Supporting Transient Communities with Twitter

Over recent weeks and months there has been a significant increase in the number of Twitter users and in the various ways individuals and groups are tweeting.  One of the exciting ways to use Twitter is to be able to use the tool to harness knowledge and information from a community, large or small, which forms at a point in time.  For example, at a conference, seminar, exhibition or other educational, business or sporting event.  

Through using #tags as a means of isolating tweets relating to a specific subject, for example #ecsm http://twitter.com/home#search?q=%23ecsm was the tag for the social media conference I was a speaker at last week in London and a friend of mine is attending a conference in San Francisco http://twitter.com/home#search?q=%23wbenc

The communities which form around these events are transient and temporary, however the #tag allows all attendees to be connected for the duration of the event and provides a way to retain the communication about the event to all ettendees and offers an opportunity for others to access the conversation and also the links to other resources including the speakers, attendees, interested parties following the event and also links shared through twitter on the subject of the conference.

This ability to harness knowledge and connect with individuals who are interested or participating in a subject matter enables us to filter the noise on the web and enable us to develop our knowledge and understanding of a subject through others with a similar interest.

    How engaged are your customers? Adobe/Forrester

    Have just read the “how engaged are your customers?” report from Adobe and Forrester – it is a very interesting document and is a good document for discussion around customer engagement and the changing role of the Information and Technology professionals within organisations.

    From a customer engagement perspective the key takeaways are around the changing nature of an organisations relationship with their customers and the move towards providing them with the means, opportunity and platforms to become more empowered customers. Through empowerment comes a higher level of engagement with an organisation and in turn a stronger loyalty

    Historically many organisations have created customer focus groups who have been involved in many areas of an organisations growth. For example

    • technology companies have customer led user groups who have been involved in the ongoing development of the features and functionality of the technology products
    • consumer product companies have customer focus groups which are used to test new product ideas and refine them before going to market

    Today there are multiple channels which can be used to support customer engagement strategies and create interdependent relationships between an organisation and their customer community. These channels may online, offline be created and maintained by the organisation themselves or may be owned by an independent organisation – the key to is embrace the empowered and engaged customer voice and to learn from the dialogue – whichever platform or channel it is taking place on.