OPINION: Jim Savage on how Twitter can improve productivity

Rainforests too likely felt the quake, as HR managers raced to reprint staff handbooks with Twitter added next to Facebook in the list of 'banned-at-work sites'.
In more recent times business as-a-whole has of course grasped Twitter's usefulness in terms of marketing, but I believe there are benefits closer to home that many firms may be missing.
New knowledge and insight would have historically come from costly seminars, time-consuming training courses, and costly support services. But now, a fresh, constant stream of free information is available just 140 characters away - you just need to have an open-mind about business models to enjoy it.
Here at Mando Group the team and I actively build relationships with other developers through Twitter and regularly tap into it for information that can enhance the work we produce. It provides us with a first line of new information direct from other developers about technologies such as MooTools. And, at the same time that direct line of communication lets us ask questions and raise issues with a key developer, allowing us to get solutions faster.
In many circumstances we also use Twitter to quickly tap into the intelligence inside many, many minds, instead of just those the colleagues sitting at the desks nearest to us. I like using it to canvas huge numbers of developers about approaches to particular problems. I can get instant feedback from 10 times the number of people that I could if I just straw-polled my colleagues, allowing me to decide on the best course of action in the quickest possible time.
Twitter has undoubtedly had all sorts of daily benefits for us at all sorts of levels, but one particularly notable case involved one of our major national clients. Had it not been for the sheer speed of Twitter they might have missed out on an improvement that was capable of seriously improving site performance.
When the JavaScript MooTools 'Swiff' class (used to display Flash on websites) was released it provided an alternative to the older 'swfObject' method, previously used in conjunction with MooTools, that had seen some adverse effects on browser performance. Mando Group's Frontend Development team was able to quickly pick up on the MooTools update via Twitter and pass on the benefit immediately to our client, giving them a much improved offering.
It's that combination of speed and immediacy that really works for us. These days many people tweet first, then phone, email later or write a press release later (as has been proven by the instances of key figures tweeting the fact that they've just been shot or had their waters break before the news has hit other media). But the bonus too is that communication via Twitter can be less obtrusive than other communication media as people aren't expecting a reply necessarily and even if something warrants one it's not going to take hours out of the business day to compile given the 140 character tweet limit.
Though we're a digital communications agency the principle here could easily be applied to other sectors. The key to making it successful for your business is not to get hung up on old business models that said that knowledge should be locked up inside an organisation. This new model requires you to get comfortable with the idea that you could be sharing information with the competition, but if you're prepared to accept give and take then you could find that micro-blogging can have maximum effect for your business.

Jim Savage is head of frontend development at Mando Group
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