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Micro-blogging in the enterprise: an idea whose time has come?
Over the last few months there has been increasing discussion of how micro-blogging tools such as Twitter could be used in organizations.
Twitter is now frequently used in external communication, with organizations as diverse as @SouthwestAir, @Comcastcares, @BigPondTeam, @SEC_Investor_Ed, and @mosmancouncil using Twitter to communicate to stakeholders and for customer service. Given the rapid rise of Twitter and how influential comments can be, this clearly needs to be on the radar for any major organization.
However there are significant constraints in using public micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku, or identi.ca for internal communication. Even with the ability to protect people’s updates to being viewed only by approved followers, few organizations would like to have this kind of information hosted externally.
As such they often look at internal tools to see how yet another consumer technology can be adapted to create value for the enterprise.
At our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in February, Australian pharmaceutical company Janssen-Cilag described how it was implementing an internal version of Twitter.
Technology companies such as IBM and Oracle have rolled out Twitter-like tools. Enterprise micro-blogging provider Yammer won the TechCrunch50 prize, though has not disclosed its corporate clients.
Now Best Buy has implemented a home grown Twitter, described in a great interview on Read Write Web.
So why should companies want to Twitter?
The reality is that I think that not many will, for a little while yet. Companies need to be very comfortable with experimentation, and diffuse communication patterns.
If they are, then Twitter can be used to ask quick questions on information people need, updates about what’s happening in the company, chit-chat, social events.
One of the problems that companies have had is that often by default this kind of communication happens on email lists, which clog inboxes, are often not relevant, and are seen as annoyances.
However it is difficult to get engagement in forums and discussion boards – people have to go there.
So something like Twitter combines elements of the best of both worlds. It’s like email in that it’s broadcast, though you choose who you receive messages from, and you don’t need to read everything. You presume that messages are non-essential, so get to then as you can, and it’s non-intrusive.
So a looser array of communication ties link the organization and how can function. The communication networks become massively more effective in how people coordinate their work. The useful messages flow as needed – knowledge and idea sharing becomes immersive.
In short, enterprise micro-blogging, implemented well, could create far more effective organizations, and be a tangible source of competitive advantage.
Yet few organizations are ready for this. It requires a particular culture to allow people to go off and use these tools with no ‘tangible’ business benefit. Unquestionably there will be experimentation and time-wasting and people seeing it as ineffective and annoying, but that’s fine. People will use it if they find it useful, and won’t if they don’t.
It’s a learning process. We must discover what these new communication technologies allow us to do as organisations. We don’t know yet. But we do know that they might make a massive difference to how effective we can be. So those who are the first to work out will be ahead, without a doubt.
I really think the next few years are going to be fascinating in how organizations evolve. I’m about to spend a lot more effort on the future of the enterprise.
Tools such as micro-blogging will definitely be part of that.
I share this kind of fascination for microblogging within organisations. Why? Because microblogging can be done much easier than writing wiki pages or longer weblog articles. People are used to writing short notes or messages into personal notebooks, e-mail or instant messages. This was true user generated content even a long time before the shiny new world of web 2.0.
Microblogging or maybe rather microsharing tools now tap this source of user generated content at least as long as they are very simple, easily accessible. For business use we will need more than this, e.g. security, smart retrieval and integration into exisiting systems like intranet or directories.