By Rob Gray, Product and Marketing Manager - Google Enterprise
May 20, 2010 - 10:01 AM
With great openness, and great transparency, comes great information overload!
Take twitter for example. It's an open tool. It's a transparent tool. Everyone can see anything that they want to (except for those who have locked down their accounts which, by the way, seems to be missing the point?) Anyway, due to the massive volumes of tweetery, it's impossible to read every tweet in the world. Therefore filters become of paramount importance. One filter is by choosing who we follow. This means that you only see stuff from those who you choose to receive updates from... that's ok in a consumer world, but does the "follower model" work in the enterprise? I don't think so.
Your personal twitter account gets built up over time, as you build these virtual relationships. However imagine a new starter in a business. They have no existing network inside that business, so they need to start their following process from scratch. They need to figure out who is useful to them in a short space of time - there is no time to build a network, especially one that is similar to their peers.
This is why "group" functionality is so important when selecting an enterprise social networking tool, or at least an enterprise microblogging tool. The idea is that you can join/follow the relevant groups rather than just follow an individual. Of course in large enterprises you then end up with a massive number of groups, so you need a good recommendation engine on the back-end making group suggestions based on your interests...
What tools have you looked at that do this well? I've looked at Yammer and blueKiwi, both of which do a good job on the groups, but not sure if they do the recommendation of groups, which is massively important in the enterprise...
I've got a feeling that we'll see this from some of the niche Enterprise 2.0 vendors... I'd be interested in finding out what any of you have seen on this front?
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