I see this question a lot...why microblogging? Why not just stick with email?
As twitter has shown, there's value in the posting of notes about what you're observing, reading, thinking. I like to think of it as messaging without guilt. Email, IM have a certain social expectation, microblogging doesn't. I like the way Alan Lepofsky put it: "Email is 'reply hoped for'. Instant messaging is 'reply expected'. Social messaging/microblogging is 'reply optional' (http://bit.ly/dm03).
The principle here is that people are so much more than the jokes they email, and the requests they send to one another. There's a whole lot of smarts people have that do not have a channel. And organizations are the poorer for not providing a way for employees to contribute these things they know and dream up.
Once this notion of commenting without guilt takes hold, a lot of what employees express becomes conversational material. And where will that happen? Likely within the microblogging app, not email.
I think you paint an overly-rosy picture of the usefulness of microblogging. There may be value in the posting of these minor notes -- people in general seem to be narcissistic enough to confirm that -- but I have yet to find much value in reading them.
I used Twitter for about 8 months and during that time I don't think I read a single valuable tweet that didn't contain information that I shortly found through some other channel. Most tweets were pure noise. What was worse is that I joined in with the noise and I am not the sort of person to broadcast what I know to be irrelevant information. Suddenly because everyone was wasting my time, it was okay for me to waste theirs.
Yes, microblogging may be increasing commenting, but those comments are largely noise; most people can only cite specific instances, usually revolving around real-time events, where Twitter was of any real use to anybody. There is a cognitive cost to reading all those tweets, not to mention a time cost, and I found that those costs far outweighed any perceived benefit in almost all cases. With a mere 140 characters to convey information, it seems like this would be the case of the majority of the time.
Microblogging takes the friction and guilt out of speaking (essentially), which I think is bad. You should think before you write or speak. You should ask yourself, "Is this information of significant use to a majority of those who will be subjected to it?"
As twitter has shown, there's value in the posting of notes about what you're observing, reading, thinking. I like to think of it as messaging without guilt. Email, IM have a certain social expectation, microblogging doesn't. I like the way Alan Lepofsky put it: "Email is 'reply hoped for'. Instant messaging is 'reply expected'. Social messaging/microblogging is 'reply optional' (http://bit.ly/dm03).
The principle here is that people are so much more than the jokes they email, and the requests they send to one another. There's a whole lot of smarts people have that do not have a channel. And organizations are the poorer for not providing a way for employees to contribute these things they know and dream up.
Once this notion of commenting without guilt takes hold, a lot of what employees express becomes conversational material. And where will that happen? Likely within the microblogging app, not email.