SMB IT Journal

If you mention microblogging to anyone today the first thing that you are going to get is an ear-full about the importance of social media and platforms for enabling the conversation and about customer interaction.  Okay, fine.  Over-hyped and poorly understood buzz that we can probably safely ignore for now.  Social media matters, yes, but spend some time on Twitter and, while a lot of people are talking, you will quickly learn that very few people are listening.  The platform is going somewhere, but right now most of the people talking in the microblogging space are talking about microblogging.  This will pass.  For now we have other concerns that are more immediate.

While I tend to quickly dismiss microblogging as the “next big thing in social media” as mostly hype from the marketing folks trying to convince people to look at them for another ten minutes I do think that the concept of a highly limited, easy to use, microblogging architecture to be one of great potential import to business.

When I talk about microblogging for business I am not talking about the popular notion of sending your intern out to post about your product on Twitter in order to garner market attention.  What I am talking about is using an internal microblogging infrastructure to deliver status about the people in your organization to your organization.  In the same way that companies have internal blogs delivering information to their own staff the microblogging platform can be an internal tool for our organization and not just something that we use to tell our friends across town what we are having for lunch.

Other social communications tools like traditional blogging, instant messaging, email, etc. started as over-hyped social media, even if the term did not exist yet, and ended up becoming standard, well understood business communication tools that are important pieces of the corporate communications toolkit today.  Microblogging will be the same.  And, like all of those communications tools that came before it, this tool is one that your company can start using today to get the benefits years before your competitors catch on.

Microblogging offers a potential boon to inter-team communications in companies of just about any size.  By providing an easily accessible microblogging platform for the use of your team you provide a simple way for individuals and teams to provide small, manageable amounts of status information to the rest of the company in a highly consumable format that is easily understood.  In the smallest organizations, those with less than five people who all sit in a single office, this may not matter, but start adding any additional number of people or start putting those people in disparate locations and suddenly microblogging matters.

Instead of hypothesizing about microblogging out of context let’s dive right into some sample scenarios and see how microblogging for internal use can help your company.  Remember that like many social media technologies, the leading microblogging platform, Laconi.ca, is completely free and something that your IT staff can roll out for you today.

Scenario 1: The Saleman

John is a salesman.  He works for your company but is almost never in the office.  He spends his days on the road, often in other cities.  You are lucky if you have face time with John twice per month.  Several people would benefit from knowing John’s status, but John is incredibly busy and does not have time to manage any extra email traffic.  He carries a BlackBerry but only answers emails from his current and prospective clients during the day and is exhausted at night when he gets back to his hotel room.  He communicates the bare essentials to you, his boss, but allows you to provide the necessary information out to anyone in the company who might need to know what customers need or new accounts might be coming online.  This makes you both a bottleneck and a point of failure.  What if you don’t communicate the necessary information to the right people quickly enough?

The solution?  Microblogging.  If your firm had an internal microblogging platform you could have extended it to John’s BlackBerry (iPhone, Windows Mobile device, regular cell phone, whatever) so that instead of sending you a quick email John could have posted all relevant information to his own microblogging feed.  Then any interested party in your organization could look at that feed to get up to the minute data straight from the horse’s mouth rather than having it unintentionally filtered and delayed.  People who need immediate updates could be subscribed to John’s feed while people who just want casual sales updates from time to time would just visit his web page when they felt it necessary.  Everyone gets the right data at the right time and you have more time to worry about the business itself.

Scenario 2: Software Development Teams

Software development is famous for its extensive need for communication.  Developers are famous for being unable to communicate easily between individuals and between teams.  Software development often requires a great deal of granual status updates at both a team and at an individual developer or manager level.  Microblogging is hardly a panacea for this situation, but it may be a very powerful tool in the communications toolbelt for this situation.

By giving each individual developer their own internal microblogging account they can make quick and easy status updates whenever their current task changes.  Other developers, who need to know on which components work is currently being done, can just subscribe to the feeds of the appropriate developers to know what everyone is doing at the moment.  Managers can know on what each of their team members is working without needing to stop by their desks and interrupting them unnecessarily to do so.

In this model, communications happens more quickly, more thoroughly and with less disruption to staff who are extremely sensitive to disruption and task switching.  Training the developers to make regular status updates – probably just a few per day taking less than five total minutes – will take some time but once it is part of the usual workflow it will make everyone’s life much easier.  It is also a great opportunity for people to solicite and offer help on certain problems.  A developer might post “working on the foo widget and trying to figure out the bar interace” and someone subscribing to their feed might see that and, being the bar interface expert, can shoot an email or run over to their office to help them out before they waste an afternoon reinventing the wheel or looking helplessly for missing documentation.

Scenario 3: General Office Updates

Most offices are bigger than a single space in which everyone can sit down and have lunch together.  Even a relatively small business with two offices or even two home offices could likely benefit from the advantages of simple updates.  It is important for businesses to communicate.  Internal business communications is one of the ways in which companies are able to outperform individuals – by sharing knowledge and tasks between many people.  If each of those tasks is so discrete that you need no communications then you just might be better off working as individuals doing the same tasks.

By the use of microblogging even general office staff can post simple updates a few times per day so that all of the offices have a good idea of what is happening in the other locations.  Whether it is seeing when lunch or meetings are underway, when the office has left for the day, seeing what new projects or challenges have arisen or finding out what customer interactions have taken place that day that information can be used to keep the separate offices working in a unified manner rather than as two completely separate locations with a very poor understanding of what the other one is doing.

Scenario 4: Department Information

If your company is large enough to have separate departments then microblogging may be just the tool that you need to enable departmental status updates to the organization.  This is not an appropriate solution for human resources to publish their latest employee handbook updates but it could be the perfect spot for them to announce the company picnic or open enrollment for benefits.

Many departments’ core function is to supply a needed to service to the rest of the organization.  Human resources, information technology, finance, billing, purchasing, etc. all exist to service the internal business needs of the organization.  If each department had its own microblog feed then it would be easy for each of them to provide simple updates to the entire company.  People might subscribe to individual department feeds, look at the department website when they have an interest or possibly all department feeds would be aggregated onto an employee portal web page or other unified information location to make these updates obvious to everyone.

The information technology department might post a reminder about phishing attacks or social engineering dangers or could post a status update to the email system that is currently down allowing everyone to keep working without spending their time phoning the already overworked IT department and delaying them from fixing a problem on which they are already working full speed.  Purchasing might post a link to a page on new purchasing procedures that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.  Finance may send information regarding a change in the way that employees must file expenses.  Potential examples are numerous.  How often does your organization wish to make a policy or procedure change but find that informing the company of the change can be very difficult once employees have learned the old procedure.  Updating the employee handbook or financial web site do little good if people have memorized the process and no longer reference those materials.

Scenario 5: Mentoring and Employee Growth

One of the less obvious ways in which microblogging can benefit your organization is in the area of employee development.  Senior employees, while posting regular updates to their microblog feeds, provide an opportunity for more junior members of staff, especially new employees and interns, to follow their feeds in order to gain a deeper understanding into the tasks that they complete on a day to day basis.

By giving junior employees the chance to observe their “mentors” in an unobtrusive manner they may benefit from learning how they work, how their time is spent and how they prioritize their days in addition, perhaps, to learning about their interests, what relevant books or articles they have been reading, what websites are important to them and more.  This is hardly a replacement for traditional mentoring but allowing employees to seek out information about other employees that they admire or from whom they wish to learn can be very valuable.

I don’t know the specific communication needs of your business, but I would be surprised to find that it would not benefit from an increase in internal visibility.  Microblogging can facilitate communications between teams, between peers,  between managers and their staff and even between disconnected pieces of the organization.  Microblogging offers a simple, low-overhead, loosely-coupled process that allows every level of an organization to provide status and information to all interested parties within that organization.

Microblogging does, of course, offer additional benefits outside of internal status communications that we have discussed here.  Servers and other IT equipment can post alerts automatically via the microblogging architecture giving anyone interested a chance to see real time failures and alerts on the network that may affect them.  And then there is external microblogging offering status and information out to customers, vendors and interested parties outside of your organization.  But those topics are too broad for this article.

Special thanks to Andrew T. West for his help with this article.

Tags: blog, communication, microblog, twitter

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