We’ve been on Twitter for some time and we joined Facebook more recently. Now we have a LinkedIn group, too. Please join us there if you’re on that network.

Last week Twitter debuted a new feature that lets you group your followers, Twitter calls it Lists. To learn Twitter List basics, Josh Catone’s Mashable post HOW TO: Use Twitter Lists is a good place to start. 

Why do lists of Twitter accounts matter? 

Twitter Lists are an efficient way to find Twitter-people that you don’t know, but should. Consider this list of 500 entrepreneurs, founders, startups, CEOs, and influential business people put together by Peter Urbanski. When you subscribe to a list like this, the updates of everyone in the list appear in your Twitter feed—You don’t have to subscribe to each individual account. You may not want to subscribe to a list with 500 active Twitterers, but take a quick look and you may turn up a handful of interesting, thoughtful people you do think are worth following.

More important, Twitter built Lists into its API, so its users can design new features. Already there are new products and services building on the Lists API, among them Listorious, a directory of “the best Twitter Lists” and TLISTS (currently in private beta), which promises a set of tools to help companies curate their Twitter Lists.

Enabling user-generated innovation and then getting out the way is something Twitter does well, as Eric von Hippel, MIT Sloan’s Professor of Management of Innovation, as points out in Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Followers:

“Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them.’”

Are you using Twitter Lists? What do you think is the most important thing about the new feature? What’s still missing?

Update: via Wilson Raj and Guy Kawasaki, comes this article from Daniel B. Honigman on How brands can use Twitter lists.

Your customers are talking about you. Can you hear them? Trust Agents, a new book by noted bloggers and social media consultants Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, is a practical guide to learning how to improve your business using the web in its 2.0, real-time form.

The real-time web encompasses social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook: sites that feature an unending stream of messages, status updates, and news alerts. The flow of this conversation has captured attention for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the rapid adoption and expansion these social-media platforms have experienced in the past year.

Brogan and Smith emphasize that, to be effective, businesses and individuals need to build trust and social capital through open interactions on the real-time web. How to start? By building a “listening station,” a way to find out what people are saying about you, your company, industry, competitors, etc.

How-To

• Download or sign up for an RSS newsreader, an efficient means to review new information posted to multiple websites and blogs within one program or web service. If you’re new to RSS newsreaders, try the web-based Google Reader.
• Go to Technorati and search for your company name. On the search results page, find the orange RSS icon, copy the link, and add it to your newsreader. Now, whenever someone writes a blog post and mentions your company name, it will appear in your newsreader. Repeat this step for abbreviations of your company name, your own name, industry, competitors, etc.
• Do the same at Google’s blog search (you’ll get some duplicates but Google finds some mentions that Technorati doesn’t include).
• Repeat once more, this time with Twitter.

We’ll return soon with recommendations about joining the conversation. For now, start listening. You may be surprised by what you hear.

Right now, fans of U.S. college basketball are focused on the final game of the NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament. What many fans may not realize is that there may be management lessons to be gleaned from NCAA  basketball — or at least from NCAA coach employment patterns. An article in the new Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review looks at Daniel Halgin’s research into the role that professional social networks play in the career moves of college basketball coaches. 

This week, we asked Halgin to comment on his research and current basketball events. Here is his response:

“In addition to the excitement taking place on the court there will be a great deal of activity taking place off the court, with the annual flurry of coaches accepting jobs with new employers.  Most notable is John Calipari, formerly the head coach at the University of Memphis, who…[this week] formally accepted the head coaching position at the University of Kentucky.  This move, sparked by the firing of former Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie, will likely create a long vacancy chain of coaches switching employers to accept newly vacated positions.  But what determines which coaches are hired for newly vacated positions?  And what determines whether a fired coach will be rehired at another institution?

In addition to performance and social network ties, I suggest that a particular kind of social network — ones in which people have a shared sense of belonging and identity that they retain through different career moves — influences which coaches receive which jobs. Similar to former high-level managers of General Electric Co. who are often referred to as ‘graduates of Welch U’ (referring to ex-CEO Jack Welch), there are groupings of coaches with former working relationships who are referred to as members of ‘coaching families’ throughout their careers. 

For example, a collection of coaches with ties to Louisville head coach Rick Pitino are recognized as members of the ‘Pitino coaching family,’ those with ties to retired North Carolina Coach Dean Smith are recognized as members of the ‘Tar Heel family,’ and those with ties to newly hired Kentucky coach John Calipari are recognized as members of the ‘Calipari coaching family.’  I find that recognized members of these ‘families’ receive more prestigious jobs, and are more likely to find employment if fired, than nonmembers.  These benefits exist above and beyond actual performance. 

As the coaching carousel continues to spin and as Memphis and other schools look to fill open positions, keep an eye out for how ‘coaching family’ membership influences hiring decisions.”

 You can read more about Halgin’s research in “What Can Managers Learn From College Basketball?” in the Spring 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.

(Follow all of MIT Sloan Management Review’s coverage of TED.)

Where do new management ideas come from? At TED, they come from the most surprising sources. For example, yesterday there was a brief presentation (from the Palm Springs simulcast) by comic and actress Christen Sussin, who shared her four rules of improvisation:

1. Say yes to everything.
2. Follow and see where it goes.
3. Make eye contact.
4. Choose what you want to know.

She’s clearly talking about comedic improvisation, but at least some of those lessons seem to apply to management improvisation as well. And her first rule, about being open to everything, seems to be one of the best ways to generate new management ideas, too.

While it’s probably not healthy to consider everything in your life as the source of a new management idea, it’s fascinating how so many of the talks here have management implications if you consider them in a certain way. Architect Daniel Libeskind talked about how he tried to make his work expressive rather than neutral, unexpected rather than habitual, memorable rather than forgettable, communicative rather than mute, democratic rather than authoritarian. And Rosamund Zander, reading from an upcoming book about personal fulfillment, delivered some rules — “take responsibility for everything,” “embrace different patterns” — that are just as applicable in the office as at home.

The day’s talked ranged from Evan Williams (that’s him to the right) telling the story of Twitter (so far) to Evan Schwartz revealing a mystery behind The Wizard of Oz; Jennifer Mather revealing the intelligence the octopus to an unveiling (by yet another member of the MIT Media Lab) of a fascinating new children’s toy. More on all that later (the first morning session begins shortly). Sustainability has been an enormous theme at this year’s TED; we’ll be covering some of those talks on MIT Sloan Management Review’s Beyond Green blog.

The day ended, of course, with a lavish party. You know it’s going to be a good party when you’re met at the front door by a flowered rendering of a large green elephant.

That’s all for now. I’m about to step into a panel on a topic we covered in the most recent print issue of the magazine: predicting (see What People Want and How To Predict It and The Prediction Lover’s Handbook). I’ll report tonight.