New Twitter group - IntranetWatch

I have set up a Twitter group called Intranet Watch.

The idea of the group is to share links, questions, quick ideas among people involved in intranets. Members of the group will post intranet-related stuff to this group, but will not post personal and other stuff.

Twitter is great for getting to know people, what they are doing/thinking/etc. but I felt the need to have a parallel Twitter channel targeted to "intranet stuff".

You need to sign up to join - send an email to intranetwatch@netjmc.com and I'll put you on the list of followers.

It will probably take us a few weeks to get things smoothed out, so please be patient with the warm up period. Twitter groups are not common, and we need to make sure that everyone who joins this group can freely post intranet specific stuff here. We may need to tweak the configuration a little.

The idea is to have a place you can go to when you want to ask a question, share a link, test an idea. All intranet fanatics are welcome - as long as there are no ads and no sales pitches.

P.S. You need to have a Twitter account in order to sign up. http://twitter.com/

Once you've set up your account, go to your home page in Twitter, do a search on Intranet Watch and request to follow.
Then you can post your intranet questions and musings freely to the Intranet Watch twitter page.

Comments

[Samuel]

Well, I think this gives me a reason to start twittering. Yeah, I know, I'm slow...

[Jane]

Slow but sure!!

[James Dellow]

Wouldn't it be easier just to use a hash tag and have people follow that? I think for what you are trying to do each user will need to create a seperate Twitter account to follow IntranetWatch and then everyone needs to follow each other. This gets a little complicated if everyone restricts their IntranetWatch following Twitter account. Might be easier just to make it public or use another tool? I'm speaking from experience of trying to do the same for a company where we want to keep tweets private between us, but its not really what Twitter is designed to do.

[Jane]

Hi James. Thanks for the comment. I'm not familiar with hash tags. Will check them out.
The idea is to create a channel for intranet-related news, questions, etc. only.
I used Group Tweet (http://grouptweet.com/) to create IntranetWatch. I think the problem is that people are twitting in general and not sending direct messages to IntranetWatch.

[James Dellow]

That's right. In order to use grouptweet they need to dm IntranetWatch, so they still need to follow IntranetWatch. That's why you'll see their normal updates in IntranetWatch's profile - however, they will only see IntranetWatch's tweets (and all the people they individually follow). To keep the conversation private everyone needs to know to dm each time, even when they "reply". All a bit messy if you ask me and not what Twitter is really about.

[Craig Thomler]

Hi Jane,

Great idea!

Have you considered a LinkedIn group?

Cheers,

Craig

[Jane]

Good idea, Craig. So good in fact that it already exists! Anne Mitchell in the US has set one up called "Intranet Professionals". It's new, the discussions are not yet active, but it's a good start - has over 120 members already. I'll find out from Anne how new people can join and let you know here.
Are you familiar with the Intranet Global Forum on Facebook, an open group set up by Toby Ward? Toby posts a number of his blog entries there, there is some discussion, and there are over 300 members.
It's hard to see if these groups help networking. The discussions are never very developed in my opinion, but there may be a lot of contact going on "behind the scenes". If any reading this participates in one of these groups and has some input to share, join in!