Oneupweb Reviews: ExecTweets, a Way To Connect With Other Executives

Want insight from leading industry executives? A new Microsoft platform is promising just that.

Microsoft has partnered with Federated Media in creating a new platform called ExecTweets, which aggregates tweets from top executives registered with the beta site. Unilever, American Airlines, Pepsi-Cola, BestBuy, Craigslist, Technorati, The University of Wisconsin and the Lance Armstrong Foundation are just a few of the companies/organizations with members.

These registered users vote on the best tweets to ensure the most insightful ideas rise to the top. The most popular Twitter posts scroll across the homepage in the upper right-hand corner, along with how many voters declared it worthy of reading.

ExecTweets is an effective filter for time-conscious business executives. By organizing aggregated tweets into categories, the tool makes it easy to see the most popular tweets, links and members. You can also search for executives by industry. I do wish article titles in the top links category were used more consistently. Without any descriptors, I wouldn’t click on a shortened URL.

Despite organizational features, the home page is cluttered with random community tweets. Tinker, a site that helps Twitter users stay on top of popular events, has a much better design than ExecTweets.

Tinker also provides trending data on the home page so you immediately see how many and when popular posts occurred.

ExecTweets could apply the same concept by showing voting polls. Right now ExecTweets shows the number of votes for each popular tweet, but you can’t see how many people thought a particular link was any good.

Votes are also tallied for recommended members. That’s right. Like any exclusive club, its members decide who makes the cut.

Current members mostly nominate others. However in some instances CEOs have recommended themselves by sending a tweet to @exectweets. People who are newly recommended are listed on the home page.

Clicking “All Recommended Execs” shows every nominated person along with how many votes each person received. The page is structure the same way as the home page, which means you can see the “Most Popular” or “All Tweets”. There isn’t, however, a way to sort nominees by industry on this page.

When I clicked on “Most Popular,” it didn’t show me nominees with the most votes, so it doesn’t look like those categories will help you sort candidates. Also, the site doesn’t explain how many votes a person must have to become a member.

Overall, ExecTweets is useful. Making executives vote on other members and most relevant content saves time by funneling that content into an organized community. More than likely no one will vote for you if they don’t know who you are or what you bring to the table.

Don’t worry, though – even if you aren’t an executive, you can still follow ExecTweets.

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