I’ve been feeling increasingly positive about the use of microsharing or microblogging as a means to bridge the chasm between us (at J&J) and enterprise 2.0. Microsharing is the term for the type of activity that these days is most popularly known through Twitter.
At least part of the e20 vision presupposes a consistent amount of “working out loud,” and microsharing is simply the easiest way to go about that. Social networking and collaboration tools are most powerful when they are able aggregate activity – including the artifacts of working out loud. Say what’re doing now, what you’re reading and what you think – and in the e20 world your activity will be exposed to whoever wants to hear it.
In the enterprise, working out loud fulfills the e20 premise of authenticity and democracy. No longer are fascinating conversations with high level thinkers reserved for a select group of executives; working out loud lets everybody listen in.
The most important thing that leaders need to understand about working out loud is that what’s going on in their world - which is important stuff - is opened up to the masses. Normal workaday folks like me don’t have a seat at the GOC, or with supplier CEO, or at a conference of CIOs – but with microsharing, we get a window into this world. And that’s powerful.
With Twitter, politicians are finding an easy path to updating their constituents on their daily activities; thought leaders are sharing and gaining exposure; restaurants, businesses, services – all finding the microsharing approach to be a viral and critical tool as a voice of their business.
As an end user, I love microsharing for the ability it gives me to watch a steady stream of updates from people and places I care about – in a very subtle and non-disruptive way. I also use the channel to connect people to what I’m saying – and even though I may have a small following, my Twitter channel let’s me reach out to a virtual community in the most seamless and unobtrusive way possible. With Twitter (and my favorite Twitter Client – Twitter Fox), I follow two channels: My personal channel that is about me, my community, and what’s going on around town, and I have my ThinkIntranet channel, where I follow what’s going on with my professional interests.
For the enterprise, I’ve been using Yammer – which while slowly gaining adoption, does not have enough activity to make it a compelling experience. Part of that is a nuts and bolts issue: You really need to use the client, but installing it is not allowed for those who do not have admin access to their machines. Also, adoption among groups at a time is slow – so that Yammer as a channel that one’s whole team is listening in to is not there yet.
With high interest in SharePoint customizations to allow for microsharing, I’m convinced we’ll see a web part available to us at J&J to integrate to such a tool in the near future.
