Microblogging in the Enterprise
by: David FiondaMicroblogging is catching on like wildfire. The most popular microblogging site..twitter.com, has grown from almost zero users three years ago to 79.5 million users as of October 2009…..
You’ve mostly heard of twitter being used by celebrities and athletes to give their fans insight into what they are doing. Twitter has also got a lot of celebrities in trouble, most recently Gilbert Arenas tweeting about his gun possession issues.
Microblogging can also be a valuable way to capture and share knowledge and information from experts within or outside of your organization. Microblogging can provide ready access to insights and perspectives that are not normally shared with traditional corporate communication tools.
For example, if I am an expert in SAP Business warehouse, I’m not going to sit down and write a formal e mail on what problem I am working on for today, I’ve got no time for that…and that knowledge will remain locked up inside me.
However, posting a quick tweet from my cell phone on a problem I solved, including a link to my case notes, is easy to do and only takes a few seconds. Now, if someone else in the organization is trying to solve the same problem, they can search the microblog and read about the problem I solved and read the online notes that I posted as a link.
Sounds great right……there is one small problem. This is all very valuable and also very proprietary corporate information. Posting it on a public site like twitter will share it with the world, including all of your competitors.
How do we Resolve this Dilemma?
Recently, CIO magazine featured case studies on companies, including Motorola and Avaya, that are using microblogging “withing the firewall” alternatives to twitter.
I thought this was an excellent article on how enterprises can use microblogging in their organizations.
Next up…We’ll discuss the results of a survey that SAP did on microblogging in the enterprise.
