Enhancing Your Organization’s Collective Intelligence Using Twitter

If you’re like me, you spend a solid amount of time reading.

Educating yourself about your business. Industry trends. New thinking. Old thinking. Learning about what the competition is up to. Listening to your consumers. And much, much more.

I’d be willing to bet that you’re not the only one in your organization doing this either.

Now imagine if you could have access to all of the best information, articles, whitepapers, reports, and resources that your coworkers are paying attention to.

Also imagine if they had access to everything you were checking out online.

You would all be better for it, right?

You’d all have access to the most interesting, thought-provoking thinking available, and be smarter and more knowledgeable as a result.

This might even save you a bit of time. Having a collective contributing to the curation of the best, most relevant content means that each individual isn’t left to their own devices (and lunch breaks) to do it themselves.

Let’s get into it. Here’s how you can use Twitter to enhance your organization’s collective intelligence.

Getting set up

First, you’re going to need a Twitter account (obviously).

Set up an account as you typically would, but I recommend adjusting your privacy settings to protect your tweets so that your competition won’t be able to benefit from your organization’s internal feed.

Organize curation, contribution and support

Define roles.

Volunteer to be the lead curator, responsible for collecting content and publishing it for everyone’s benefit.

Promote that you are doing this to your organization so they know how to experience the benefits and get involved by contributing their best finds.

Gain the support of senior leadership to really give this initiative a shot in the arm. Having the support of your leadership team will help this plan to really take off, and to gain the attention it deserves from the rest of your organization.

Establish a hashtag

Choose a relatively obscure, or very specific hashtag and have all participants use it so that you can easily find the content they think is relevant to the rest of your organization.

You don’t want to choose anything that is likely to be used by other Twitter users because it will taint your search results. You’ll be happy if your search results only yield your coworkers’ content and you don’t need to syphon through other conversations happening on Twitter to find what your coworkers tweets.

Search and retweet

Set up a search stream in HootSuite for your hashtag and retweet everything your coworkers are tweeting using that hashtag.

Soak up the goodness

And that’s it… contribute when you come across something valuable, and enjoy the flow of interesting content from your coworkers.

BONUS – Newsletters

If you have any interest in really going above and beyond with your Twitter content curation project, consider creating and distributing simple monthly newsletters featuring links to what you deem to be the most interesting pieces of content for anyone that may have missed it in their feed. I’m sure there will be more than just a few individuals that find this to be helpful if you’re up to it.

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How do you share information internally in your organization?

Is that information collected anywhere for future reference?

As always, it would be great to hear from you in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

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