Social Messaging

Socialtext Signals provides social messaging integrated with Socialtext’s enterprise collaboration platform. While it provides a lot of the same great benefits of other micro-blogging tools like Twitter™, it provides many additional benefits as colleagues in a company use it to work towards common goals.

If you want to quickly gather collective insight from a broader group within your organization, without interrupting people, and without multiple threads of long responses, Socialtext Signals is the answer. It amplifies, clarifies and complements other collaboration and gives you fast and widespread information sharing.

What is Social Messaging?

Social messaging, also known as micro-blogging or micro-sharing, lets a network of colleagues share brief (140-character) messages. Socialtext Signals provides:

• A fast and powerful way to reach a broad audience without cluttering e-mail inboxes or increasing anyone’s “to-do” list.
• A way to micro-blog securely, among colleagues within a corporation who are working towards a common purpose.
• An integrated user experience; share, view and post signals multiple ways and from multiple places within Socialtext workspace pages, profiles, the Socialtext desktop application, and your personal dashboard.

Micro-blog as part of your other collaboration activities

The Socialtext collaboration platform gives you many ways to learn about colleagues, and when you opt to follow someone you see both their activity streams and their Signals. You always know the people behind the Signals because you see how they collaborate in workspaces, and you can click to their profile from any contribution or Signal. As you use the Socialtext platform to collaborate, you are presented with the option of posting a Signal at the right opportunity, in the context of what you are already doing, such as when you are saving your changes to a wiki page or blog post. You can also post and monitor Signals from your dashboard, from Socialtext Desktop, or from within a person’s profile. The configurable pop-up notification that comes with Socialtext Desktop also alerts you to new Signals.

“With Signals, our people share pieces of knowledge throughout the day, giving us a ticker of what we’re accomplishing for our clients.”

Lisa Bertero Palmer
Senior Vice President, Davies

Tap the collective intelligence of co-workers without costly interruptions

With Signals you tap into the collective intelligence of co-workers, without the attention costs associated with other communication mediums. This is because the constraints of social messaging actually support efficient communications:

• Messaging is in near real-time
• Messages are kept to 140 characters, the length of an SMS message, which encourages brevity, summary and linking
• While you can view all messages, you follow people to create a custom feed of the signals from the people who are important to you, leveraging the social network as a filter
• For most, micro-blogging is considered a "reply-optional" medium

Improve the signal-to-noise ratio in your organization

Socialtext Signals helps improve the signal-to-noise ratio in an organization. For example, someone may edit several wiki pages as part of accomplishing a business task. Activity notifications that are part of the collaboration platform, seen by those who subscribe to the person, the page, or the workspace, can then be amplified by a Signal which summarizes the outcome of the business task, and which may be received by a broader or different group.

“Signals is like social telepathy. Everyone can keep in touch without directly corresponding all the time.”

Brett Gurewitz
CEO & Founder, Epitaph Records

Micro-blog metadata that provides meaning at a glance

As you save the changes you’ve made to a wiki page or blog, you are presented with a chance to summarize the edit, and by checking a box you can post that summary as a Signal, complete with a link to the page. This allows you to Signal your activity without having to switch gears. Like all Signals you post, it will be seen by everyone who follows you, giving them context about what you are up to. As people work in the Socialtext platform, context about their changes get shared as Signals. Much like the activity feeds of Socialtext People, these types of Signals give colleagues real-time context about what others are up to. The difference is with a Signal you get a chance to summarize what you just did, in your own words.