The Future of Business Conversation: Twitter 2.0

Many of us are familiar with Twitter. The idea started out as a 140-character blurb about, “What are you doing right now?” A few short months later, it has evolved into one of the biggest ways for people across the world to communicate about life in real time. Twitter is no longer a monologue, it’s a conversation. You could say the idea has evolved into, “What are you doing right now, and how will I respond?” People share ideas, blogs, information and simply talk about what’s going on around them. This is a perfect example of how the tools of social media are not always used for their originally intended purpose. People realized that Twitter could become the vehicle they were looking for to hold a conversation with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Lewis Green got me thinking about how this might affect business conversation in the future. He writes, in Age of Conversation 2, “The biggest downside of effective business collaboration is geography, as employees often are in different towns and cities, states and provinces, and countries and continents. An expanded, closed-circuit Twitter-like application could change all that.”

The benefits, as he describes them:

No matter where you live or work, you can share ideas 24/7
You can drop in and out of conversation as necessary to go about your daily work, without missing the flow of conversation
You will always have a complete and accurate record of each conversation
This could even be expanded into customer feedback where operators are standing by to receive and respond to customer comments, stories and ideas

Imagine the possibilities for real-time conversation and sharing in business. Anytime, anywhere, you could join in your company’s ongoing conversation of how to improve your business, how to solve a problem or, when creativity strikes, share the idea before it’s gone.

I see the lines of the “40-hour, 9-5 work week” blurring just a little more.