Twitter Case Study

Twitter Case Study

OAD 49100

Twitter Case Study

Twitter was founded by Evan Williams in 1999. The company was purchased by Google in 2003. When Twitter became available to the public the company relied on “personal evangelists” to promote the product. The big break for Twitter did not occur until March of 2007 at the South by Southwest festival (Hitt, Ireland, & Hoskisson, 2013).

Internal Organization

Twitter has “Ballooned in a short time, adding more than 1,000 employees to its ranks in the span of just one year” (allthingsd.com, 2013). The organizational structure of Twitter was composed of multiple departments and the roles of their employees and leadership teams and has caused confusion and a need for reorganization. The challenges that Twitter faces includes strategic decisions that management must make about their internal organization and can cause a lapses and miscommunication within the network.

There have been issues surrounding the profits for Twitter and part of this problem has been attributed to the “Revolving CEO seat and defecting employees across the ranks” (allthingsd.com, 2013). Twitter has faced a lackluster of returns compared to what they wanted to occur. The company has not grown as they had wished. Twitter wanted to have over 5,000 employees by 2013 and earning revenues of $1.1 billion.  The projections were estimated that Twitter was operating at a loss in 2011  (Hitt, Ireland,  & Hoskisson, 2013).

Value

“Value is measured by a product’s performance characteristics and by its attributes for which customers are willing to pay” (Hitt, Ireland,  & Hoskisson, 2013). The company has grown substantially and has provided a service that has been used in many different avenues of service.  Twitters core values are to grow their business in a way that makes them proud; recognize that passion and personality matter; communicate fearlessly to build trust; defend and respect the user’s voice; reach every person on the planet; innovate through experimentation; seek diverse perspectives; be rigorous and get it right; simplify and ship it.

Conclusion

Twitter has had to overcome many obstacles in the growth. The organization still has a ways to go in solving their revolving door issues with their leadership team. The core value that Twitter has adopted are very specific and provides the long term goals of the company and what the application was intended for. The business has grown and the uses for twitter have been found to be useful in many different situations such as the up rises in other nations. Twitter has many operational benefits for both organizations and private use.

Hitt, M. A., Ireland, R. D., & Hoskisson, R. E. (2013). Strategic management: Concepts and cases, competitiveness & globalization (10th ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Pub./Cengage.

allthingsd.com. (2013, March). Twitter untagles its overgrown org chart. Retrieved from http://allthingsd.com/20130320/twitter-untangles-its-overgrown-org-chart/