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.

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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.

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Are you ready to become a collaboration super hero? Your training is just a click away.

As companies recognize the benefits of social software at work, products such as wikis, profiles, and microblogging are quickly becoming standard tools within enterprises.

To help ensure that you get the most out of Socialtext, each month we offer a series of free webcasts designed to help you learn to use these new tools as effectively as possible.



There are three classes:
1. Getting Started With Socialtext - A Platform Overview
2. Collaborate Effectively With Shared Workspaces
3. The Benefits of Enterprise Microblogging and Online Spreadsheets

These classes will show you how to move beyond the world of email and file attachments, and teach you how to create information that can be contributed to, and consumed by everyone in your company.  You'll learn how to get answers faster than a speeding bullet, break down the knowledge barriers between departments, and easily discover the colleagues that can help you get your job done.

Are you ready to begin you training?  Click here to register today.

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Do you want to improve the impact of your workspace pages?

Well if a picture tells a thousand words, then how many does an embedded video, slide presentation, or map replace?

With Socialtext it is easy to embed almost any type of web based content onto your workspace pages, here's how:
You can view more How-To videos on the Socialtext Customer Exchange.

Don't forget to subscribe to the Socialtext Youtube Channel to keep up with all the great videos.

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While doing product demos on the tradeshow floor of Web 2.0 Expo, we witnessed an interesting phenomenon.  As soon as one person started to watch a demo, a few more people would join in. Then a few more.  After a few seconds, we'd have a crowd.

Why does this happen?  Because people are interested in what other people are interested in.  The same affect can be witnessed as long lines form to get into the hottest new club, or as you look in the window of a crowded restaurant and decide you want to eat there.

This "crowdification" also happens with social software tools, where as more people become active in a system, the more value the system has.



Kick Start The Process

At our demo booth, when we had a few quiet minutes, we would have one of our staff pose as an interested party whom I would demo to, and inevitably a crowd would form.  So how do you get this type of traction for your company's internal social software tools, such as blogs, wikis, microblogging, groups, etc?  You do the same thing.  Find a few key people who have an interest in seeding the conversations/content.  They are often called Champions or Evangelists.  Have them start to participate, and make sure their contributions provide value to their colleagues.  Those people will then respond, either by adding to the existing content (edits/comments/links), or even better adding new information of their own.   One person will turn into 3 or 4, which will then turn into 10 or 12, and then the crowd will form.

So don't simply roll out new tools, make sure you have the leaders in place that will encourage others to follow.  This will help a crowd form, and make your new social software platform the hottest club inside your company.

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Next week at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Socialtext's Ross Mayfield will be hosting a panel with two of our customers, Dave Burke of The Washington Post and Patrick Durando of McGraw Hill, on the business value and adoption techniques of enterprise social software.

The session, "Web 2.0 Goes to Work: How Two Media Companies Implemented Business Social Software" takes place at 9:00am on Wednesday 11/18/2009.

If you have not yet registered for the conference, we have a special offer for you. You can signup now for 50% off any conference pass.  That includes all options from the full conference down to just the Expo Hall.  Simply use code "webny09pbr2" to get the discount.

We look forward to seeing you at Ross's session, and please make sure to stop by the Socialtext booth in the Expo Hall.

See you in NYC.

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What can you do with Socialtext Desktop?

• Provide status updates.  Ask questions, get answers.  Share information.
• Keep current on what everyone is doing, and stay informed when content is updated.
  
• Find people, connect with them, discover new people.
• Access content in Socialtext workspaces; wiki pages, files, blogs, and spreadsheets.
  

The following video was filmed as part of E2TV at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco last week.  Enjoy the tour, and make sure to download Socialtext Desktop if you're not already using it.

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We've just published a new case study on how FONA International is using Socialtext to help their employees reduce email, break down silos of information, heighten the sense of internal communities, and increase customer satisfaction.

A few of the benefits include:

• Reducing one processes' email output from 4,000 messages per month to 1
• No longer emailing around Excel attachments, and having to manually merge multiple versions
• Increased customer satisfaction by providing a self-service extranet, where customers can access the information they need, tailored to their account

Read the full story here

One of the things I really like about FONA's implementation of Socialtext, is the navigation they use, which reminds me of the periodic table.

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Ross demos SocialCalc, the social spreadsheet, and Socialtext Desktop for Robert Scoble.

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Ross Mayfield - Chairman, President, and Co-founder of Socialtext - talks with Robert Scoble.

Topics include:

• SocialCalc, the social spreadsheet.  On the 30th anniversary of VisiCalc, Socialtext has released a new online spreadsheet that enables distributed teams to work together to solve business problems.
• The speed and agility of software development in the 2.0 world vs. some of the larger enterprise software vendors
  
• Moving beyond "adoption of new tools" to instead talking about the business value of enterprise 2.0, and how tools like microblogging provide value very quickly
  
• The change from IT talking about "software stacks" to instead now focusing on the importance of REST APIs
• Activity streams, and the underlying event engine architecture
  

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