I’ve been a big proponent of microblogging’s simplicity for a few years now. It’s one of those things that companies can launch very quickly and more importantly, transform certain processes. The case studies at a recent Harvard Business Review article reflect some of the common enterprise scenarios — reducing email, simplifying workflows and of course sharing ideas as we’re accustomed to on Twitter.

I’ve used Yammer pretty extensively and most of the organizations I’ve spoken to lean toward the other two [SocialCast, Socialtext] mentioned for similar capabilities.

At Meredith Corporation, the publisher of Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, microblogging tool Socialtext Signals is the platform of choice. Using Signals, the marketing function can post alerts to employees and partners on a wide range of marketing issues, such as researching competitors, brainstorming new ideas for a direct marketing campaign, or analyzing the outcomes of current campaigns.

Says Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing for Meredith, “Signals allows us to break down the silos and easily share information with each other internally. We also use Signals to communicate with groups of external vendors, so we can brainstorm current campaigns with them, propose new ideas and share best practices. It is amazing how much we have cut down on email traffic while increasing our productivity.”

Image via CrunchBase

Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.

Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.

If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.

Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.

Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.

And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.

The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.

Below are Wilson’s five areas.

* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.

* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.

* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.

* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.

* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users

The thing I like about SocialCast’s approach is their lightweight strategy, dropping in around existing apps and platforms as needed.

Eric Schonfeld described their approached recently around the company’s  funding announcement

The startup’s service combines a corporate activity stream that ties into CRM and ERP systems with social bookmarking, Outlook and SharePoint integrations, mobile (iPhone and Blackberry) and desktop (Air) apps, and analytics.

The bigger software vendors will own the foundation for collaborative technologies — it’s smarter to coexist and deliver information in a platform-agnostic way.

I also noticed mention of an AIR and mobile app, which is equally smart. There’s a contingency of users that will drive adoption outside of the internal portal with mobile and desktop apps alone.

I took the passage below from one of The Economist’s latest stories on social networking. I tend to agree with the assessment of Twitter as an “information company,” the more I see its evolution.

 

“..Mr Stone says he sees Twitter as more akin to an outfit like Google than to Facebook. He describes the business as “an information company” whose users are keen to find out answers to what is happening in the world. The billions of tweets that Twitter is gathering up could certainly be the basis for a vast, searchable archive. The challenge facing Mr Stone and his colleagues is to find smart ways of transforming those raw data into profits."

I know there’s a lot of folks who’ll go to their online grave exclaiming that Twitter is simply a community. I don’t disagree, I’ve worked inside my own Twitter community for almost three years.

But if you look at how the platform is being used and monetized, it’s exactly as Stone describes in the passage above. Both Google and Microsoft have compensated Twitter for its “information” and that interest doesn’t appear to be waning soon.

Both Bing and Google realized early on that real-time would have a big impact on the way people search for information. While they’ve got their own share of eyeballs, the reality is that you and I continue to communicate on an always-on and instantaneous channel as we share on Twitter’s platform.

None of the others — Google. Microsoft, or Yahoo — have anything to rival that. Of course Facebook is the closest. as The Economist points out, but still lacks the openness that Twitter provides. Until Facebook or another entrant opens to the web completely – a la Twitter – its information will remain at a premium.

 [Illustration above by Ian Whadcock]

  

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Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

One of the other quotes that stood out was John Batelle’s prediction that the microblogging interface would change and “look nothing like a microblog.” I’d guess that has  a lot to do with the interface disappearing in some respects. By that I mean interfaces will be accessed through all sorts of services, applications and embedded widgets. And in a sense I think it’s already changed pretty drastically.

The other thing that almost everyone seems to allude to is how social media will become more entrenched in the inner-workings of companies – from their external communication practices to the way business systems are built, designed and deployed. 

That last part is why you hear so much about “social business,” which is a really tough thing to distill into something folks can understand.

If you stray too far to the technical, toolset, or process side, you sound like a business process re-engineering (BPR) evangelist. Jump over too much to the “social media” side and you quickly run the risk of being categorized as too fluffy or someone trying to socialize things that really don’t need to be social.

2010 Social Media Influencers – Trend Predictions in 140 Characters, by TrendsSpotting

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

It’ll be tough to unseat much of Yammer’s base, but there should be plenty of integration options to coexist within large enterprises.

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

Image by cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr

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I spent a few days in Dallas a few weeks back working with a Telligent client on some community strategy stuff. As expected, a lot of the conversation focused on the effect third-party social networks have on website traffic.

But more importantly, we tried to hone in on how social networks can stimulate online conversations. One of the things I’ve noticed is the relationship between forums and things like Twitter. I grabbed the screenshot from TreeHugger to show how they’re using Twitter to “lubricate” content that exists within some of their other online properties.

I put lubricate in quotations because it’s a word that Twitter’s Ev Williams uses to describe how Twitter excels at delivering multiple pathways to existing information. In that context, I don’t think  there’s a better way to describe it.

As far as my client work, the way I articulated it was to package your experts and present them online as visibly as possible. It’s not just about linking to your existing content, it’s also important to catalyze the opportunities to engage with your customers. Many describe that last piece as market conversations.

As I mentioned to my client, what better way to have your expertise on demand than having a Twitter List or widget displaying one of your brand’s experts ready to respond to forum posts or FAQs? It’s really a matter of augmenting what you’re already doing with your forums. Forum MVPs or purists will always stay close to some of their old habits, but increasingly users’ methods of interacting with you (and your content) is more free-form. In other words, your customers’ clicks aren’t always tied to your core brand content.

Today it wouldn’t be unusual for one of your customers to visit your site and quickly be whisked away to one of your employee’s Twitter accounts.
If that’s such an increasing use case, why not bring that closer to where your brand’s conversations originate? In a sense, I think this points to an increasing expectation on companies to have some level of curation expertise.

I’d even go a step further. Is it that far-fetched to hear that one of the deciding factors in selecting a vendor was how many of its employees were deemed as industry influencers or luminaries? Of course not, it happens all the time. But nowadays, the variables for how our customers come up with their observations are much more visible. With things like Twitter Lists, blogs and Facebook fan pages, expertise has never been on such public display.

A big part of my argument in citing the “Forums” use case has a lot to do with curation. What fascinates me the most is bringing curation closer to the business. It seems like Forums are one of the obvious candidates.

Posted via web from George Dearing dot com

Erik Schonfeld writes about the information overload challenge, showing the overblown, Tweet-filled desktop of Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur.

While Twitter presents new challenges staying dialed in to the stream, it still does a helluva job vetting news and information once you get your network in place. It’s that last part {discovery} that poses the biggest challenge. Why else would you have to create 20 columns to scrape enough information together to get a few key morsels?

I think that’s why you’re seeing Twitter and other ecosystem partners focusing on search and curation. Once that starts to improve, I think you’ll see higher value networks start to bloom — and in much shorter time frames. We can then leave the "20-column" configurations in the rear-view mirror.

“It’s 18 months later and the problem hasn’t been solved. The screenshot I took back then still resonates because the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information."

I’ve always liked CoTweet’s model. It was one of the first companies to map the back-end workflow needed to manage Twitter messages and correspondence.

You really start to see its magic when you add multiple Twitter accounts and configure the tool for dispersed individuals that need to swarm as communication S.W.A.T teams. Once you’re familiar with the ins and outs, you can really see how the tool could be expanded with other web services and real-time hooks.

And I guess Morgan at JetBlue might’ve been the one that responded to me a few months back when I was griping about some departures at JFK. I’ll give them credit. They were listening and they responded. That’s more than I can say for a lot of companies.

Image via CrunchBase

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