You can use Twitter to get new ideas to do your work in a better way

Would you like to show off at work with great ideas? This week I did some intakes for a course about learning technologies which is starting next Monday and I realized that actually very few people are using Twitter. Yes, they do have a Twitter account and may have a look at their timeline some times, but it is not helping them to do their work in a more innovative way. That's a pity, because Twitter can actually help you to generate better ideas.

Knowmads are innovative

I believe that we need to work more and more in a knowmadic way (see this blogpost about knowmad). Technology is driving innovation and new ways of working, but we need people to do this. New ideas can help to solve a recurrent problem or simply ideas which stimulate you to do your work in a different way which may be fun. It is not something I am making up, but something I have experienced myself and which is backed up by a study by MIT.  I read "how Twitter users can generate better ideas" by Salvatore Parise, Eoin Whelan and Steve Todd. The article is based on a 5 year research program in which they studied 10 employee groups in 5 companies. They linked internal brainstorm results to Twitter usage. 

The ideas of twitter users are of higher quality

Twitter users and non-users actually submitted the same number of brainstorm ideas, but the ideas of Twitter users were rated higher (the rating was done anonymously).  Furthermore, there was a correlation between diversity of the Twitter network and the quality of ideas. Loose Twitter networks are better for ideation. 

Become an ideas scout and idea connector

Just being on Twitter is not enough. 205 interviews revealed what skills are necessary to be able to find ideas and be able to translate to your work context. You need what they call an individual absorptive capacity. Two activities were correlated to this capacity: idea scouting and idea connecting. Twitter users who performed both roles were the most innovative. 

An idea scout is an employee who looks outside the organization to bring in new ideas. An idea connector is someone who can assimilate the external ideas and find opportunities within the organization to implement these new concepts

Idea scouting

So how to scout ideas on Twitter? Interviewees said: It’s not the number of people you follow on Twitter that matters; it’s the diversity within your Twitter network. A senior technologist who was interviewed said: “I don’t necessarily want to follow more people. I just want to follow people whose opinions don’t always align with my own, which is kind of an ongoing battle because after a year or so of following the same people, you find that your opinions shift and morph a little, and suddenly you are with a homogenous group of people again.” What I personally do is follow a wide range of people on Twitter. However, the flow is so large I can not read all. I may hence miss Tweets from the people in my network, therefore I  use Hootsuite to be able to follow my warmer networks via lists.

The 70/30 rule

One person had a 70/30 rule to blend serendipity into her Twitter network: 70% of the people she follows are directly relevant to her work, 30% are outside her comfort zone. Several employees mentioned virtual connections to the thoughts of individuals such as former astronaut Buzz Aldrin as catalysts for good ideas. What I do is follow people from other industries (like marketeers) and also writers of books I like. You could also think of having a core of strong ties (people you know well and work with) and weak ties (people who are unknown to you or move in quite different networks).

From weak to strong tie

You can use Twitter as a way to move from weak ties to strong ties, to get to know people better. Twitter is perfect to establish weak ties (by following them), you can start to engage by interacting (such as replying, retweeting) but may also organize face-to-face meetings. In this way Twitter helps you expland your strong network.

Idea connecting

Idea connecting involves translating the idea to the workplace and issues and sharing and discussing those ideas with the appropriate stakeholders. In the interviews people described their roles as listener, curator and alerter. One person said: “I try to sift through all the Twitter content from my network and look for trends and relationships between topics. I then put my analysis and interpretation on it. I feel that’s where my value-add is. I’m not just sending out a bunch of links. I think through what might be valuable to particular groups such as marketing or engineering. This leads to engaging discussion.” My personal experience is that there is also serendipity involved. I follow L&D trend watchers and read about artificial intelligence and chatbot. When I participated in a face-to-face method to reflect about mistakes in order to learn from them I was able to connect that idea to a confession bot idea. Hence Twitter does work for me as a source of new ideas.

Twittering = learning?

I often have conversations about the role of social media in learning processes. Sometimes people might say: 'Ok, but twitter is not learning. How can you learn from 140 characters?!

The theory about learning you embrace determine how you look at social media and its importance (or unimportance). From a behaviourism point of view, twitter might not be very relevant as a means for learning. However, from a social-constructist view you might see a twitter network building relations. In that case twitter is very important. I used a Dutch article about various learning theories: ontwikkeling van leren in organisaties by Keursten to look at what the various thought streams might think about twitter:

• Behaviorism: learning is equivalent to influencing and changing behaviour. You do this by offering situations to practice the desired behavior. One example is a course about giving feedback. You can teach people the right way of giving feedback and create a situation to practice it. Twitter will not be seen as an important means for learning, because the change in behavior needs face-to-face to practice (although there are also research which shows that an innovative program using a webcam to practice social skills worked very well).

• Cognitivism: learning as information processing; the mind and thought process is put at the centre of the learning process. Within cognitivism, a clear distinction between knowledge, skills and attitudes is made and sharpened. I see the cognitivist approach reflected in many conferences, where the expert notify and explain to participants what the latest findings and trends are. Twitter will be interestingly but mostly because people may link to articles, books and information. I must admit I have used this argument myself. I would now respond differently.
  

• Pragmatism: learning by doing. This an approach I see clearly in the design of 23things, a course for librarians. See for instance here. People can learn 23 new Web 2.0 tools by using them, experimenting and experiencing them. Within this movement Twitter will not be so important (unless you want to learn how to use Twitter!)

• Constructivism: learning means developing a unique world view based on all experiences acquired. Learning is a process by which a professional adds new knowledge and ideas to his or her existing body of knowledge. Independent and self-directed learning is important. Within this thought stream twitter is more interesting. Twitter provides a window on the world. And using twitter means quite some self-direction, choosing who to follow, what to tweet etc.

• Social constructivism: learning through collaboration. This school of thought views learn as the result of interactions between individuals, learning within networks and communities is important. I am myself a supporter of this school of thought. That explains why I think being active on Twitter might be an important part of a learning process. Using twitter to build your network and maintaining relationships.

Keursten did not yet talk about connectivism. This is also an important school of thought developed by Siemens.

• Connectivism: was developed because the previous schools of thought were not impacted by technology. These theories do not address learning that occurs outside of people (i.e. learning that is stored and manipulated by technology). They also fail to describe how learning happens within organizations. Learning is a process that occurs within chaotic environments of shifting core elements and is not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning can reside outside of ourselves. Connectivism might be summarized as 'I store my knowledge in my network'. In the case of connectivism Twitter might be a source of serendipitous learning and self-organisation.
  

When you are talking about using Twitter and Yammer (a single twitter tool) within your organization is therefore important to do this in the context of your learning theory. This may help surface the differences. How do you feel about learning through twitter?

Your number of followers on Twitter doesn't matter but retweets and mentions do

Often I get the question: do people know when you unfollow them? And I used to reassure them that you only get a notification from Twitter when people start following you, not when they unfollow you. But now there is a whole bunch of twitter tools; I started testing some Twitter unfollowers tracking tools:

1. Twittaquitta - will send you a mail with your new followers and unfollowers
2. Twunfollow- will send you only the unfollowers

Now I'm a little confused what I should do with this information. For en_nu_online I stop following them back. For my own account most of the time I don't really care. And this is now back-upped by real scientific research! (disclaimer: I only believe and quote scientific research when it's in line with my own convictions..)

I read the paper: Measuring user influence in twitter: the million follower fallacy by Cha, Haddadi, Benevenuto and Gummadi. They researched and compared three measures of influence on Twitter: indegree (followers), retweets (how often a message is resend by followers) and mentions (the number of times a person is mentioned by others on twitter). Traditionally a lot of research has gone into the influentials who can persuade others. A modern view how ever de-emphasizes the role of influentials in innovation, and pays more attention to the interpersonal relationships and the readiness to adopt innovations. A trend can be initiated by any one, and if the environment is right, it will spread.

The most followed users in the research spanned public figures and news sources (CNN, New York Times, Barack Obama) and celebrities like Britney Spears. The most retweeted were aggregation services like Mashable and Twittertips, businessmen like Guy Kawasaki and news sites again. The most often mentioned were the celebrities.

Interesting findings:

• The number of followers was not related to mentions and retweets. Hence the most followed users were not necessarily the most influential in getting a message spread.
  
• Influentials were influential in a wide range of topics, not only their own field
• Broadcasting too many tweets puts popular users at risk as spammers
• Users who limit their tweets to a single topic showed the largest increase in influence scores

Similarly, Dan Zarrella talks about the science of social media and digs into similar topics. If you have the time, you may watch it, takes an hour.

The Science of Social Media from HubSpot on Vimeo.

Dan Zarrella dismantles the idea that ideas spread 'because they are good'. This is not the case, it depends on the ability to reproduce yourself. Most ideas get less than one retweet. Compared to animals, you have the elephants (live long) and the fruit flies (live short but high fecundity). The tweets may be compared to the fruit flies, you need to seed widely to have an impact.

Some highlights from Dan Zarrella:

• The more negative remarks, the less followers people have on Twitter
• The hoax about the death of Nelson Mandela was spreading not because the person starting it was influential but because it was well-timed, well-worded. He didn't have many followers, but they were well connected.
  
• Now that everybody is tweeting there is link fatigue. In weekends the number of tweets slow down, but the click throughs go up.
  
• Novelty gets spread, if nobody has heard about something, it spreads.
  
• Most retweetable words include you, twitter, please, retweet (and how to, and new blogpost)
• Least retweetable words include game, going, haha, but also bed, gonna, well, sleep.
  

Now assuming you are making use of twitter to change the world or get influential for other means (I still feel I'm there to connect and learn..) I guess what you take away from these scientific researches is the following:

Build a well-connected social network around you ready to embrace the changes you envision.Make sure you have unique and interesting information that resonates, information that fills a void. You may ask influential people to tweet or add please retweet. Multiple seeding may be necessary. Calls to action work. Don't tweet that you are gonna sleep :). Monitor your number of mentions and retweets, not the number of followers.

Twitter for organisations

I follow some organisations and some individuals on Twitter (I follow northern NGOs like @oxfamnovib, and some southern NGOs like @alamad_NGO). Generally, I find organisations' slightly boring, slower and less engaging on Twitter than individuals, but keep on following them because they do have some useful new information at times (or out of politeness?). I'm always curious who is behind the account, especially if I know the organisation!

Several people have asked me how they should organize their Twitter account for their organisation, how to name the account and who should Tweet? I respond that it's best to combine organisational with personal. Recently, I have asked this question in the Facebook group with non-profit consultants and also found this blogpost by Steve Bridger talking about the same issues.

How to use twitter as an organisation?

• Naming the account after the organisation or the person? - There are three different options: an organisation account (eg. UNICEF @unicef), a personal employee account (like Arjen Mulder @arjencito), or an account combining a name and organisation (eg. Colin Butfield @Colin_WWF). Ofcourse you may both, have an organisational account and encourage your employees to be active on Twitter with their personal account, talking about their professional lives. It is nice to know who is tweeting from organisational accounts. You may add that information in the profile, or as in the example of @handsonnetwork use the image on the homepage (see picture). One person mentioned that the twitter account on behalf of the organisation didn't work till she added her own name. Also, if you are sending a Direct Message, you might add your name at the end to make it more personal. For other organisations, like UNHCR it seems to work well (with more than a million followers!). Slightly more creative is setting up a Twitter account with a specific purpose, like one of my favourites, the African Proverbs.
  

• What to tweet? Try to develop an idea of your followers and why they would like to follow your organisation, are they volunteers, clients, partner organisations? Is it to offer webcare (a booming new approach to customer care) or something different? Christian Kreutz analyzed accounts of 10 development organizations and found they performed poorly on interaction with their followers. On the other hand, you may set up an twitter account like an information service, and as long as you are clear about it, for instance with tips or quotes (see again African Proverbs). Be creative! And you may organize an occassional poll amongst your followers using twtpoll or another polling tool.

• How to leverage employee accounts? More and more new employees may already be active as professionals on Twitter and may like to keep their own accounts. What you can do as an organisation is to offer a phrase to add to their profile information. You may make a list of the twitter accounts of the persons in your organisation and put in on your website for instance (check whether they are into this or whether is more of a private twitter account!). You may offer some guidelines to employees. Steve Bridger offers a nice list with example guidelines on his blog:
  

  * Include a disclaimer in your profile;
  * Common sense should always prevail;
  * Don’t tweet what you wouldn’t want to see in print – or your mother to read;
  * Keep it clean (a few people advised against swearing);
  * Try to stay clear of controversial topics – or at the very least refrain from using inflammatory language.
  * While your views are your own, bear in mind what you say could reflect negatively on the charity’s reputation
  * Take care not to announce a new initiative before the ‘official’ word is out, and if in doubt leave it out, or seek advice (even though embargoes are so last century);
  * Do not say anything that may damage relationships with corporate partners, suppliers, and other charities
  * Be transparent – if responding to any work-related social media activities always make a disclosure.

• How to avoid fragmentation? If many employees are Twittering in your organisation, it might be a good idea to stimulate employees to follow each other. Create for instance a company list. This already helps to create some uniformity and inspiration. And may help for internal knowledge sharing purposes too!. Make twitter part of the internal agenda: ask who is inspiring, ask people to collect tweets they liked. Make sure there is an ongoing conversation.
  

Do you follow organisations doing a great job on Twitter? Please share it through the comments!

Learning by coincidence on Twitter

(cartoon via Rob Speekenbrink)
I get involved in lots of discussions whether Twitter- is learning (or nonsense). People are sceptical on what you can learn through 140 characters. Often I answer that you definitely learn through twittering because you can link through to blogposts, articles etc. Basically defending the 140 characters.

Probably the main difference is in the theory about learning that people hold. Is learning what you do in school or in a training or is it something we do continuously? From a social learning point of view, Twitter is an important medium in which people converse, and build relationships. For people who are not active on Twitter this may be quite invisible. If you look at an individual twitter message, it makes no sense. But if you follow people over a longer period of time, you notice the influence it has, on the way you think and act. Like the day I decided to put up the christman tree because many people were twittering about it :).

Last week a conversation made me think about a different angle. (Nb: following is a rather longish story, if it is boring to you you may skip the rest of this paragraph). We have been very busy searching for a good secondary school for our daughter and it took up quite a bit of our time. We visited open days, evenings for parents, classes. There are many things to consider in your decision-making. In the Hague there are also too many pupils per school, so you have a chance to be rejected. In our case, many friends started to apply for a school, and we were about to apply too. Then I talked to a friend in another part of the country and found out there most people wait for the test results (CITO), so that you know the exact school type. This suddenly made a lot of sense to me. So you see how you get influenced by your environment and may overlook the obvious. So we decided to wait for the test results first.

Back to Twitter. I see a twitter network having the same function. Seeing new perspectives, widening your choices. Seeing new solutions to problems you didn't even know you had. Simply by reading a lot of stories. Ofcourse you need to be able to link it back to your own situation, and that depends on the quality of your network. Another example: through my twitter network I learned about prezi as an alternatve for Powerpoint, even though I wasn't looking for it. You may call it serendipity too.

Do you want to do more with twitter? Here's a great handbook: free download!

Facilitating a twitter chat

I've now participated in three Twitter chat sessions. The first time was I late, I arrived on the scene towards the end. The second I could not really follow well, I saw all these separate and short messages. I pulled out. The third time was my lucky time. I used tweetdeck to follow the hashtag, did not continue working simultaneously but devoted myself to the chat. It was the conversation that Catharinus Doornbos, Trainer at Station-to-station and initiator of discussion Tuesday on ICT and education. I liked it. Nevertheless, I had the feeling that you mainly talk with the facilitator and less as a group. I've interviewed Rinus about his way of facilitating a twitter chat.

Why did you start facilitating Twitter Chats?

It started with a movie that I saw about Twitter Tuesday for the U.S. Teachers. By using a hashtag (#) in all tweets, the discussion can be followed by everyone. In these discussions I came to great ideas and got to know lots of useful websites with many resources and tools for education. I wrote an article on the edublogs of Netwijs. I said jokingly, that we could start a twitter Tuesday in the Netherlands. Then I received some positive comments. Because we in our department had just talked about innovations in education and ICT and wanted to devote more attention to it, I asked my colleagues to support my idea.

How have you started your twitter Tuesday ?

I selected a start date and time and almost every day via Twitter communicate these with the use of the hashtag # netwijs. That triggered new responses. The number of active participants now grows slowly. The number of followers too. I notice more participation and a subsequent rise of personal followers after the debate. Yet, the participants are mainly people who in one way or another professional involved in education and ICT, but not teacher. There are few teachers participating. Maybe it is lack of time, perhaps it is by ignorance.

How do you facilitate your own chat?

As moderator I start the discussion with a question or statement. Then I try to ask for responses from participants by probing and bringing in other perspectives. In this respect there is no difference with leading a face-to-face discussion. The added problem is that you have only 140 characters for use in your tweet or actually less, because you must use the hashtag. You must really be to-the-point. The advantage is that you have no other incentives, such as facial expressions, gestures, or people who talk. Everyone is now in an equal position to contribute and free to comment on they want to comment on. I make sure that I have read some materials on the subject and have some nice links ready to throw into the discussion when it is quiet. During the discussion, I am regularly searching the web. During a simple discussion you have that opportunity. Afterwards, you can read everything right back, even what you've missed. This makes it very dynamic.

Are you satisfied with the results of the chats?

The result so far is that I've expanded my network considerably with people I would never have met otherwise! We share knowledge with each other. In addition, our blog got much more attention. We use the name of our department as hashtag (# netwijs), hence we ensure branding and we reinforce our image, that we have knowledge of education, ICT and innovation.

Twitter to start your personal learning network

I'm working with a learning network in education using a sharepoint platform. It's hard to move from face-to-face meeting to online interaction (for a number of reasons and we're writing a whole paper about the challenges). We're experimenting with webconferences and I was suggesting to experiment with other tools like a weblog, ning, or a google group. Some are hesitant: if online interaction with one platform doesn't work well, will other tools not be even more confusing?

When I saw this video on the free technology for teachers blog with about the use of twitter for educators I was struck by the way they see twitter as THE only tool for educators. Watch the 15 minutes video if you're interested.

How is twitter used by the panel? They use twitter to connect with students, parents and other stakeholders, to share resources for teachers and to have tweetpolls and conversations. For instance, every tuesday there are discussions using hashtags. These discussions are with an international group of teachers, including teachers from Turkey etc. The one on the necessity of homework was particularly lively.

They stress that it is not twittering away about learning together. They don't call it twitter but rather a personal learning network. People become learners rather than workers and twitter helps them to continuously learn. It is a great support to teachers. One in three teachers leave because there is lack of support for them, and this can be the way to create support. They decided to start a ning to work as a repository.

Mmm, should we start a twitter experiment? I wonder whether twitter fits the teachers practice because it is so much to the point!

Twitter & Education - #140conf LA from RealPlayer SP on Vimeo.