Sharon Gaudin’s write-up in Computerworld summed up some of Twitter’s fundmental engagement problems:

The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.

…the study shows that a lot of Twitter accounts aren’t active, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December.

According to the findings, only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered last month. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007 when Twitter was a fledgling company with far, far fewer users.

Early on, I thought Twitter would be like any other technological innovation: People who are more tech-inclined and early adopter in nature will embrace the technology first, and then it becomes more broadly accepted later after certain modifications occur.

But I think Twitter has passed that inflection point by now.

And if it is broadly accepted as a technology, it’s in the form of modifications made to Facebook, not Twitter itself. I also think enterprise microblogging will be more broadly applicable to the masses than Twitter ever will as a technology.

There could be myriad reasons why Twitter can’t capture people’s attention outside what’s becoming a very specific audience. One could be its structure: The Facebook stream allows you to view pictures, videos and other bits of dynamic content without having to click on a link to redirect you elsewhere. Twitter, by contrast, is all about links and redirection, which takes more time than many (and the numbers seem to support this) are willing to give.

Twitter is morphing into a social bookmarking service. While there are still some incredible tweets that I read everyday absent of links, that’s starting to happen less and less.

It’s a shame. I wish more people I interacted with in my daily life (especially outside work) were on Twitter. But I’m becoming more and more skeptical if that’ll ever happen.

Enterprise microblogging, in particular, makes e-mail and IM more useful.

But choosing the proper communications mechanism now can be confusing for people. Many have tried to answer this question of IM vs. microblogging vs. e-mail, but if they had done so adequately, people wouldn’t still be asking about the differences. So now, with absolutely no presumptuousness, here is my stab at it.

What e-mail is good for:

1. E-mail is good for closed communications, addressed from one-to-one or one-to-few. The information being traded you don’t feel is relevant — and never will be relevant — to a larger group.
2. Communications that are granular in focus or formal. Some examples: A letter to a boss or HR, or a thank you note to your friend or grandmother.
3. Communications where people live in separate networks, and the hassle of creating a new network to support their communications doesn’t seem worth it.
4. Everybody has it.
   
5. Platform independent.
6. Accessibility (it’s free on the Web) and push notification means a huge swath of people have it on their phones.

What microblogging is good for:

1. Open conversations. With microblogging, you post information into the stream openly for people to see, not just the precious few you remembered to CC in an e-mail.
2. Awareness. General status updates are very helpful on the day-to-day at work (“heading to meeting with the client” or “editing the press release”). IM isn’t as good for this, either, since status is more a state of being (“busy” or “available”) and has less context. Even customized status in IM isn’t very visually appealing because it’s not in a flow-based design.
3. Opt-in model. People can subscribe to your updates. With e-mail and IM, you have no choice in the matter. (“push versus pull” is in the industry jargon for this).
4. Discoverable. Microblogging is searchable and captures information for everyone in your network to see. With e-mail, people can only search for things in which they were addressed in the message.
5. Forcing succinct thoughts. While there will be more debate about the 140 character limit of microblogging messages (as fashioned by Twitter), the constraint keeps musings at a reasonable length and prevents the long rant e-mails that generally don’t add much to the collaborative process (you see a similar thing happen in forums). Microblogging actually can be a good way to gauge what conversations and ideas deserve longer form, and someone can post a link to a web page, wiki or blog where people who are interested can engage more deeply.
6. Doesn’t turn people into information janitors. In both e-mail and microblogging, you will see information and noise not relevant to you. The main difference? Since microblogging is a flow-based app and less structured, information you don’t feel the need to address can keep on moving, eventually going out of sight and out of mind. With e-mail, every message requires attention in some way if you want to keep your inbox a usable place. That doesn’t necessarily mean you must reply. But you will spend time deleting, unreading or putting messages into nice tidy folders. Email is, after all, beholden to a paper/filing cabinet metaphor. (Could be the reason Gmail is the only usable e-mail service since it departed from this slightly).
7. More casual communications etiquette. There’s more pressure to respond to both e-mail and IM than microblogging. If someone you know or work with decides to e-mail or IM you, you feel inclined to respond even if you’re not interested or don’t have time. How many times do you say, sorry I haven’t responded to your e-mail? With microblogging, the app’s design causes people to — pardon the hackneyed expression — go with the flow. If you don’t respond, it’s nothing personal.
8. Ability to get answers without interrupting people. Ties into point #3 and #7. When you encounter a business problem and you don’t know who to ask, microblogging is great for questions because of this opt-in model. The people who don’t know the answer let it pass; the person who does replies for everyone to see. That reply is also searchable for the future.

What IM is good for:

1. One to one conversations. Similar to e-mail. Think your typical IM chat with one co-worker or family member where information you share is only pertinent to each of you.
2. Banter. We like to talk about the weather, last night’s game, the show we saw, or the general things that we’d talk about if in person. In fact, it’s better that a lot of this stuff go into IM rather than disrupt the stream in microblogging and e-mail with crap no one would want to search for later.
3. Close relationships. We IM with people we know pretty well, either personally or in a business context. For the latter, our business would have to be frequent to warrant IMing.
4. Really half-baked idea generation. While I like to use microblogging to tap my peers expertise and build on an idea, sometimes I need to work an idea out by spewing prose onto a page with a couple colleagues in real time before I can condense that thought into a simple sentence. IM is great for this.
5. Pairing. I don’t mean two developers sitting at the same computer. If you’re working on, say, a wiki page or a blog post with a co-worker, and want to discuss the next thing to add, IM is nice alongside the app.

The choice between all of these technologies, and when to use them, could evolve over time. I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts.

/cgl

Now, Twitter does deserve credit in combating its mainstream stream (ha) problem lately. It created better out-of-box, or in the browser, experience for new users with Lists and automatic ReTweets. These types of features might seem like a next logical step — or even pedestrian — to power users, but for new users who have no idea what a TweetDeck or a Seesmic is, it really helps. Still, even with Twitter’s openness in exposing its APIs and allowing people to build on the platform, the more closed Facebook has continued to thrive because it marries microblogging (or status messages, which are longer and have threaded comments) with other social sharing features in one constant stream without the need for redirection.

For this reason, I believe microblogging, integrated with other social software, will be more useful for the general populace as a technology at work than it ever will in their consumer life. Here is why enterprise microblogging will affect more people, and their day-to-day, than Twitter:

1) You Know the People

One of Twitter’s main problems is that if you reside outside of the insular community I mentioned above, it’s hard to see why you should be on Twitter. Suppose you’re an accountant, a doctor, or an auditor — rather than a social media consultant, digital or SEO marketer, or John Mayer. When you let Twitter cull your e-mail address book, you won’t come up with many names of people you know that are already on the service. So you need to start following people you don’t know. While seasoned Twitter users know value can be derived from following people you don’t know, most people won’t get there (60 percent leave after the first month), or their accounts go static and unused.

At work, you know the people on the enterprise microblogging platform because you work with them. If you have internal social networking profiles, when you examine one of their enterprise tweets, you can click on their name and see information with much greater depth than you ever could on a Twitter profile. When you know people, you’re more likely to understand the content and context of their short messages.

2) Communication Problem is More Real at Work

People already have consumer e-mail and Facebook (which has a status update) to communicate with their friends (not to mention phone, IM and texting). So it’s no wonder that many people can’t be bothered to spend much time on Twitter. Flawed as they are, those other technologies are good enough for them as consumers because they know exactly who they want to communicate with and how to reach them. In addition, services like Gmail sort through SPAM and enable accurate searches, so the “e-mail is broken” proposition doesn’t hold.

At work, the opposite is true. For most of you, your IT department has provided you with work e-mail that isn’t as nice as Gmail. Plus, you have to deal with occupational spam. When a colleague encounters a quandary that traditional systems and processes can’t readily address, he pings you and several other people. Odds are, only one or two of you possesses the right information to help him address his business problem, but he has already interrupted everyone else who doesn’t.

With enterprise microblogging, you can ask questions openly in the stream. The people who don’t have the answers can let it pass by without hitting a “reply-all,” and the person who does know can respond transparently for everyone to see (in case they ever encounter the same problem). This information remains searchable for everyone. This would not happen as efficiently in e-mail or IM.

3) Privacy Provides Comfort to Share

Twitter is sometimes too public for its own good (I’m discounting the fact they have the “private” option, since so few use it). Everything you publish flows into the stream for anyone (now, including Google) to see, and that’s scary to people. This could explain why Twitter is turning into a social bookmarking service. Tweeting a link and a one sentence explanation of how you feel about it seems safe enough. Tweeting where you’re headed for dinner or where you take your kids to soccer is too intimate and private for the whole world to know (again, we’re talking the everyman’s use case, who, believe it or not, aren’t enthralled with an overshare culture). As a result, they have more comfort with the Facebook status message.

Inside businesses, enterprise microblogging provides great privacy that eases people’s minds, lowering the threshold for sharing. A sales rep knows that he can enterprise tweet his location without worrying whether or not a competitor might put two and two together. A CEO can enterprise tweet a link that only his employees should read, but doesn’t want the whole world knowing their reading. Also, status messages, which can be a great way to get started with microblogging, aren’t frowned upon like the “heading to lunch” tweets are on Twitter. They aren’t trivial in the enterprise; location and activity status have value.

4) Value Becomes Evident Faster

It’s unfortunate that many people don’t realize how great Twitter is due to the time it takes them to realize value. For the first month I was on Twitter, I didn’t know who to follow or what to tweet. I figured it out eventually, and now enjoy amazing value from it. But for the general web populace, the gratification has to happen faster, or they leave. (I was also aided by the fact that I work within the proxy of the types of folks who typify Twitter’s user base, and I’ve come to know many of them personally.)

At companies, enterprise microblogging can provide immediate value because of the aforementioned points (knowing the people, and privacy). It’s less complicated to understand than most kinds of enterprise software, and people from all areas of your organization can get started with minimal training. Take this CIO story that highlights St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR), which recently implemented enterprise microblogging:

For example, SLPR’s receptionist received a call from a listener who heard an announcement on the radio about an event at a local high school and wanted to know more about it. Instead of sending an e-mail blast to all staff members, the receptionist used Socialtext’s app to poll the staff, and received an answer in less than five minutes. There was an immediate response, and we didn’t have to clutter e-mail inboxes to get it, Eby says.

[Abrupt end to post/cgl]