June 1st, 2009
A Twitter driven social experiment
According to my Twitter account, I have 3,852 followers. I follow about 1,500. I have no idea how many are active, passive or dead though I’m sure someone out there will have a tool that tells me. Anyhoo - over the weekend I tried an experiment in crowdsourcing via Twitter.
Stacey Monk is one of the leaders behind Epic Change, a non-profit devoted to helping those less fortunate than the rest of us. In the website’s own words:
Our proof-of-concept project seeks to rebuild and expand Shepherds Junior, a small primary school in Arusha, Tanzania
Stacey is a savvy operator and has been featured on various blogs and websites. The work she’s doing is in a thoroughly deserving cause but it is still tough raising funds in a world where there is plenty of competition vying for our attention.
Each month, Ideablob runs a competition where the winner receives $10,000 towards their project. Eight are selected to go forward in a month long voting exercise. It’s a simple idea and provides the finalists with a showcase through which their ideas can be promoted. Epic Change made it to the final eight for May and was in strong competition with several other equally deserving entrants.
Having nothing much better to do on a late Saturday night and being aware that Stacey was using Twitter to pimp the project I thought I’d get in on the act. Anyone I saw floating past my Seesmic Desktop ‘home’ page got a direct message or an @reply to look at IdeaBlob and, hopefully select Epic Change.I also set up a search on @staceymonk
I have a good number of colleagues, friends and enemies I know personally, some of whom are regarded as Valley A-listers, analysts and tech alumni. They got a more direct approach. TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington for instance got a Skype message. Pretty much everyone I approached directly was kind enough to reply. Not everyone voted for Epic Change but that matters less. What matters is that Twitter seems to have invaded our consciousness to the point where a good number of people are glued to it. Or at least a good number of those in my Twitterstream. What’s equally obvious is that if you have established some sort of reputation then people listen and will amplify a message via their own networks. Check this Tweet from Loic LeMeur, CEO of Seesmic:
@dahowlett suggests I pimp @StaceyMonk ideablob “share and grow business ideas” http://bit.ly/ideablob so here we go I am pimping
Or how about this from Ed Brill, an IBM/Lotus director:
@dahowlett redirects to ideablob.com … somewhat interesting, crowdsourcing still a hot topic
Even people I only vaguely know through the interwebs got in on the action:
@dahowlett Hey that looks really cool!!! I’m going to try it!!
I’ve long held the view that content without context in process is meaningless. That’s one reason why many people turn up at Twitter and go duh? On this occasion the context and process were self evident and I am thinking that in business terms, the same will often apply. Something like: ‘Help me with this problem (link to context) I’m struggling with XYZ (process.) However, in the business context we don’t have a very good way of linking or embedding the content - in this case a series of Tweets - into business processes.Those technical problems will be solved but for me the bigger question is what this will do for the effectiveness of people trying to get things done with business applications.
Most people work in the context of an application - say accounting, sales or HR - but that’s not where their attention is necessarily needed. Seeing how popular Twitter has become, could it serve as the binding interface that crosses departmental boundaries and turns those boundary walls into permeable membranes? We’ve tried blogs and wikis with reasonable success but they’ve not truly entered the mainstream. Twitter has overcome all sorts of barriers, doesn’t require gatekeepers in the traditional sense and seems to serve us very well. Contrary to what I often hear from IT policy makers, it is benign and in that sense doesn’t need controlling. The key is in knowing that users can consume, respond or ignore without worrying whether others are doing the same.
I don’t know whether Epic Change won in its efforts to garner votes. The results will be announced in a few days. What I do know is that Twitter as a metaphor for reaching out to anyone who is ambiently in our respective streams is starting to prove incredibly powerful. That cannot be ignored. Oh yes - and apologies to anyone I offended in my relentless Tweeting. It was in a good cause. Consider me to be a digital street corner tin cupper.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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