Disruptive Conversations

What are the benefits of microblogging within a corporation or enterprise? What value does it bring? How can it be used? And how do these new tools like Yammer, Present.ly, Laconi.ca and others measure up?

Over on a Voxeo blog, I went into lengthy detail on all of those points in a post called "Yammer, Present.ly, Laconica and pushing enterprise microblogging into the cloud". I basically laid out:

• The benefits and use cases we've seen for corporate microblogging within our company over the few weeks we've been trying it out.
• Our experience with using Yammer - the positive and negative aspects and how it does and does not compare with Twitter.
• Some thoughts about how Present.ly compares to Yammer.
• Some thoughts on how the open source Laconica could be used to build a corporate microblogging service.
• Some thoughts on the wide range of companies leaping into the space right now.

Along with some general thoughts on what to think about when investigating these solutions and some pointers to the great work done by Laura Fitton and Jeremiah Owyang among others.

This was also somewhat predictably the topic of my weekly report into the For Immediate Release podcast today.

Rather amusingly, on the same day I published my review, the New York Times came out with two articles on the same general theme - one as an "article" in the main site and one as a blog post:

• Popularity or Income? Two Sites Fight It Out (the article focusing on Twitter vs Yammer)
• Will Microblogging at Work Make You More Productive?

The comments on the NYT blog post make for interesting reading. Obviously we at Voxeo are not alone in experimenting with Yammer.

I'm sure lots more will be written in the months ahead about corporate microblogging - and I'm sure I'll be writing more on it here. Meanwhile, please do enjoy my review of the tools and please do let me know what you think (either here or there). Have you tried Yammer? or Present.ly? or Laconi.ca? Or one of the other options? Do you see a role for microblogging within an enterprise?

Technorati Tags: microblogging, twitter, yammer, present.ly, laconi.ca, voxeo

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