Enterprise Microsharing Reading List

this page is a work in progress…

Some Good Overviews:

• http://jbordeaux.com/breaking-cliques-with-enterprise-micro-blogging/by John Bordeaux
• Trends to Watch: Twitter in the Enterprise; Will You Twitter Inside the Enterprise? by Jevon MacDonald
• Learn at All Levels: Enterprise Micro-Learning; Are Employees Twittering Away Productivity? by Marcia Conner for FastCompany
• Enterprise Microblogging as a Corporate Tool
• It’s like Twitter, but for the…
  
• Enterprise Microblogging: ein neuer Hype? Ja und Nein. Von Dirk Röhrborn, Communardo
• Is the Enterprise Ready for Microblogging Tools? by Aaron Strout and Joe Cascio for Mashable

Clint Boulton: Gartner reports that Twitter and Facebook are being used productively in the Enterprise. They also argue against banning Facebook and Twitter use at work.

So How Does This Work?
After reading Something New Under the Sun and How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye by Andrew McAfee, I scrawled:

Wow. This so precisely aligns with my thinking on the potential value of enterprise microblogging. What he’s put into words about weak ties, querying the corporate “social network” for business intelligence, having spaces for unstructured collaboration, could all be done in a corporate microblogging space. The importance of ‘converting a potential tie’ and helping people stay on top of their networks of loose ties maps perfectly onto the Twitter “Village”/Fox Taming metaphor that I’ve talked about before.

Case Studies
EMC’s use of Twitter by Len Devanna
How Twitter Can Work in a Corporate Environment FastForward Blog on Zappos
Best Buy’s Enterprise Twitter on Read Write Web
Microblogging in the Enterprise Case Study: (Janssen-Cilaq and Jitter)

• Jitter: Experimenting with Microblogging in the Enterprise
• Writeup by Janet Clary
• Trends in the Living Networks writeup by Ross Dawson

Product Posts With General Descriptions

• Socialtext Signals launch roundup
• ESME: Is This What an Enterprise Twitter Could Look Like? – ReadWriteWeb
• Business microblog tool Present.ly is smarter than Yammer

Mainstream Media Coverage

• CNN Putting Twitter and Facebook to Work
• Claire Cain Miller in NYT’s blog Bits asks Will Microblogging Make You More Productive?

Some History
With all this “new” talk of Enterprise Microsharing, it’s funny Twitter itself started as an internal communication system for the guys at Odeo. It worked so well they shifted focus to produce Twitter.

But it was a while later before serious discussion of “Enterprise Twitter” crept into the conversation. Like any good innovation, the idea pops up in parallel in many minds at once. Here is Niall Cook writing in June 2007 about internal business use of Twitter.

Bill Ives wrote Twitter Enters the Enterprise on September 5, 2007, but the blog and post he’s responding to are gone. JP Rangaswami writes in late December 2007 about the inherent difference in communicating via microsharing vs. email, and follows that up with thoughts on Publish-Subscribe and ways collaboration could play out. His thoughts in Twitter and Agile are worth quoting:

What I see in Twitter is this: The ability for members of a distributed peer workforce to describe precisely what he or she is doing, and to share that description.

Out of this, I can foresee enterprise magic happening. Geographically dispersed team members are able to help each other out because suddenly they have line of sight of each other’s tasks, activities and processes.

Shortly after, Daniel Siddle provides examples of how an enterprise Twitter could be used, including something like the status channels – information feeds employees will want to check regularly – that we recommend to drive use, especially in early stages of deployment. Dennis Howlett covers one of SAP’s early experiments with Twitter in the Enterprise and reflects on some uses, and Curt Monash shares what improvements he would make and how Twitter could be useful in the Enterprise. His follow-up Enterprise Twitterincludes a good index of other posts until then.