Moving closer to IT, late last month Salesforce.com announced its alliance with Twitter. The deal lets Salesforce.com's business customers monitor public tweets about their products and step in to the conversation with a tweet of their own to show they care or to resolve a problem. And in the case where a tweet solves a particular product issue, the Salesforce.com customer can make that solution part of its knowledge base if the issue arises in the future.

Does Twitter have a use beyond marketing?

The question now is whether Twitter's use in the enterprise will move beyond marketing. Can it play a role in other sectors of a business -- especially in IT?

There is one area where IT might use Twitter and its competitors to advantage: as an evaluation tool. Not unlike Salesforce.com, IT could use Twitter as an evaluation tool to monitor customer/employee reaction to a new product, application, or service.

IT might also initiate the conversation by asking employees in a tweet's 140 characters or less to give them an unfiltered expression of their experience with the new product.

However, Twitter's use in other areas of IT is more problematic. You might think that Twitter could serve well as an alerting tool for IT, sending tweets to IT staffs' PCs and mobile devices. But perhaps not: "For an IT department looking for an [internal] communications tool, Twitter is not the most appropriate tool," says Oliver Young, a senior analyst with Forrester Research.

As IT people already know, scale changes everything. If a service like Twitter is going to be used as an alert tool, IT had best be sure everyone in the company is on board, Young says. That's easy for a 10-person company, but not as simple for a company with 10,000 or 100,000 employees worldwide.

Young also believes for internal use -- such as for IT alerts to its users or as part of the IT infrastructure for IT staffers to talk to one another -- instant messaging is the better service. Young points out that Twitter is not necessarily as fast in reaching its destination as IM.

If using Twitter as a microblogging tool to carry on conversations within the company, everyone had better be sure that he or she has turned off their public face, keeping tweets within the four walls -- or ultimately something that shouldn't be shared will be in a public forum, Young warns.

A company must also consider the latest in e-discovery regulations from the feds, aka the Federal Rules for Civil Procedure. If you archive your internal  tweets, for whatever reason, they are subject to searches in the future in case of a litigation. And if you cannot produce the tweet the litigant is asking for, you can probably count on a hefty fine from the presiding judge, if history is any indication.