Benefits of Micro-Blogging in the Enterprise
Kevin Dostalek, VP, Education and Innovation

It's been about a year since I first wrote about micro-blogging within the context of Web 2.0 technologies that could provide value on the corporate intranet portal. Since that time, the explosion of platforms such as Twitter have highlighted the value of this type of communication in an open public context. Other major platforms such as Facebook have revamped their primary information aggregation user interfaces (the "wall") to be decidedly more micro-blogging-like, proving that this type of rich "status update" stream can be valuable within smaller communities as well. Niche players have emerged such as Yammer and Present.ly to fill the micro-blogging gap in the current best-of-breed intranet portal solutions. I've decided to take many of the lessons learned in the past year, primarily from our corporate use of both Twitter and Yammer to describe some of the benefits that micro-blogging can allow an enterprise to realize and capitalize upon.

Before I get ahead of myself, for those of you that may not be familiar with micro-blogging, it is essentially a way of sharing small bits of information usually from one-to-many (think of an email distribution list). Most micro-blogging platforms represent these "small bits of content" in streams. There is generally an author's stream (everything you've posted) and also your aggregated stream which will be a filtered view of everyone else's streams. Many platforms, like Twitter, use the concept of "following" that provides the main filtering mechanism on your twitter stream, but other filtering concepts such as by keyword, group, hashtag, etc. can be used. Note here the main difference between a micro-blog and an email system: in the email system it is the author that decides who will receive the messages; in a micro-blogging system, it is primarily the recipients that have control over what they receive. This plays an interesting role in the dynamics of spam, relevancy, and attention - but that is a post for another time. One of the best introductions to micro-blogging may be Common Craft's "Twitter in Plain English" (note that this is not enterprise-focused).

The rest of this article will cover some of the benefits of micro-blogging in the enterprise including:

• Mass Content Distribution
• Expert/Connector Location
• Trust Building / Culture
• Knowledge Management / Relevancy
• Training / Information Radiation
• Idea Exchange / Suggestion Box / Employee Voice

Continue reading Kevin's article

At Ambassador Solutions, we believe in sharing our knowledge, expertise and passions with the world. For this reason, we have a variety of presentations and workshops that we can facilitate for your organization.  Here is a preview of some of the many topics we can address, and stay tuned for more information in the next issue of Abuzz.

• Corporate Culture: So What And Who Cares?
• Values-Driven Culture: Getting To The Heart Of The Matter
• Employee Driven Innovation: Inspire, Engage, and Manage
• Social Networking Communities Inside and Outside Your Business
• Social Computing Features of SharePoint 2010
• Business Processes For the Facebook Generation

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