After last night’s Social Media Club meeting, a reporter asked me how Pownce and Twitter could be used for business. One of the attendees, Bill Swartz, thought they would eventually become enterprise services.
Here’s what I came up with. Please help me expand my perspective.
Pownce is a great way to publicize events, and also to send large files to customers and business associates. Tools like these grew from larger trends like outsourcing, free agency, and collaboration.
Let’s assume you are a German engineer designing a bridge in China. You are working with, perhaps, a German team, an American team of financiers, and the Chinese government. Use Pownce to send the drawings or link to where they are posted on the web in a private space. Also use Pownce to post events and get people to attend. You can limit your “friends” to members of your team, and make your posts completely private.
Pownce is an excellent business tool. Twitter is less so, because you can’t send files through it, and it doesn’t have a way to announce events.But if you are at a conference, and you want to meet someone there, you can tweet: “meet me in the hallway outside the meeting and lets talk about the deal.”
Both Pownce and Twitter are good for inter-office and cross-team communication. In business now, many people who work on project are not seated in the same room, same country, or even same time zone. They need every communication tool they can get, and Pownce is excellent for distributed teams like that. So is Twitter. As communication tools, they communicate to revenue indirectly by facilitating communication.
There’s a great post about Pownce on Mashable.
Comments? Elaborations? Help.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I would have to say both Twitter and Pownce are applicable in business. You could have all your officemates follow you on twitter and keep in touch with them, instead of calling or txting them all individually.
I’m still too accustomed to using email for file sharing (although I suppose it has its limitations – Gmail max is 15MB)
I would imagine the CAD world would have great insights into this, since they’ve had to cross-colloborate design teams in different geographical locations for years….