Via Mashable
By Aaron Strout and Joe Cascio
Although experts in the social media space have been talking about how businesses might adopt microblogging tools like Twitter and Plurk, only recently have we started to see a series of new vendors cropping up in the enterprise microblogging space. This has been due in part to businesses needing to figure out how Twitter can benefit the enterprise. The fact that the mainstream press has started covering this topic has also helped to push things along (see Businessweek’s CEO Guide to Microblogging if you need proof).
Given the recent focus on business microblogging and the emergence of some new players like Yammer and Utterli (Formerly Utterz, Utterli has been around for a little over a year but just rebranded and is now becoming more enterprise-centric), it felt like as good a time as any to write a post about the business value of microsharing within the enterprise. Included in this post will be considerations for implementing microblogging and a few of the relevant players in the space.
Just to level set, it probably doesn’t hurt to define what microblogging is. For anyone that uses Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca or any of the multiple other microblogging tools, microblogging is in some ways like instant messaging or text messaging but instead of it taking place one to one, it’s often one to many or many to many. I could take this entire post explaining what it is, but friend and Commoncraft founder, Lee LeFever, has done a fantastic job in his quick Twitter in Plain English video. I’d also like to clarify that this post is focused on businesses using microblogging within their organization vs. having a corporate presence in the public (like @comcastcares on Twitter). How corporations are using microblogging publicly is an equally relevant topic, however, numerous posts have already covered this phenomena.
Business Value
One of the lessons we learned from Web 1.0 (and the subsequent bubble) was the fact that startups that create technologies in search of a problem fail, even when VCs are stupid enough to throw wads of cash at them. This time around, most companies don’t get funded unless they are solving a business problem or at least offering up a technology that can enhance existing business processes. To that end, here are a few ways companies can tap into the power of microblogging:
Emergency Broadcast System: First and foremost, any company needs a way to reach all of its employees quickly and efficiently. E-mail is obviously one way to do this but increasingly, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. With many folks receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, it can take minutes if not hours before we get to an e-mail from the CEO.
Knowledge Management: Here’s where things get interesting. One of the biggest failings of many companies is the fact that they trap their intellectual property in Powerpoints, spreadsheets and Word documents and store them on shared drives and e-mail inboxes. Once the creator of that content walks out the door, the odds of their years of work finding its way into anyone else’s life are slim. As companies start uploading more and more content onto wikis, or central file repositories, these files can be linked to and indexed by conversational tools like microblogs.
Training: Any company that has gone on a hiring binge quickly realizes how painful it is to train new employees. If a formal training program exists, the materials are often outdated almost as soon as they are created. By identifying a few key influencers and allowing new employees to see their daily “streaming,” information and best practices can be shared more easily and in real time with little burden on the “trainer.”
Expert Identification: Another area that many larger companies fall down is in making their resident experts easily findable. If you can see your company’s employees talking (possibly segmented by business unit or group within an organization), it wouldn’t take long to figure out who knows what about whom.
Seeing the Connectors: Good companies spend a lot of time on succession planning. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a good handle on who the true connectors are within their organization. By analyzing conversations and watching the conversations of employees, senior managers can easily identify who these connectors are and then ensure these employees compensation and titles match their internal value AND start to add additional connectors if too much information is flowing through any one individual.
Inclusion of External Stakeholders: Back in the early 2000’s, extranets were all the rage. There would finally be a way for companies to include partners, investors and even certain customers in their daily conversations. Portals obviously began to fill this roll to a degree but none were ever truly conversational. Enter enterprise microblogging with the ability to include these aforementioned stakeholders in the mix.
