Jul
9
WRITTEN BY:
Jason Hooker
Thursday, 9 July 2009
In business, many in-house communications are time sensitive. Sometimes, a message needs to be shared immediately but in a relatively short period of time it will expire. Examples of this include announcements, status updates, questions and polls.
Micro-blogging technology provides a better solution than overloading email systems and clogging users’ inboxes.
What is micro-blogging?
By now, most people have at least heard of the micro-blogging website called Twitter. Several people around the Frame offices are seasoned users and advocates of the technology. For the rest of us, here’s the elevator pitch:
Simply put, Twitter is a global stream of consciousness condensed into 140 character bursts.
Those 140-character messages consist of status updates, links, questions, conversations, arguments, complaints and all kinds of other short communications.
In a business context, there is value in participating in the Twitter world, but mostly in a customer-facing context:
- gaining insight by monitoring customer perceptions and conversations
- providing better customer service by communicating directly with customers.
But should you expose your company’s day-to-day, in-house communication to the world? Probably not.
That’s where Yammer comes in.
Yammer is Twitter for business
Yammer provides micro-blogging functionality similar to Twitter, but restricts communication to users within the same email domain. Teams can form groups within the Yammer environment to reduce the volume and increase the relevance of information that users receive. However, as with most of these types of technology, there are pros and cons.
On the pros side, you can:
- make announcements to a controlled set of users
- ask questions of / poll the organisation
- follow messages from selected users or groups
- reduce email clutter
- receive messages on multiple devices—web, desktop, BlackBerry, iPhone.
On the cons side you have:
- yet another application/website to run and watch
Members of Frame’s application solutions team have been using Yammer for several months and we’ve found it to be quite useful.
Sites mentioned in this article
http://www.twitter.com
http://www.yammer.com