Microblogging in the Enterprise

James

June 26, 2008

Twitter - and the act of tweeting - is the latest new trend on the Web. It has many benefits and provides new functionality not provided by the current set of Internet technologies (blogs, instant messaging, wikis, etc.) I believe that microblogging will play an important role the enterprise because of its ability to foster innovation, collaboration, trust, and friendships.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has proposed the Twitter will become an Internet Utility. What does it mean to be an Internet utility? To me, it means that Twitter - and other microblogging services - have joined the list of general tools (email, web sites, blogs, wikis, forums, and instant messaging) that exist on the Internet.

Microblogging fills a gap

But isn’t microblogging like sending a short email to all your friends or starting a blog? I don’t think so. I think microblogging fills a gap.

If we consider each of the aforementioned core Internet technologies in terms of how content is created and consumed, we can see how microblogging fills this gap. Each technology fills a different niche with respect to how many people are involved in the reading and writing of that technology’s content. For example, an email is written by one person and intended for one or a small number of known recipients, whereas a Wiki article is written by potentially countless people and intended to be read by anyone with access to the Internet. To illustrate, look at how this chart plots various technologies based the number readers and authors.

Microblogging fills the space for content that is created by one person and intended for just a few (usually) known people. Note: the dragon represents the space where content created by many people is read by very few - perhaps this is the eventual destination of mainstream print media.

But wait, there’s more to this than just the number of readers and authors. It is easy, mostly one-way, and can create a sense of social self-awareness.

Its easy

What’s the difference between a blog and a microblog? Writing a blog post requires you to do hard things like like planning, researching, drafting, revising, and proofreading to make your point. A microblog post is just very short note. You simply jot down what you are doing or what you want to share with your followers. The Internet it littered with abandoned blogs with one or two posts. This is because maintaining a blog is real work. Microblogging is not. It is more like water cooler conversations or the trenchant observations you toss over the cube wall to your co-workers.

Its mostly one way

When you receive an email from a friend I think there is still an unwritten rule that you need to reply. This may be a holdover from the heady days of letter writing (you know, with a pen and paper). Microblogging is mostly meant for broadcasting to all your followers. Even if you are posing a question on Twitter, a reply from someone should not be expected.

Proprioception

Proprioception is a term that describes the sense of one’s physical self. Its the sense that, among other things, informs you where your limbs are at any given time. Try this. Close your eyes and ask yourself where your right hand is. Chances are you will know that it is resting on your desk holding your mouse. How did you know that? That’s proprioception.

Clive Thompson wrote an excellent piece about Twitter in Wired magazine a year ago. In the article, he coined the term social proprioception which refers to a group’s sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination. In a nutshell, the article claims that a single tweet has little value. It is the stream of tweets from your friends that gradually build up over time and causes “an almost telepathic awareness” of your friends. Spooky, but cool.

Microblogging in the Enterprise

The facilitation of efficient communication across a large organization is very difficult and is a primary factor that determines an organization’s success. Intra-organizational communication was once performed with the memo. Today it is done with things like the company-wide email and maybe even an internal forum. More recently, some companies have been experimenting with social technologies like internal blogs however, I submit that these techniques still tend to be highly formal and therefore have the tendency to cause employee eye-rolling.

I propose that a complimentary internal twitter-like service would provide a medium for backchannel communication among an organization’s employees.

I think the benefits described above would be realized as follows.

Easiness - it does not take much time to jot down what your are doing or how you feel about what is going on in your department. Participation would not have a large impact on employee productivity. Examples:

“having trouble rebuilding an index.. again!”

“slow morning… only 4 support calls today”

“totally jazzed about meeting with customers all next week.”

One way - You don’t need to respond to other people’s microblog posts. An internal microblogging service would not just be yet another ever growing inbox of unread items. If you don’t look at your microblog stream from the people you follow, it does not matter. Unlike your email inbox, there is no need for anxiety if you ignore your company’s microblog for a few days.

Proprioception - This is the biggie. Microblogging could have the effect of giving an organization a better sense of itself. Imagine IT being able to monitor the backchannel chatter in the finance department. Perhaps just from monitoring the posts, IT may discover an easily correctable issue that makes the finance department’s job easier. Another example might be sales staff discovering interesting projects going on in development and could then provide input about customers that would pay for the result of that project. The examples are endless.

Important note: Most Twitter posts are readable by any anonymous person on the Internet. For an internal microblogging service to work it would have to be similarly wide open. That is, anyone in the organization should be able to read any other microblog post. It is the antithesis of the principle of least privilege.

I’d like to postulate the following:

Microblogging fosters friendship.
Friendship fosters trust.
Trust fosters collaboration.
Collaboration fosters innovation.

Just as Twitter has filled a gap on the public Internet, an internal twitter-like service would provide similar benefits to an enterprise and would lead to greater innovation due enhanced collaboration, trust, and friendships.

OK, so who’s going to build it?