Everyone needs to blog! was the call not so long ago in the enterprise, Microsoft even went as far as making it part of the job of senior managers to post to their blog sites about what they were up to. I suppose the rationale was about driving better communication within the business, and opening things up so customers and staff felt more engaged. It failed. It failed because it actually is not that easy to sit down and write a blog, not everyone is able to do it. It failed because people did not think what they were up to was always worthy of a blog posting, and it failed because people just forgot to do it.
So does twitter have a place in the enterprise? I mean, it is a "micro blogging" site, will it actually get used?
Yammer thinks there is a place for enterprise micro blogging. I think they may be right (but I dont know if you can make money from it).
Just as twitter has found a place with people who want to say something, but dont want to write a blog post, I think Yammer will find a place within the enterprise, filling that space that blogs have had difficulty filling with most managers.
From my own personal experience, engaging with colleagues and staff on twitter has increased the lines of communication, and developed better relationships, however, given the public nature of twitter of course some topics remain off limits. Yammer helps to remove some of these boundaries by being open to only people within your enterprise.
By having a walled micro blogging site we would be able to talk a bit more freely about work topics, and, engage people in other areas of the business who we may not even know exist at the moment.
I actually think micro blogging in the enterprise may have a future, changing the culture and the nature of how people work today however may be more difficult. Sharing information within the enterprise is not always in the best interests of the people sharing it (and thus it is not shared), or, some information should remain secret (and thus should not be shared). Withholding some information, and release some that should be withheld will also cause its own problems, managers need to alter the way they work today to take this into consideration also.
In sumary, I think twitter type applications do have a place in the enterprise, however the enterprise still needs to change and evelove to take advantage of this type of service and get value from it.
