TWITTER成为职场新宠

An even more tiresome category of businessman uses Twitter to boast. Sir Richard Branson is a leader here. “Honoured my blog has been nominated for a prestigious Webby Award for business blog. Check it out,” he says in a recent post.
还有一类商界人士利用Twitter自夸，这更令人生厌。理查德·布兰森(Richard Branson)是这方面的佼佼者。他最近在帖子中写道：“很荣幸，我的博客获得声名显赫的商业博客威比奖(Webby Award)的提名。去看看吧。”

Despite the dismal use to which executives are putting Twitter, more and more are signing up for fear of being left behind. Last week I met a British business leader who told me that he had just joined, but complained that he was now so focused on turning the details of his day into pithy tweets that he was finding it hard to pay attention to what he was doing. Worse, once he had composed his Tweet he felt insecure and unpopular as only three people seemed to be following him.
尽管高管们对Twitter的使用很乏味，但注册的人却越来越多，因为担心落伍。上周，我遇到一位英国企业高管，说他刚刚加入了Twitter，但他抱怨道，由于忙着将每天的细节转变成简练的tweet消息，他发现自己很难集中精力去做事情。更糟的是，写好Tweet后，他产生了不安全和和不受欢迎的感觉，因为似乎只有3个人在追随他。

Last Wednesday I signed up, too. As I couldn't find any good executives to follow, I decided to take in the Budget on Twitter through the Treasury feed. Alistair Darling turns out to be quite unpopular, too. While Ashton Kutcher, husband of Demi Moore, is the first to have 1m followers on the strength of posting pictures of his wife in his knickers, the chancellor of the exchequer had only 1,800 takers for his plans for the British economy.
两周前，我也注册成为Twitter用户。由于找不到可以追随的好高管，我决定通过财政部的信息源在Twitter上接收预算信息，结果发现阿利斯泰尔·达林(Alistair Darling)原来也相当不受欢迎。凭借上传妻子穿着自己短裤的图片，德米·莫尔(Demi Moore)的丈夫阿什顿·库彻(Ashton Kutcher)成为第一个拥有100万名追随者的用户，而英国财政大臣只有1800名追随者关注他的英国经济计划。

Yet his tweets last week were perfect – short, clear and informative. They made me think that if the Budget can be done on Twitter, it must be possible to do all corporate communications the same way, and put e-mail in the dustbin forever. To force everyone to say what they have to say in 140 characters deals with the communications overload at a stroke. Not only would messages be quicker to read and easier to understand, most would not get sent at all. The bulk of internal e-mails are exercises in back-covering or throat-clearing, and so if they were forced down to their barest essentials it would become clear that there was nothing there at all.
不过达林两周前撰写的tweet消息很完美——简洁明了，信息丰富。它们使我相信，如果能在Twitter上做预算，必定也能以同样的方式进行所有的企业沟通，把电子邮件永远扔进垃圾桶。迫使每个人都用140个字符表达自己必须要说的内容，一举解决了沟通过于繁重的问题。讯息不仅读得更快，更容易理解，而且多数根本不会发送。大部分内部电子邮件是盖盖子或清嗓子练习，因此如果要被迫只留下最基本的要素，那么显然就会什么都剩不下了。

To communicate this way – either on Twitter or on Yammer, which is a similar service aimed at companies – would have another advantage. It would make clear who are the really powerful people in a company. Humble employees who happen to have good ideas could easily have more followers than the chief executive.
以这种方式交流——无论是在Twitter上还是在为企业提供类似服务的Yammer上——还会有一个好处。它会让人们看清谁是企业中真正有权势的人。碰巧拥有好想法的普通员工或许很容易就会比首席执行官拥有更多追随者。

Still more revealing would be the ratio of followers to followed, as it tells you whether people are not just talking but also listening. On this score, I'm afraid to say, my new friend Bart falls down. He is only following nine
更具揭示意义的是被追随者追随别人的比例，它能告诉你人们是否不仅在谈论，而且在倾听。在这方面，我恐怕得说，我的新朋友巴特失败了，他只追随了9个人。

Over-delivery
过量提供

As well as taking in the Budget on Twitter, I downloaded the full statement, which was rather more heavy going. However, it did allow me to calculate an important – and worrying – new statistic. By comparing the 2009 statement to the 2008 one, I can exclusively reveal that there has been a sharp increase in the use of jargon.
我不仅在Twitter上接收预算信息，还下载了声明全文——这是一件更艰难的事。然而，这确实让我计算出一个令人不安的重要统计数据。通过将2009年的声明与2008年加以比较，我可以独家揭示出，行话的使用急剧增多。

In 2008 there were 123 mentions of the verb “to deliver”. This year the tally had soared to 212. Much “value” is being delivered and any number of things are being “delivered against target”. Indeed, there were three mentions of “over-delivery”. There was also a 330 per cent increasing in the meaningless phrase “best practice” and a 130 per cent increase in “roll-out” – which is excusable only when pastry or carpets are at stake.
2008年，声明中有123处提到动词“提供”(deliver)。今年这个数字飙升至212处。大量“价值”正在提供，许多东西正根据“目标提供”。实际上，有三处地方提到了“过量提供”。毫无意义的短语“最佳实践”(best practice)的使用频率也上升了330%，“推出”(roll-out)的使用频率上升了130%——只有谈及糕点或地毯时使用这个词才有道理。

“Stakeholders”, “overarching”, “benchmarking” and “strategic” – all words recently banned by local authorities – were more in evidence this year than last.
“利益相关者”、“全面的”、“基准管理”和“战略性的”这些词今年使用的频率明显高于去年，它们最近都被地方政府禁用了。

The only bad word that has fallen from fashion is sustainable, down from 111 last year to just 42. Sustainability turned out not to be so sustainable after all.
在不再流行的单词中，唯一一个不应该的单词是“可持续的”，使用频率从去年的111次下降至仅仅42次。可持续性终究不是那么可持续的。