I Wish I Knew Who You Were, And Who You Worked For (Automatically)
Lots of people have multiple accounts on Twitter, for various reasons. I can’t tell you the number of times I get a message from somebody out of the blue and I’ll think, “Hey, I know you, don’t I?”
But who is it?
Some detective work later, I figure out that the reason I know this person is because I’m following one of their other accounts. Perhaps their business account. Maybe their personal one. What bugs me about this is I might have a friendly relationship with this person on one of their accounts, but have no idea who they are on another. Or even that they have another.
What I’d like Twitter to offer (and this would be entirely opt-in) is a way for multiple accounts to be linked together. This would be great for businesses that have main accounts and lots of additional ones for their staff. Like Twitter themselves, for example. When you visit the Twitter profile, all their employees should be right there, too. With titles and responsibilities. And if I stumble across an individual employee, it shows that they’re linked to Twitter.
(Think Twitter + LinkedIn.)
Some people do this now in their bios, but it’s kinda awkward, and doesn’t translate well into manageable data.
It could even work a bit like a newsfeed, with one main account pulling the updates from everybody else. So, if I wanted to really follow Google, for example, an @GoogleTeam user could be setup so that everybody who worked for the company could be followed via that one account. The different users would feed in and I could reply to them accordingly.
(Think Twitter + RSS.)
And it wouldn’t have to stop at businesses. Participants in sports teams could link together, as well as social groups and other clubs. You could start your own tribe.
(It might even come with privacy. You could direct message everybody in your tribe with one click. Wouldn’t that be convenient?)
As it is, it’s awkward to find out all the people that work for any corporation on Twitter. I’ve been trying to do this for Twitter themselves, and Dave Winer is doing some great work with his 100twt project. (Check out what the people who work for the New York Times are saying.)
I’d like to see it automated. I think it benefits businesses and customers, which is rare enough to make it very worthwhile.
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Thats a good idea, a very good idea… You should sell this one to Twitter.
.-= Pippa´s last blog ..The Six B’s – a motto to live my life by =-.
While this could work well, it would work best if a person’s tweets were strictly devoted to the linked item. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work at all.
For example, let’s say that John James is an Olympic athlete who works at Home Depot. If John has two separate Twitter accounts, one for athletics and the other for woodworking, then the one account could be linked to the Olympic super-account, and the second could be linked to the Home Depot super-account.
But what of my case, in which my @empoprises account tweets personal observations…and stuff related to four vertical markets within which I blog…and the rare item related to my employment at MorphoTrak? In that case, linking to a super account wouldn’t work at all.
The whole thing probably works best for people who don’t have a Twitter account before joining an organization. When they join, the HR person or coach or whoever would then instruct them, “OK, now you’re part of SuperLand. Establish your own Twitter account, link it to SuperLand, and tweet your version of the SuperLand message.”
.-= John Bredehoft´s last blog ..Prodject part three – Managing product management =-.
You wouldn’t link your personal account to your employer. As said, businesses could link their actual staff accounts – those that were created to provide things like technical support, etc. You’d only follow @CompanyTeam if you wanted to see everything that company was talking about (as you might with Twitter or Google, say). Lots of staff on Twitter have personal accounts, too. These would be quite separate (and as said, everything would be opt-out).
Google has numerous accounts on Twitter, as do other companies like Microsoft. I can see no reason why these shouldn’t be linked.
(You could, of course, still follow just one of them, any other number, or the whole.)
Personal accounts could be linked in groups that had relevant interests, say.
A Twitter account wouldn’t have to be new to join a group; it would just have to (as you say) already be serving that purpose, be that professional or personal. At the user end, we’d define our own tribes, and businesses could do this quite usefully on theirs.
I really like this idea!
.-= Natalie Michelson´s last blog ..Nat_Mich: RT @Sheamus Why Send A Dozen Direct Messages (Or Tweets) When One Email Will Do? | Twittercism http://bit.ly/17p44l =-.