As children, our parents teach us to be kind and share with others. “Share your toys. Share your snacks. Share your games.” So shouldn’t we be expected to behave the same way when we grow up and join the business world?

Unfortunately in competitive corporate environments, people sometimes horde information to try and gain any advantage they can over their colleagues. Thankfully, a cultural shift is occurring, where people understand that sharing and openness are vital to company-wide success, and that helping others is actually one of the key ways to getting ahead.

This is the third part of a series explaining the benefits of microblogging in the enterprise. In part one, we took a look at how sharing status updates can lead to tighter knit teams and reduce duplication of work. In part two, we examined how affective microblogging can be for questions and answers, enabling everyone to benefit and contribute to knowledge sharing. Today, I’d like to highlight how enterprise microblogging can be used effectively to share links to information, from public websites as well as internal resources.

When you read a blog post or news item online that you find informative, do you share it with others?? If so, how and with whom? If the only corporate tool at your disposal for sharing is email, do you really want to bother your colleagues by putting yet another message in their inbox? Will they even read it? What if there are other people that should know about the information? That’s where enterprise microblogging solutions, such as Socialtext Signals, come in, providing a better way to share information.

Sharing links via microblogging, instead of e-mail, has several benefits

1. Audience – Everyone in the company benefits from the information, not just a few people on an email recipient list. For example, you may think that article about a competitor will be interesting to the Marketing team, but the Engineering team could benefit from reading it as well.
2. Discoverable – Via search, everyone can find links that have been shared, since they are not locked away inside someone’s mail file.
3. Conversations – Often, when a link is shared, it sparks a discussion, leading to thoughts and ideas that let you improve products and services, or better satisfy customers.

Each of these characteristics have lead to link sharing becoming one of the most popular uses of Twitter. According to a recent New York Times article, “(on Twitter) One-fifth of posts and 57 percent of repeat messages contain a link, proving that this is an increasingly popular way to spread news” – Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist.

So what advantages does sharing links via internal microblogging provide versus using Twitter?

1. 1) Privacy – Employees want to share information with each other easily, but not disclose it publicly. For example, if employees research a company for a possible acquisition and want to share lots of links about it, that must be kept confidential. The same goes for sharing information about your competitors. Also, people share intranet links with sensitive information and descriptions which must be kept internal, such as “Everyone please take a look at this list of questions from the Acme account.”
2. 2) Expertise – Sharing links is not just about the content, it’s also about the people. Enterprise microblogging integrates with the corporate profiles of the authors, providing a great way to discover which people have expertise and interests in certain areas.
3. 3) Integration – Rather than using multiple tools, content creation, link sharing, search, and profiles (mentioned above) should be integrated. Socialtext Signals features the unique ability to post a microblogging message automatically when a workspace page is updated. The resulting Signal (microblogging message) provides a link back to the page, and shows who made the update. Click on the person’s name or photo to see their profile. Go to the search bar in Socialtext, and find pages, people, and signals all from the same location.

But what about social bookmarking?

Sharing links is not a completely new idea. “Social bookmarking” sites, such as Digg and Delicious, have been around for a while. Some enterprise software vendors even offer dedicated internal social bookmarking tools. However, sharing bookmarks in their own unique location results in employees having to look in more places to find information. Instead, by sharing links via microblogging, employees now have a single experience for creating and discovering status updates, questions and answers, and shared links.

So the next time you’re reading something that you think could benefit others, signal a link, and let everyone know.

Here is a video of sharing links via Socialtext Signals.

In Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise could get an answer to almost any question instantly, simply by asking the Computer out loud. While we’re not quite there yet, with countless websites, search engines, and social networks providing access to almost unlimited data, we’re pretty damn close.

The problem is that while automated search results are helpful, they often provide more information that you can (or want to) process. So how do we filter through all the results to get the best answers? The solution often involves turning to people. We ask our friends and colleagues for their insight and opinions. For example, on Twitter and Facebook, many people ask questions to the network they’ve built, rather than “Googling” for the answer. If you need to know who sings a certain song, or where you can get a replacement battery for your Macbook, odds are someone in your community will quickly provide a response. The power of querying your friends led both Google and Microsoft to pay Twitter millions to add public tweets in the results of their massive search engines.

As the use of question-and-answers over social technologies increases, businesses are looking at how they can provide similar services internally. That’s where a secure enterprise microblogging solution, such as Socialtext Signals, comes in handy. Signals allows colleagues to conduct Twitter-like Q&A, but do so internally, eliminating any concerns that company confidential information might be discussed in public.

With Signals, you can ask questions openly to your colleagues in a private setting, and get informed answers quickly. This represents a huge departure from past technologies. In the past, if you had an HR-related question, you most likely would have sent an email to someone in the HR department, and that’s if you even knew the proper person to contact. Depending on the size of your company, you might spend 20 minutes first, just trying to identify who to reach out to. Microblogging works much differently. If you ask the same question openly via Signals, anyone in HR has the opportunity to respond, or you might even get an answer back from someone in Engineering or Sales, who recently had the same question and now knows the answer. Additionally, that conversation is now discoverable by everyone, rather than locked away in just your individual inbox.

Similar to how social networks provide advantages over Googling, Q&A via Signals also has advantages versus standard intranet searches:

• Search indexes don’t (yet!) contain the information inside our heads. I can’t search the company intranet for “Does anyone have connections with a graphic artist that could help us with our new website?” Being able to access the wealth of tactic knowledge from across the entire organization is incredibly valuable.
• Search results don’t factor in the human traits like opinion and experience which your colleagues can provide. While automated results are quick and plentiful, they may not always provide the most useful information.
• Search is only good when you know what you’re looking for. If I want to find “Who is the Sales Exec for the Acme account”, an intranet search will probably find that from a page or profile. But an intranet search won’t help much with “Does anyone remember the name of the company that launched last week saying their engine is 10% faster than ours?”

As you can see, enterprise microblogging can empower your entire organization to help one another. Questions get answered faster, enabling people to spend more time on business tasks, rather than searching for information.

Sharing Status Updates Reduces Duplication Of Work

Last week I wrote Using Social Software To Accelerate Business Performance, as the introductory post to a new series where I’m going to discuss how “Enterprise 2.0″ tools provide benefits in the business world. I’m going to begin the series today by discussing the internal use of microblogging, which enables people to openly share short messages with their coworkers.

For those of you unfamiliar with microblogging, the most widely known example is Twitter, where you enter “140-character or less” messages, press update, and essentially anyone in the world can read what you have to say. Notice that microblogging differs greatly from email and instant messaging, where the audience is limited, since you specifically choose who the recipients of an email or chat message are. With microblogging, the information is shared openly, enabling more people to read, and thus benefit from what is being shared.

Internal microblogging provides companies similar benefits to services like Twitter, but adds a layer of privacy, by sharing the information only within your company. This enables you to provide status updates internally, which you would not share with the public. For example, you can mention customers, codenames, future projects, and other “internal-only” things.

Socialtext provides internal microblogging via Socialtext Signals. With Signals, when someone posts a message, all their colleagues can read what is being shared. (In a future blog post I’ll explain how you can send signals to a subset of people using Groups) It important to point out that the content shared via Signals is searchable, so the information can be discovered by everyone at any time. Compare that to email, where a great deal of valuable knowledge is locked away in individual in-boxes, available only to the people that were listed on the To: and cc: lists.

So let’s look at a specific example. This morning I signaled a status update “Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes.” I did not think much of it at the time. I was simply practicing what I preach, and openly sharing with my coworkers what I was doing. Much to my delight, an hour or so later (as seen below) one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with “Once you’ve got that list, could you send me a copy?”

Now Graham does not work with me in Marketing. He’s one of our developers who happens to work on things like directories and LDAP. The 10 seconds it took me to share what I was doing, has now saved Graham hours of time duplicating the work. Multiply the time saving benefits of this one occurrence by the dozens of similar times that this happens each day, and then ask yourself “How can we afford to not be using microblogging inside our company?”

Want more proof, take a moment and read about how St. Louis Public Radio is using Signals to openly share information. As station manager Tim Eby says: “People understand each other more, and they know what others are doing. This lets us respond more quickly to new opportunities.”

Next up, I’m going to write about how you can use internal microblogging for questions and answers.