Twitter for professional networking (a few quick thoughts)

Beth Kanter has a thread going on Social Edge re social networking & social enterprise--a social triple threat. Her 6 points are essential, and there's a lot of other useful stuff there too.

After interacting with folks today re Twitter and politics, I figured I'd spend a few minutes on my break writing up a few professional networky things I've noticed while playing with social networks. These cut across gigs--not limited to SE--and include my experience working with my students, who have been great in helping to figure out what works and what doesn't.

• The first thing that comes to mind is that professional network has both internal and external components. Although we tend to focus on using social networking sites to connect with people outside one's current place of work, within an organization introducing useful tools can be an invaluable means of establishing one's value to others and the group. That's why my first couple comments in Beth's thread focused on internal networking.
  
  
• As I noted in that thread, maintaining a healthy signal-to-noise ratio can be key to keeping & attracting followers.
  
  For folks like Beth or Robert Scoble maintaining constant contact strengthens the signal--their value added is engaging this stuff all the time, and stuff they send trends significantly toward the useful or positive connecting. Folks who try to mimic this by twittering every insignificant action every frickin' minute of the day--it's like weird jello molds or 1960s Swanson TV dinners, more a response to new tech than something genuinely enticing.
  
• RSS feeds based on keyword searches are a great way to find & connect to engaging new people.
  
  
• Because short is the norm on Twitter, it's a much more user-friendly way to ping people periodically than, say, email. Especially for a Mr. Roboto like me, who writes more comfortably when imagining that no one will ever read it.