Posting to Twitter, a micro blogging community, via SMS makes it easy to share one liners (up to 140 characters) with all your friends at once, from anywhere. I post on Twitter about where I am going to be at night, what I am reading and working on, about how I am feeling. Anyone else who uses Twitter that wants to "follow" me can get these updates.

The result is a pretty amazing space shifting tool that allows me to connect with a lot of people about things otherwise too mundane to share outside of my immediate company. Think of it almost like a status message you broadcast out to the world (in fact, you can twitter your Facebook status message).

For example,

Now think of the venting that happens in a long line at a store or at a polling station. With Twitter, you can broadcast that. And people do. A lot of them. The counts on how big the Twitter community is start at one million (which some people think is low), and go up to more than 11 million. With all these people micro blogging, the service can be an exciting window into real time sentiment. So of course we want to track it.

Twitter lets you track keywords being talked about, and you can do this in Managing News. This could be particularly interesting for stores known for having long lines (ahem, Safeway) to know how people are reacting to that and to the store's overall customer service, and for candidates who want to know who's saying they're voting for them on election day.

We started following American Airlines to see what the chatter was about them considering all the safety and flight cancellation problems they were facing. We thought it would be the perfect test to see what monitoring twitters during a real time communications crisis was like. Wow, the chatter was amazing.

Now we're looking at how we should integrate "tweets" from Twitter into Managing News, aside from just good old RSS. The technology side of this will be easy because Twitter has a great API, so now we're doing the research to see what strategies make the most sense. We will share more as this develops, but in the meantime, this really is something that every corporation and large nonprofit's communications team should have on their radar. One company that does is JetBlue, and they've had a good bit of success with this policy. Joel from SocializedPR has a great article on this.