Fast Company: “The Next E-mail” Twitter and Others as New Business Communications

yours truly… multitasking

What’s in your business communications toolkit?

Hi, I’m Jim and I’m a Twitterholic. My addiction to the very popular, multi-platform SMS tool is mentioned with a quick quote from me, tech evangelist Betsy Weber, and consultant Cathryn Hrudicka  in a smart piece by Podtech rock star, Twitter Hall of Famer, FastCompany.com contributor, and blogger Robert Scoble. I’ve blogged about Twitter’s value as a branding tool, and have encouraged big media to empower their employees to be brand champions with these tools. Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook are also used as examples of these new tools in the business communications aresenal. Scoble adds an interesting twist, pointing out all the behavioral data made available by seemingly mundane posts. Scary or promising depending on where you stand.

given what it and other companies spend acquiring new customers, there’s an untapped gold mine in Twitter and Facebook because we’re volunteering so much information about what we’re doing right now.Learning how to tap it correctly–both to sell to me directly and in seeing major trends in the millions of daily public posts–will be the next major challenge for these companies.
Robert Scoble, on Fastcompany.com 9/07  

He sums up the piece with a look in to the future:

If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that we’ll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and they’ll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to participate in the heartbeat of business.  

Besides Twitter, what social media are you using to promote your brand (read what should be using that I don’t know about!)? What are you using to learn more about your community? What will be the next killer tool? In addition to Scoble’s Twitter presence, check out his Twitter link blog.