Bits & Bytes

Twitter (twitter.com) was developed with a single goal in mind, to keep your friends, family, associates, others, etc. up to date with what you are doing. There are 2 main areas to Twitter.

1. What you are doing.
2. What others that you are following are doing.

That's it! It is that simple. Because of its simplicity, people and companies are utilizing it for different use cases. Here's a couple of scenarios for how people/companies are using Twitter to communicate. It's very common for people to have multiple Twitter accounts - some for personal use and some for business use. Who they allow to follow depends on who they want to see their updates.

Personal Communication:

• John wants to go out to eat with friends. So he adds "I want to get a bite to eat at 7pm tonight. Somewhere in Addison. Anyone interested?" Then his friends who follow his Twitter updates will see his update and thus the conversation starts.
• Mary just got a new job with Anderson Consulting and wants all her friends and family to know. So she adds "I got a new job!" to her Twitter account.

Business Communication:

• Microsoft makes frequent updates to their products and so they offer a Twitter account where their customers and others can easily receive notifications when updates are available. So they add "Outlook 2007 SP2 Update has just been released. Go to www.microsoft.com to download the latest update" to their Twitter account. Now all the millions of customers who have signed up to follow that Twitter account are instantly notified of the update.
• The L Group frequently does Executive Briefings that are FREE for those who want to come. So the day after a new Briefing has been scheduled, they add "Join us at our next Executive Briefing on 3/20/2009 at the Hotel Intercontinental. Sign up at www.theLgroup.com."

As you can see, Twitter was designed for SHORT real-time communication.  Messages are usually short in length and, for businesses can be action oriented. How you use it is dependent upon what information and to whom you want to communicate. The possibilities are really endless, because it was designed to be a general communication medium.

Here is the research I did on the psychological impacts of relying on email as a communication tool. I was motivated by my own needs to figure out why email has been impacting my business negatively here recently. So the obvious question is "then why am I still using email to communicate with people?" It's because I found that the problems are not on a global "email is bad" level. The problems are due to a lack of awareness of the psychology of email.

Here are the highlights of the research I found:

• Almost 50% of all emails are incorrectly interpreted in some way by the receiver.
• Both the sender and the receiver fill in the tone of an email based upon how they feel or what they fear, not what's actually being said.
• Most emails go unchallenged, meaning you might be angering people, bruising egos or burning bridges and you'll never even know it.
• E-mailers assume that other people have the same inside information about their intentions and motivations that they do-what social psychologists call egocentrism.
• E-mail is fine if you just want to communicate content, but not any emotional material.

Like any other tool, it's up to the discretion of the individual as to whether an email is a good or bad. My only goal is to create awareness with those in which I have email relationships.

Here are some great articles that I found on the subject.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb06/egos.html

http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/nicholas.epley/Krugeretal05.pdf

http://www.youmeworks.com/no_honking.html

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003470.html

Bits & Bytes isn't about blogging for the sake of blogging.  It's about sharing knowledge and information that we feel is important to our clients and our partners.  For years, we have been sharing this information on a case-by-case basis in our conversations with clients through email and over the phone.  But we found ourselves having the same conversations and felt we weren't practicing what we preached.  We weren't using technology to make our services and our business more valuable to our clients!

So, here's to the new adventure we're beginning, and thanks for joining us.

- Reliable Studios Team.