Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can say with honesty (or a straight face) that any of my 8000 tweets deserve the same treatment.  Nevertheless, the Library of Congress in its wisdom has decided that my tweets (as well as all the tweets of every other Twitter user) are to be saved for posterity.  My initial reaction was that this had to be an April Fool’s day joke.  But, apparently not:

According to Nate Anderson, the reasons for preserving these bits of ephemera reflect modern trends in scholarship:

There’s been a turn toward historicism in academic circles over the last few decades, a turn that emphasizes not just official histories and novels but the diaries of women who never wrote for publication, or the oral histories of soldiers from the Civil War, or the letters written by a sawmill owner. The idea is to better understand the context of a time and place, to understand the way that all kinds of people thought and lived, and to get away from an older scholarship that privileged the productions of (usually) elite males.

The LoC’s Twitter archive will provide a similar service, offering a social history of hipsters, geeks, nerds, and whatever Ashton Kutcher is. As Twitter continues its march into the mainstream, the service really will offer a real-time, unvarnished look at what’s on people’s minds.

But will the knowledge that our words are being saved forever lead us to change the way we tweet?  Will our 140-character blurts, verbal gaffes and inanities now be transformed into pearls of wisdom?  Probably not in my lifetime.  However, I will try to remember to be a bit more circumspect.  What about you?

[Photo Credit: Wilson Loo]

That’s key — I do it when I want to.  Unlike e-mail, which tends to interrupt me at the whim of the sender, there is no expectation on Twitter that you will immediately read and respond.  I’ve discovered that there’s great freedom in that mode of communication.

All of that changes on Thursday, September 17, when folks can start phoning people in their Twitterverse for free courtesy of the Jajah@call program offered by Jajah, a VOIP company.  According to The Next Web, here’s how it works:

You’ll be able to make phone calls via Twitter free of charge to anyone in the world, so long as they follow you back and have JAJAH accounts.

@calls are made without revealing your number and without needing to know the number of the person you wish to call – all you need is their Twitter username.

The beauty of JAJAH is that it uses the Internet to connect two standard phones, thus implementing both the advantage of the Internet as a low-cost service and the comfort of using a regular telephone device.

Suddenly, all those folks you followed back just to be nice can start phoning you.  24/7.  For free.  Are you ready?  If you’ve been playing any of those foolish games to pump up your follower numbers, you’re about to win the booby prize.

It’ll be interesting to see if the advent of free Twitter calls changes the way people approach the whole issue of following/followers.  Will the net result be a shrinking of each participant’s Twitterverse?  I’m reserving judgment on this until I see how it plays out.  However, I’m not sure I’ll be rushing out to facilitate phone calls just yet.  Will you?

[Photo Credit:  jiruan]

Unfortunately, we soon discovered that there was no WiFi in the room.  (I was later told that the only room with WiFi initially was the ballroom.)  As a result,  I took my notes offline and will move them to a blog post when I get the chance.  No live blogging for me.

By contrast, some bloggers attended the Twitter session at LegalTech (in a ballroom with WiFi)and decided to tweet the various presentations.  What a blast!  Although readers around the world were getting multiple 140 character sound bites in duplicate (and triplicate) and were slightly reeling from the impact, I do think the medium somehow conveyed the energy of the session in a way that a blog simply cannot.  We were frantic and frenetic, and we were clearly having a great time.  A quick look at the feedback received shows that our friends online enjoyed the tweets and participated via Twitter by commenting and posting their questions.

In a single day we got to experience two different ways of communicating information and dealing with technology.   Social media tools like blogging and micromessaging via Twitter are wonderful and powerful.   Several of my readers said they had so much fun reading our updates that they wished they had been in the room with us.  That said, they acknowledged we’d delivered the next best thing.  If they can, they’ll find the cash to come to LegalTech next year.  I’ve got to believe this is something the conference organizers would like to encourage.

So, about that WiFi…

[Photo Credit:  vkdir, Creative Commons license]

1. Transparency & Values: Twitter constantly reminds me of who I want to be, and what I want Zappos to stand for
2. Reframing Reality: Twitter encourages me to search for ways to view reality in a funnier and/or more positive way
3. Helping Others: Twitter makes me think about how to make a positive impact on other people’s lives
4. Gratitude: Twitter helps me notice and appreciate the little things in life

I’ll let you read his post to find out exactly what makes Twitter so wonderful for him.  However, for our purposes, I wanted to take a closer look at his discussion of values.  In his post he explains that living life in a public forum like Twitter means that there is a constant spotlight on him and on how he embodies his company’s core values in his daily life and his daily tweets.

The Zappos core values were created by the employees of Zappos working together to explain what mattered to them. Here are the values they identified as their “core values”:

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

Now, take another look at this list and tell if you don’t think it would be a great statement of knowledge management’s core values?  We may not be delivering shoes and clothing, but these core values speak to our work as service providers and midwives to change.  In fairness, there are few businesses that could not be improved by following these core values so, in that respect, there isn’t much that is particular to KM in this list.  Nonetheless, I’d suggest that we haven’t always done a great job of embodying these values and that failure is reflected in our spotty results as a discipline.  As the economic news gets grimmer, it might be timely to think harder about what our core values are and how we live them out in our workplaces.  And then, we need to commit.

I’ll give the last word to Tony Hsieh, from his post Your Culture Is Your Brand:

We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them.

[Photo credit: bluedharma, Creative Commons license]

That said, I know folks are always looking for the silver bullet, the one sure-fire way of achieving success. Putting to one side the fact that I don’t know how you define success, let me make a suggestion: Go where the conversation is. In the brief time I’ve been using social media tools, I’ve been struck by how well they facilitate conversations that cut across status, age and geography. Above all, I’ve been impressed by the richness of those conversations. But don’t be fooled by the fact that they can be brief, casual and, on occasion, banal. The reality is that these online conversations build relationships, and those relationships enrich your life. In fact, they can even be profitable in your professional life.

There was a time when the critical business conversations happened on the golf course or in particular private clubs. Increasingly, they are happening online. So if you want to participate, find a social media tool that works for you** and then use it to go where the conversation is.

[*When I first saw the blog title, "Do You Know Where You're Going To?" I thought Mark was joining me in my series of blog posts based on popular songs. Unfortunately, it was not the case. However, for those of you who don't mind a trip down memory lane, here's the song I had in mind.]

[**And, for those of you who have read this far, here's a small bit of advice: try using Twitter for three weeks and then let me know what you think. There are great conversations to be enjoyed there. If you wish, you can find me on Twitter using the tag @VMaryAbraham.]

The real issue isn’t size of following as much as it is scope of impact. How many of these folks are really paying attention to you? How many do you actually affect? Unless you know this, you don’t have a good understanding of your interaction with Twitter. Admittedly, there are Twitter stars whom everyone likes to follow. And, assuming we follow because of their established reputations, we’re more likely to pay attention to what those Twitter stars say. For the rest of us in the Twitter mob, however, the number of our followers is a poor (and possibly inaccurate) proxy for our impact.

Coming back to law firm knowledge management, take a moment to consider whether your efforts to measure the wrong thing are leading you into unproductive activity. Don’t focus on bulk — focus on impact. For example, counting how many times a particular document is opened via your portal or document management system may be interesting but not helpful. What you really want to know is how many times was it opened and actually used? And, how often was it exactly the thing the user was searching for? In the latter two cases, you learn much more about the quality of your content and the quality of your search engine.

Consider the following: a document was opened 10 times and used each time, but then opened 20 times and discarded because it was not on point. For someone looking at bulk alone, they’d say, the document was opened 30 times, declare victory and go home. However, someone measuring impact would say it was used 10 times not 3o, and then would ask why. When you ask that question you create the possibility of learning and insight. That’s when you know you’re on the path to using metrics intelligently.

[permission to use granted under a creative commons license]