The Review Blog

“Financial Crisis / Stalled too many customers / CEO moi” (“The financial crisis / has too many customers away / I’m not CEO). Who is this letter of resignation in the form of haiku? Jonathan Schwartz, now former CEO of Sun Microsystems, which announced Thursday his resignation, and in less than 140 characters: the message was posted on Twitter , which was an account officer since April 2008, even if very little power.One way of putting it rather peculiar when one remembers, as explained in the blog Technology Live , “that the CEO is usually based on a well-oiled machinery of communication to announce their career development, including their resignations.
This procedure unexpected resignation expected (the boss of Oracle, Lawrence Ellison, who has just bought Sun announced that it called for the departure of Schwartz) has done quite a stir on the web, which surprised the blogger Laurent Dupin , who recalled that Sun “is a high tech and web of the first hour” and that “Schwartz does not landed in the online exchange. The director had actually been ranked by Business Week as one of 50 U.S. employers twittent , and was also reputed to have asked the Securities and Exchange Commission (the policeman of the U.S. stock market) interest in how financial communications passing now also by blogs.

It will now hold, as explained in the New York Times , the title (unenviable) “first boss of a Fortune 200 company [a list of the largest U.S. magazine established by the eponymous ed] to resign twitter . Who will be the first patron of the same caliber to do that in France, where the few leaders to twitter belong to the media sector ( Alain Weill , the NextRadioTV, Alexandre Bompard , Europe 1 …)? He stayed for a month to Didier Lombard, who has announced his intention to take the field at France Telecom (and has a Twitter account name – or that of a namesake – inactive for now) to compose a haiku is end with: “GD no more”.

Much has been said in recent days the use of social media on the occasion of the earthquake in Haiti: Nielsen figures to support, USA Today suggests for example that 3% of the notes published on blogs in the hours that followed made reference to the disaster, and the Red Cross had 100 times the number of new followers (subscribers to his account) on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Immediately after the earthquake, more than 1,500 Facebook status per minute were referring to the disaster, while many news sites have been using Twitter stream for their coverage, users have created hashtags (keywords) on the site to facilitate the transmission of information, or that the singer Wyclef Jean launched on his behalf an appeal for donations, propelling Yele (the name of the association) at the top of most used words.The disaster was also an opportunity for a coming-out policy: the first ever sent by twitt Barack Obama, paradoxically, not on his account ( @ BarackObama , fueled by its communication services) but that of the Red Cross (event immortalized here , here and also here ).

An oddity that reflects the difficulty of using Twitter for the most popular politicians, who have an extremely broad mandate monopolizing or need to “cross” the different social categories. In France, those who pass the year, in addition to having found the right tone, tend to face the management of one or two specific communities (for geeks Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet , the “PSophiles” for Benoit Hamon . ..) and have chosen to “follow” a limited number of accounts (accounts “followed” automatically update the screen and their owners can send messages directly to the address in question).

The account of Obama himself, “read” 700,000 people, 20% of those who follow (0.2% for NKM, Hamon 4%), an enormous figure for a politician: when we add the employment Time dementia and a range of topics and potential partners very large, we say that we are not ready to see twitter itself from the situation room of the White House. As one article to be published Thursday Challenges, the Elysium services promise an account of Nicolas Sarkozy for months: given the constraints of the exercise for a head of state, they will work hard to make it attractive with the heart of service target.