Overtime, methods of communication evolve. I don’t know where twitter will be in five years, but five years ago I didn’t foresee not having a home phone. Some may love this technology, some may not — but you can’t argue that it’s extremely relevant today.

Employees tweet at work just as they use instant messaging services assuming your company doesn’t have a policy prohibiting them said usage. So here is my views on how to harness Twitter in the workplace:

Define a strategy for your company, just as we have done! I believe transparency is important so here are excerpts from the concepts behind the strategy we are implementing at Juxt Interactive along with explanations of the driving factors behind our approach.

• Have each and every individual that wants to use twitter at work to benefit the company determine their voice. How will they position their messaging and how can that help your company? If you follow me you’ll notice at least 80% of what I say is focused towards business. tasks I’m currently working on, industry news, and research & development.
• Have more seasoned users mentor new users. Technology is usually inherently confusing and twitter is no exception to the rule.
• Adjust your email footer to include a link to follow you on twitter, this is simple and a great way to gain followers.
• Be aware that your clients, prospects, vendors, and staff follow you, if you send messages that are offensive to any of these groups, you probably shouldn’t be part of your company’s twitter team.
• The time of your tweets matter. If you have an important message sending it at 10pm on a Friday night may go unnoticed by many [at least those users who stream in real-time.] with the exclusion of people in different time zones.
• We live in a global economy, if you don’t already do business internationally be prepared to do so, don’t limit yourself to local discussions.
• Retweeting is imperative, but don’t use your companies Twitter account as a straight unidirectional promotional channel.  Have employees retweet as necessary at different intervals so your message is seen by different groups of people at different moments in time.
• Deliver content that is relevant to the audience that you wish to target.
• Make sure your voice is authentic as is your message.
• Engage others in your field in communication.
• Understand Twitter is a push/pull medium - don’t just speak; ask, listen, react.
• People are as smart as you give them credit, don’t just promote your company. Good rule of thumb: think of your audience as your wife, or husband. Don’t be condescending, be respectful.
• Watch the length of your tweet, 140 characters is obviously short.  Use it wisely.  If you @reply to many users in a tweet it becomes an issue when retweeting.
• Lastly, Twitter is dynamic — always changing.  Understand this and embrace this.  Change the structure of your tweets, the sequencing the people you reply too, the tags, etc.

Again, we’ll see over time if this strategy proves to be sucessful.  Currently this is just aggregated research and an attempt at creating a strategy to streamline and organize communication over this specific medium.

In late 2008 Coca-Cola asked Juxt to create a ringtone generator for their Sprite brand. The concept was fairly fairly straight forward, create an engaging rich media campaign for Sprite that would supplement and drive additional traffic to their under the cap program. The under the cap program gives participants a digital prize on their mobile phone every time they text a cap code found under the cap of a 20 oz Sprite.

The rich media unit allowed visitors to mix custom samples to create a ringtone which then could be sent to their mobile phone. The mechanism for delivery of the ringtone was sending a text message with a unique code to 77483 [Sprite’s short code]. The unique code was determined by the selection and pattern of samples chosen in the mixer.

So far so good, four samples (drums, bass, lead, and synth) and four measures the only piece missing is a creative mind to mix yourself a ringtone. This is where things get both complicated and interesting. Due to the hosting environment infrastructure and mobile messaging platform we were unable to create ringtones on demand in real-time. Instead we were require to create all possible combination of ringtones in advance. Using a 4×4 grid of samples and measures we are left with 65,536 possible combination’s but one option is complete silence so our magic number is 65,535 distinct ringtone possibilities.

We tried a wide variety of different software applications to sequence audio tracks to generate our 65,535 ringones. However, after much research we determined that each piece of software resulted in poor results. For the most part, desktop applications weren’t able to process the sheer bulk size of the files we were trying to sequence. It became evident that this wasn’t going to be an easy task. Eventually I found a audio conversion application for linux called the Swiss Army knife of sound processing (SOX). After trial and error and a make shift syntax manual I was able to join four samples (drums, bass, synth, lead) so they all played at the same time. Success. Well, not quite success but progress.

Having a solution to merge audio tracks was comforting, but there was still a few more hurdles. Mainly, how do I go from creating one combination to over sixty-five thousand, and how would I generate a code that could easily be interpreted by the Flash mixing interface so the right SMS code could be generated? Since SOX is a linux tool it made sense to create a script to write an application to sequence the ringtones. PHP was an obvious candidate, its available, easy to write, and very robust. I am going to spare the details of the contents of the script, but I can tell you that it used bit arrays, translation, loops, and math. As I mentioned previously matching the code to a specific ringtone is extremely important. If you are in the industry you are aware that banners and rich media units have file size requirements. In our case the flash mixer needed to be less than 100k. The design and functionality already left us at nearly 100k which meant we didn’t have room for logic in the application and we could not load a mapping into the flash application via XML because the file size would be ~5MB which would kill the experience.

Regardless, we found a pattern relying on hex that allowed us to use a simple naming scheme that the mixer could understand with very little logic. Then we modified the naming convention slightly to make sure we didn’t generate any codes that matched data in the 18,000 row document explaining how to spell vulgar or inappropriate terms using your keypad. After generating 65,535 ringtones in a number of formats we put them on a terabyte drive sent them to an unnamed country in Europe and the rest is history, run through the MTV or VHS properties to find the ringtone mixer and get yourself a new ringtone.

Lastly, I’ve got some portfolio additions that will appear in What I’ve Done section in the coming weeks.

Gordon Biersch
2 Harrison Street
San Francicso, CA
Jan. 23rd 2009 @ 7pm

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact myself @brianjeremy or @sfoak via Twitter.

“To whom it may concern,

I am intending to dress up as Sam Adams (not the historical Samuel Adams but the character associated with your beer). I was wondering if you could provide a description or list of his attire as I would like to try to assemble the best costume possible. Thanks for entertaining this rather whimsical request.

(name redacted)
  

You can view the case study on samadams.com in my portfolio: http://www.brianjeremy.com/what-ive-done/samuel-adams/