Using Twitter As An Office Collaboration Tool
By: Glenn Letham
Twitter has many uses and is valuable to many users in many different ways. Once great use of Twitter is to use it for quick, convenient messaging for a team or corporate use. Imagine a team of developers spread out all over the country or perhaps a baseball team that needs to get notices about a rain-out or change in game time etc… consider a team Twitter account. Here’s all you need to do:
First, create a team account (@yourteamname) - Important, when creating this account you will want to set the Protect Updates Option (unless you want the World to see your notices!) See Settings / Account / Protect my Updates (last option on page) - you may or may not want to setup an auto-follow option so this team account will automatically Follow back anyone who follows
For a “closed” or protected Twitter account be sure to select the Protect my updates option in account settings
Next, you’ll want your team members to be made aware of the account and then have them follow it. A simple email to your team will work well as you are likely already spending loads of valuable time swapping emails around!
The rest of the work is up to the people that will follow the Team Twitter account
For the followers (team members) I suggest you enable mobile updates - see Settings / Devices and set updates to On - this will enable users to receive mobile updates from select users.
Receiving mobile alerts of Direct messages is very handy although may be tough to manage for people who follow lots of Twitter users (spammers and auto followers are runing this!)
Then, optionally enable email messaging when you are sent a Direct message (always a good back-up plan)
Finally, now that the team members are following the Master Team account, members will want to enable device updates from that specific Twitter account. Simply make sure you are already following the team account, then go to their Twitter page (e.g. http://twitter.com/gisuser) and notice just under the Twitter user icon there’s an option to enable Device updates - set that to ON
That’s it… if everyone follows these steps correctly (savvy Twitter users should have no problem understanding this) now, when the Team Manager posts a Tweet, all team members following the Twitter account (recall, this is a protected Twitter account) will receive a text message containing the Tweet.
