How Am I Doing? Use Twitter to Collect Instant Feedback

I've been giving some thought recently to how to use Twitter as a business tool, without much luck. Thankfully, Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd came up with a great answer.

Use Twitter as an instant feedback tool on ideas you want to run up the flagpole, on the success or failure of recent meetings, and for grading your performance after a presentation.

Feedback is most useful when presented as close to the time of performance as possible, the authors note in their HBR.org post, Use Twitter to Collect Micro-Feedback. Twitter is not only ideal for giving instant feedback, but its short message-length format encourages participants to think about their response.

Here are three ideas from their post:

After an all-hands meeting, seek feedback from a few participants. Was it relevant? Did you get the information you needed or expected?
As your presentation draws to a close, ask your audience to tweet comments on your performance.
Especially with your millenial employees, supplement quarterly and annual reviews with an "on-demand microfeedback system."

No one is saying Twitter replaces good, old-fashioned human contact. Just think of it as another potential tool as you look to improve your own performance and those who work for you.

Do you use Twitter or other messaging platforms for professional feedback?

(Tweet image by wonderferret, CC 3.0)

Sean Silverthorne

Sean Silverthorne is the editor of HBS Working Knowledge, which provides a first look at the research and ideas of Harvard Business School faculty. Working Knowledge, which won a Webby award in 2007, currently records 4 million unique visitors a year. He has been with HBS since 2001.

Silverthorne has 28 years experience in print and online journalism. Before arriving at HBS, he was a senior editor at CNET and executive editor of ZDNET News. While at At Ziff-Davis, Silverthorne also worked on the daily technology TV show The Site, and was a senior editor at PC Week Inside, which chronicled the business of the technology industry. He has held several reporting and editing roles on a variety of newspapers, and was Investor Business Daily's first journalist based in Silicon Valley.

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