Turning Enterprise Microblogging Inside Out

“What if instead of focusing on the time or person, we instead focused on the assets being shared?”

Over the last year or so, Enterprise Microblogging tools (like Socialtext Signals) have become of one the main ways colleagues share information with each other. People ask questions, post status updates, share links to web pages and upload files they want their peers to see. The information shared via microblogging is displayed in what we call “streams.” These streams display information chronologically, meaning as new posts or comments are made they are added to the top of the stream, pushing older information down. The posts flow by like a river, and while you can scroll back to see things you’ve missed, typically people just pay attention to the information being discussed right now.

As we spoke with our customers about Signals, we quickly learned that the information being shared had tremendous business value. Marketing teams were sharing information about competitors. Sales were sharing presentations about customers. Engineering was sharing links to support issues. So we asked ourselves, “What if instead of focusing on the time or person, we instead focused on the assets being shared?”

Our answer, Socialtext Explore, the next stage of microblogging. Explore takes the stream and turns it inside out. Instead of showing who shared what and when, it provides you a way to focus on what was shared. You can choose to look at links, attachments, or both. Explore not only displays the link or file being shared, you can also expand to see the entire conversation that took place around the asset, providing you all the context of the discussion and the participants.

Socialtext Explore - Sorted By Recency (click to enlarge)

Filters along the left hand side of Socialtext Explore make it simple for you to narrow down the scope of the information being displayed. You can filter by time, by tag, by group or by person. Here are just a few of the countless ways Explore could help you:

• Find the most popular links shared by members of the Marketing team during the last month
• Which wiki pages did your manager ask you to review last week
• Which customer presentation has the Sales team linked to the most this year
• Find all the signals tagged about a specific competitor or customer

Socialtext Explore - Sorted By # of Mentions (click to enlarge)

I believe Socialtext Explore will dramatically improve the way people accesses the information being shared via microblogging.   No longer will you have to worry about missing something important in the stream.  Just take a quick look at Socialtext Explore, click a few filters and you’ll discover all the things being shared.  I’m wicked excited about Explore, and how Socialtext once again is leading the industry in Enterprise 2.0 innovation. I’d love to get your feedback, so please leave your comments below.