The case for enterprise micro-blogging
Contextual understanding of content is key for businesses. Tools like Tweetdeck help make sense of Twitter.
I wrote yesterday about the case against enterprise micro-blogging. And while many people agreed with my suggestion that Yammer may not be ideal for my situation, we all agree that there is something to the notion of short-message style communications in the enterprise.
In Twitters' consumer setting, we tend to want the instant gratification with little to no follow-up on the discussion. In the business world we are looking for everything to have a meaning to our team/company and so on.
In the business world content is king, but context matters.
Besides the act of communicating, most people want is the ability to track conversations in an intuitive way. There are enterprise tools that provide context into all aspects of your business. A few examples:
- CRM -- any company that uses Salesforce.com will tell you that their CFO and sales team live and die by the data on the dashboard, using it for everything from forecasting to quarterly closing
- Marketing Analytics -- In the past I've described Loopfuse as "crack for marketers." The service provides near real-time statistics of all of your interactive traffic so you can measure and analyze
- IT Systems Management -- Products like Tivoli Netcool and HP OpenView are annoying behemoths, but they also serve a key function, ensuring that IT staff know what's going on in their networks and providing single-view and deep analytic views.
In the business world we want to see as much information as possible in the most concise and accurate way. Tweetdeck gives you a big lead in making sense of Twitter-verse surrounding yourself and your company's Twitter efforts.
I'd also recommend checking out Tr.im, a relatively new service that gives you basic analytics about the short links you include in Tweets. If you are a marketer using Twitter to announce products and such, this information is invaluable. I've found that links I include get clicked by about 10% of my followers, which is a shockingly high number.
You can follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom