One of the questions that came out of last week's #ECMjam resonated with me: Are tweets records? I was on the road, occasionally able to watch the conversation on my mobile phone, but unable to jump in and add my thoughts while it was happening live. But I'm voicing my opinion now: Yes, a Tweet is a record.
I think this is an important question, and part of the increasingly business relevant "social productivity solution" discussion within ECM, SharePoint, and digital records management, in general. Yes, Tweets are sometimes records -- to be kept, versioned, discussed, tagged, rated, liked, cross-referenced, and searchable. But few companies are yet capturing them. The goal is to put them in context, relating them to other records, adding to the social fabric of your content.
If I am a business owner, I want to capture all forms of communication happening around my records: paper, email, instant messaging, audio, video. We can pretty much do all of this today in SharePoint and other ECM platforms, but we're not yet doing this with Tweets. Why?
As social patterns shift and social computing features become more integral to our enterprise applications, Tweets, like email and instant messaging, are becoming more relevant. The problem is that few organizations are yet capturing and tracking this form of communication, and are thereby losing these important discussion threads. In the late 90's as consumer-based instant messaging platforms (AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MS Messenger) gained in popularity, several private IM platforms were launched as a way to control the conversation happening within the firewall, and allowing organizations to retain this information. Even now, IM dialog can be captured and saved as a text file on most platforms, even automated.
What is needed is similar set of tools to capture and classify Tweets. Tools that better mirror the shifting patterns of communication. Social productivity solutions that allow you to store it in SharePoint, version it, and track it in relation to other content, your project, or your business initiative.
What do you think?
#sharepoint
#ECM #socialproductivitysolutions #socialinformatics #instantmessaging #SharePoint #twitter