dispatches from the new world of work

Tom's Tweets

There's a new way to experience Tom's Success Tips. We recently told you about the serialization services of DailyLit and that you can have a success tip delivered to your email inbox each day. Now they've expanded the format of their offerings to Twitter, the micro-blogging service. Tom's not planning to jump on the micro-blogging bandwagon anytime soon (limit Tom to 140 characters? I don't think so), so for now, this is the only way to get your Tom fix on Twitter. How does it work? Using your own Twitter account, you "follow" Tom's Success Tips. Each day, everyone in the world following Tom's Success Tips on Twitter will receive a "tweet" with a link to the same tip. Why sign up for this instead of the DailyLit email delivery? The email delivery is a personal subscription and will begin with the first tip the day you sign up. The Twitter offering is more like a global reading group with everyone receiving the same tip on the same day. Since Twitter can be used on a computer or a cell phone, it's fun to imagine the varied locations and circumstances of the folks who will be reading the tips at the same time. Get on board by June 16th to get the first tip along with the rest of the world's Twittering Tom fans.

Shelley Dolley posted this on 06/11/08.

Comments

That's for the heads up! I Twitter all the time and could always use some good advice

Posted by Bill at June 12, 2008 10:01 PM

Twitter is so unreliable; you may want to talk to Tom about the horrible experience they create for their users before running too far down this road.

Harry Joiner, Marketing Headhunter calls them as reliable as the rhythm method.

Posted by anon at June 13, 2008 10:04 AM

c'mon anon,

where's your pioneering spirit? so twitter isn't the most reliable service around. who cares? we happen to like the folks at dailylit and like their service so we're willing to experiment with them in this venture. this isn't about reliability; this is about having some fun.

Posted by erik hansen at June 13, 2008 10:42 AM

Interestingly, I found out about this from elsewhere yesterday (and was, I think) in the first 100 to sign up.

I agree that Twitter has about as much reliability as an unreliable thing (no metaphor is even vaguely adequate to sum up the situation with Twitter over the past few months), but I still think it's a great trial - cheap, fast, easy - hard to see what the downside is for anyone.

Unless we believe that Tom has been dumb enough to sign a "Twitter Exclusive" preventing him doing the same on whatever the next microblogging service to catch on is :-)

We use Twitter, BTW, to distribute "management KPIs" at 3pm each day - the managers sign up with Twitter, register their mobiles with Twitter, follow a "special Twitter account", and tell us to add their Twitter account to the distribution list... then, once a day, they get a 140-character overview (system-generated, no human intervention) private message to their mobile... WITHOUT the need to standardise on any particular mobile technology... The whole thing took a couple of hours of development time, ran on our existing servers, and hasn't needed touching for 6 months.

Of course, Twitter goes down a lot, but for an EXTRA feed of high-levels KPIs, it's great!

Posted by Mark Harrison at June 13, 2008 12:28 PM

Mark - I love your idea of using Twitter to communicate with an internal audience. I am going to look at this on Monday! Thanks

Chris
http://learn2develop.blogspot.com

Posted by Chris at June 14, 2008 5:40 AM