Socialtext

Although enterprise microblogging has emerged as a key technology to enable better collaboration between employees, it holds the greatest business value when it's integrated with other bits of social and enterprise software. That's the overall theme in an article today by Clint Boulton of eWeek. Detailing a recent Gartner report, Boulton writes that "while more than 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging by 2012, stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration."

The predictions reflect what we've experienced in the market with customers. One of the reasons our customers have derived business value from Socialtext Signals (our microblogging tool) rests in the fact that it integrates well with social tools in our platform. For example, when saving a workspace page, Socialtext can automatically post a link to the page in Signals, making it simple for your colleagues to discover and access the updated content.

In the article, Garner also predicts that "70 percent of IT-led social projects will fail." This bolsters our contention that line of business (LOB) people make the best champions for social software because they feel the pain points in their daily processes very tangibly. This is not to say IT won't play an important role. In allowing enterprise social software to integrate with other enterprise systems in a secure environment, IT is a critical player and needs to work closely with LOB champions and vendors to provide this integrated experience.

A significant downside to standalone enterprise microblogging tools, which isn't cited in the article, concerns security and control. As some of these free, niche tools crop up organically within companies -- and employees begin to share private, proprietary information over them -- an IT administrator must pay the vendor providing the service just to get control of logins, passwords and the domain the employees set up to host the information. This isn't a true freemium model; it's an extortionist sales model.