. How you reach the goal changes according to what you perceive is happening on the periphery. Goal for a martial artist can be an opponent. For a company – well, take your pick: increased sales, product launch, survive the recession, reputation recovery.
Twitter becomes a tool – along with other peripheral vision management tools such as a blogging strategy, forums, and RSS feeds – for getting a better sense of what’s happening in your market. If it becomes a distraction, your path to your goal becomes unclear; if you ignore it, you may miss opportunities for achieving your goals more quickly and easily.
(For added interest – here’s a recording of a short talk by John Seely Brown on business ecosystems.)
