Confessions of an eBiz Junkie

Twitter as a Business Tool?

From past posts, you may know that we've been exploring different ways to leverage Twitter as a business Tool. We've set up Tweet accounts for EMCCorp, EMCWorld and a few others. We used Twitter as a tool to communicate with attendees at our recent EMC World event. As recently as this morning, I was discussing the validity of Twitter as a business tool with one of our senior executives.

I can certainly appreciate the complexities of introducing new tools, especially when adoption of said tool is quite high - perhaps beyond expectations. However, I've been experiencing more and more issues of late. Yes, I've been following the Twitter blog - and I know the team is working it. However, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to tout Twitter as a relevant and legitimate tool while such issues continue to plague. I've seen the infamous 'over capacity' screen at least 5 times this morning.

Our EMC World experiment with Twitter was a good one. Twitter adoption among attendees wasn't as high as I would have expected, but there were enough to make the experiment interesting. We were fortunate not to experience any major issues during the week long event... But, if things had been as unstable as they seem to have been in recent days, I'd have considerable egg on face and would be backing away from my attempts to legitimize the tool in the enterprise.

The current state of the state may be fine for casual users... But really needs to tighten up if enterprise adoption is a desirable outcome for the team.

 

EMC World Begins

Today's the big day. Following a concert by the Goo Goo Dolls last night, EMC World kicks off in full swing this morning with an action packed agenda over the next few days. I'll be watching activities in real time via Twitter and following thoughts from employee and attendees alike via #EMCWorld @ Hashtags.org.

Some neat media is starting to surface. This one caught my eye and I thought you'd enjoy it. more to come over the course of the week. Of course, many more cool vids available over at the EMC Channel on YouTube.

MVP for a Day

I'm realizing more and more that physical internal events can really help build awareness around the opportunities afforded through Social Media. There's certainly no shortage of passion and interest - so the trick becomes providing the right level of information such that the energy is channeled in a productive way. We've been doing this through our Lunch n' Learn events - But took it to another level this week.

On Monday, we were fortunate to serve as host for Microsoft community executive and CEO/Founder of CGT Consulting, Sean O'Driscoll. I've been following Sean for quite some time, and consider him among the top thought-leaders in this space.

We'd posted an open invite to the event on our internal community platform - and it filled almost immediately. Based on strong interest from our global audience, we extended to a LiveMeeting and had healthy international representation.

I'd say the event was a huge success...