Innovate with internal microblogging?
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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As my colleague Tim Buckley Owen noted a few days ago, it is very difficult not to mention social media developments at every turn.  But there are a few sofcial media applications that have been around for quite a few years that should also be given house room.The internal corporate communications tool?

Here at FreePint we use Yammer as our internal communication and work process tool.There are others like it and I have heard people speaking well of present.ly. The word is that in the world of private enterprise these types of communication tools are way ahead of Facebook and Twitter, sometimes seen as distractions in the corporate world, because of their ability and value in helping an organise solve problems by encouraging knowledge sharing, collaboration and escalation of projects.

These tools are micoblogging and push notification systems. The little nuggets of information submitted by users and pushed through by email or text messages or other alerts remind the user to return to the platform for updates and/or further information sharing. This creates a bottom up searchable knowledge base within the organisation.

I have come across these tools mentioned in so many different industry sectors and diverging professions that it is hard to ignore their potential value.A clue came from a recent twitter tweetup on #nhssm (a UK National Health Service social media hashtag) about medical students having great success with Yammer.In Dan Slee’s blog he was also investigating the power of Yammer in the delivery of public services – does it have the power to innovate?  Rather than the usual "standing round the watercooler" chewing the fat, the conversations so far seem to indicate innovation and movement.

I came across an interesting post on why Yammer failed and it is nothing to do with the technology.  Read into this post and you will see that support for social media is always a requirement and in that organisation there was no support.  Look at my LiveWire post about the success of Roche Pharmaceuticals in social media use – top down organisational support is the key.

I think we need to bring in the "Big Guns’ now" - and I am talking actual big guns. The US Army posted a few weeks back about their uses of microblogging tool Yammer – so enterprise social networking fires up the military too.

In the short research I did around this topic, Yammer was the product that appeared the most in conversations.  This is a shame as the present.ly tool does have one real benefit over Yammer – it allows people with different domain email addresses to use the system together.  This is great if you have outsider contractors involved in the workflow delivery as many organisations do. 

This post I think will be the start of some follow on work – if you have ideas or feedback on these tools I would like to know.

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