A couple of weeks ago, my colleague, Joe Cascio, and I did a guest post on Mashable.com called “Is the Enterprise Ready for Microblogging Tools Like Twitter?” I would encourage you to take a few minutes to read the post but in the event that you just want the Cliff Notes version (remember those?) here’s an outline.
WHAT WE COVERED
The post focused on three basic areas:
Business Value – essentially, the “why would businesses want to use a microblogging tool like Twitter for internal conversations. The six areas we called out were:
- an emergency broadcast system
- for knowledge management
- internal training
- expert identification
- seeing who the “connectors” were and
- better connecting to external stakeholders.
Key Considerations - in other words, what would some of the demands be that companies put on vendors that provided microblogging tools for the enterprise. This included considerations like:
- Single Sign-On
- reliability
- analytics
- security
- scalability
- groups functionality
- distribution and
- interoperability
Current Players – in this section, Joe and I mentioned a few of the obvious players in the enterprise microblogging space like Yammer, Laconi.ca and Utterli. We went on to acknowledge the fact that many of the white label community providers like Jive, Awareness, Mzinga (the company I work for) along with open source software like Drupal would soon be in the microblogging game.
READER RESPONSE
Not surprisingly, the “enterprise microblogging” post received a fair amount of attention due to the all the press the best known consumer microblogging tool/site, Twitter, is receiving in the press these days. What was most fascinating and the impetus for this subsequent post was the conversation that took place in the comments.
For one, a number of other enterprise microblogging application providers chimed in about the fact that they too were in the game. Most notable was A-lister, Dennis Howlett (also a contributor to this blog) who is doing some work for SAP’s microblogging project called ESME…
ESME has all these capabilities – and more. (Disclosure: I”m part of the ESME team)
Serendipitously, the owner of the TouchBase Blog (and one of the pioneers in the microblogging for business space), Laura Fitton had posted on Mashable just a few days before with a matrix comparing a number of other players in this space. While we didn’t get a chance to include a link to Laura’s post, I did make a point of including a link in the comments.
Equally timely was the announcement earlier that day that SocialText had jumped into the enterprise microblogging game. Commenter, Justin Kistner…
So what is the key take away from our original post? Well, we confirmed the fact that people are interested in enterprise microblogging. We also confirmed that there are going to be a whole lot more players in the space before all is said and done. That’s one of the reasons that Laura has asked Joe and me (notice I didn’t opt to speak “Palin-ese” and say “me and Joe”) to guest post on this blog from time to time.
What other key considerations need to be discussed regarding microblogging in the enterprise? For one, we could sure use some case studies. If you’ve got them, we’d love to hear about them.
Aaron Strout is Vice President of Social Media at Mzinga, where he focuses on creating business value through viral marketing channels, including blogs, podcasts, twitter, and webinars.
Pistachio Consulting is putting the finishing touches on our report “Enterprise Microsharing Tools Compared: Sixteen Applications Your Business Can Profit From” which will soon be available for free download on our site. You can also register to have it emailed to you when published.
Just in time for your post, Socialtext announced Signals, which makes microblogging ready for the Enterprise, and not the other way around. Disclosure: SocialText is my client.