An enormous amount of information flows down the Twitter
electronic pike as tweets. This
continuous flow from thousands of tweeters – individual, company, and other organizational
types – represents a unique source of information. It seems to me that there has never been anything
like what this flow of tweets represents with respect to information availability.
It is technically relatively easy to select a specific topic,
for example, employee performance, and then to pull (filter) from the Twitter
flow many tweets with relevant information on the topic “employee performance”. If one is seeking what others know about
employee performance, using Twitter as one source of information would be easy
and likely productive.
Although, as stated above, gaining access to tweets on specific
topics is relatively easy, what should one do who is interested in a broader
subject, such as human resource management, under which employee performance is
but one subtopic? In other words, how
does one filter Twitter for all tweets with information on the various subtopics
that make up a broad subject area such as human resource management?
An answer that I have come up with uses the idea of a
dashboard consisting of several filters, each filter on a specific subtopic
within the broad subject area. Once set
up, the dashboard can easily be brought up as a webpage and then each filter on
a specific subtopic will be available to drill down for details in the tweets
on that subtopic. The collective tweet
fitters will cover many, if not most, of the subtopics that make up the broad
subject area of interest.
This idea of a dashboard of Twitter tweets seems to me to
offer the possibility of being a good tool in managing various broad subject
areas in a company. Besides human
resource management, other areas might include: financial management; benchmarking;
sector analysis; environmental issues; governmental issues; and country and
regional informational needs.
A dash board concept is used extensively in financial
management of a company where the various components of a financial dashboard
represent various financial and accounting data relevant to the company. Collectively, the various filtered data (on
the dash board) gives an overview of the financial condition of the
company.
Hopefully, the collective filters of tweets on subtopics of
a broad area, such as human resource management, will also give useful information
in managing the general area in a way not possible otherwise.
Click here to go a version of this blog which shows the “Human
Resource Management Twitter Tweet Dashboard”.
Shown at the bottom of the page are 7 subtopic Twitter filters making up the dashboard. These filters were set
up using Twitter creation tools on one of their web pages. The subtopic filtered is shown at the top in
the presentation box. The presentation
box presents tweets in real time as they are submitted in Twitter, and will
cover tweets in the recent past (e.g. several days). Clicking the link “Join the discussion” in
the presentation box will bring up a complete list of the tweets related to the
subtopic that have appeared in the recent past.