VoteFlow – A Twitter Friendly Workflow Alternative

• ideas
• socialmedia

There are two things that are true at the moment (among all of the other truisms of the world):

1. Twitter is gaining mass appeal and is going mainstream.
2. Corporates are either looking to use or are already using twitter as a method of communicating with their customers

Which leaves me with a single question:
How are they managing the quality of their communication via this channel?

Why bother? Well to prevent blunders that have the potential to damage a reputation.

An Overview of Workflow
Traditionally, organisations are using workflows in systems to manage the quality of their communication. In general, most users involved with workflow in these systems admit the process is somewhat slow and cumbersome to manage. I remember once when speaking with James Robertson of StepTwo, he felt there was a general unstated acceptance in organisations that workflow doesn’t work (his post is well worth a read).

Whether workflow works or not for the current applications it is being used for is beyond the scope of this post, and not something I will go into. Will it work for the time sensitive “What are you doing now?” style applications like Twitter? I don’t think so. Applying a workflow process that has many eyes checking even 140 characters for correctness, alignment to brand, compliance, etc, will probably turn a “What are you doing now?” into “What I was doing 3 days ago”.

A Twitter Friendly Alternative
So what’s the solution? Well honestly, I don’t know – but I do have an idea or two. I believe workflow processes should only be used to handle information or data that has a relevant flow from A to B to C, and relevant quality checking can happen along the way. Information that needs to be dispersed to a wide audience such as an enterprise’s customer base should travel a different path. Certainly in the case of a tweet I believe using a different paradigm for quality checking is warranted.

One of the primary methods for speeding up the total time an item spends in workflow, is to use parallel workflows where possible. This enables multiple approvers to approve / reject the changes implemented. I believe this can be taken further, where a single parallel step with a wide number of participants can speed up the process even further. A single parallel workflow…. sounds just like a vote – and that’s what I’m thinking of. I will try and elaborate on the ins and outs of the process below.

The Vote Process
In the case of a tweet, let’s say I think my organisation’s (the ficticious Acme Widgets) customers should know that “Launch a new range of widgets, and the first 50 retweeters win one free”. I would then submit that to the twitter queue and the vote process would begin. My co-workers in the organisation would either vote-up my tweet to the point at which is was published, or vote it down so it wasn’t published.

In my mind I would see the voting process supporting two different publishing triggers:

1. Item published once x votes were received.
2. Item published automatically in x business minutes/hours, if 0 decline votes are received.

The reason the second publishing rule exists to keep people attentive to the process. With only the first process in place, I believe that individuals would be all too keen to defer their responsibility for voting something up to others rather than take on any risk themselves. With the second voting rule in place, it means people have to make an effort to monitor the content stream as all defined parties would have the chance to prevent a content blunder from occuring.

Defined Voting Groups and Weighted Voting
Obviously, nothing in this world is ever simple. I don’t for one second think this is as simple as pushing all corporate communications through a single voting engine with no ability to configure rules for content publishing and review. Different types of communications require different sets of eyes to review the content, and thus the system needs to support this. Additionally, I believe the voting process needs to make allowance for weighted votes (as this is relative to the way the real world works). For instance, if the CEO of Acme Widgets felt that the announcement was ok, then his/her vote would carry enough weight to mean it’s published as soon as the CEO ok vote is received.

Feedback
At this stage, what I have proposed here is a very raw concept. Does anyone else have ideas about alternative quality management solution that would suit a twitter style application?