Photo Credit Willie Holdman Twitter’s Speed of Trust ripple of influence
April 21st, 2009 by linkTwitter is remarkable. Follow us. I ignored it too long thinking it was not scalable or professionally relevant. My strategic business thinking is obviously sometimes my biggest handicap. I was wrong, it scales the entire globe. It is both personal, i keep up with kids and grandkids, and professional, I connect and communicate with like minded thinkers around the world. Short story first. A new friend on twitter Dinesh connected me to some wonderful TV footage on the Economist of an interview with Jaya Kumar, the Chief Marketing Officer of one of our clients, FritoLay, and Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com talking about trust, transparency, high trust culture and specifically the Speed of Trust. This is something that in the “old days” in the late 80’s early 90’s when we launched the 7 Habits book would have slipped through our fingers and not been shared with as broad and committed of an audience. This conversation would not have been transparent to me so that I could engage it, leverage it and share it. I also now have the opportunity and intend to acknowledge and thank Jaya for it.
Another new friend in Denmark gave me tips on what to see on my upcoming trip to Amsterdam. Another did the same in London.
The longer story that comes to mind is the significance of the realization of the transcendent potential of the world wide web so eloquently described by Christopher Locke at the turn of the century (the 21st century that is) in 2000 in his book the cluetrain manifesto:
“More important, all of us are finding our voices once again. Learning how to talk to one another. Slowly recovering from a near fatal brush with zombification after watching Night of the Living Sponsor reruns all of our lives. Inside, Outside, there’s a conversation going on today that wasn’t happening at all 5 years ago (95) and hasn’t been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began. Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure what it is about is futile. It’s about a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback deja vu of our strange perplexing species. Something ancient, elemental, sacred, something very very funny that’s broken loose in the pipes and wires of the 21st century. There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being… This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice. The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.“
Twitter is clearly a giant leap forward in that direction.
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