Tag Archives: Twitter

The systems we use to manage our relationships eventually transform into the systems we use to collaborate with those relationships.

Customers and partners engaging other customers and partners.

Engagement is what brings tasks and relationships together. Engagement is the process of building relationships with people and putting those relationships to work to accomplish some goal.

"Information networker" describes a group of people whose work centers on creating and connecting information. Today the lines between information creation and distribution have blurred. Twitter is a social network application used by information networkers to distribute ideas and build their influence online. In using Twitter for this purpose, information networkers also happen to build a very valuable real time information network that's used by a much larger pool of people.

Twitter is not a social network. It's a "real-time information network" and once you see it that way, its competitive edges look a lot closer to Google than Facebook. Facebook is a social network utility, while Twitter is a social network application with real-time information as its end goal.

When it comes to social change, the problem with online social networking tools has less to do with the tools themselves - and more to do with how organizations fail to connect their social network organizing with their efforts to deepen their relationships with people. A healthy mix of weak-tie and strong-tie connections and the processes for moving people from the former to the latter is the essence of the Engagement Pyramid and it’s what Malcolm Gladwell is missing in his critique of social networking tools.