What's happening? "Micro-blogging" inside the Enterprise

Insights on the use of micro-blogging tools inside the enterprise

SharePoint 2010 includes several social computing features, including the ability to post brief status updates answering the question "What's happening?" There is no searchable past history of updates as with micro-blogging platforms; the focus is more "current state."  A recent post by Bill Ives on the FASTforward blog directed me to a very interesting study on the use of micro-blogging tools inside IBM.  The researchers looked at both Twitter (public) and BlueTwit (private, internal, behind the firewall) to examine both why and how people were using both tools. As you think about deploying SharePoint 2010's social computing features, there are several insights to be gained.

If your organization executives are worried about that users might be spending all their time on micro-blogging sites posting personal status updates, this study found that this was not the case.  The results showed that workers were mostly using the tools to post information and to engage in brief directed conversation.  Personal status updates were the third most frequent type of update, far behind the other two.

Are executives worried about confidentiality?  At least at IBM, users were not using the public Twitter forum to post confidential information. I found it really interesting that the study found that all participants used common sense and expressed that they had no trouble identifying what information was confidential. This doesn't mean that your organization's social computing policy shouldn't explicitly state that confidential information should not be posted in public forums, but it does imply that your adult users, even the "millennials," understand what information is confidential and that they shouldn't talk about it on Twitter or perhaps even inside the company's micro-blogging platform, as the researchers found in the study.

One of the most interesting and probably predictable results of the study is the difference in the type of updates users post when their audience was internal versus external. Externally, it was more common for users to provide information.  Internally, it was more common for users to ask questions - either through broadcasts (a type of "crowdsourcing) or directed posts.  SharePoint 2010 supports directed posts by allowing a user to post a note on someone's Note Board.  It supports the concept of crowdsourcing by allowing a user to post a question in her status update. The "crowd" in this instance is limited to the people in the user's network. In the study, this was reported as a real benefit, even if the internal audience was clearly more limited than the outside world.

The study also reported that users were very aware of the ability to enhance their professional reputation by participating as both a poster and, just as importantly, as a "responder" to questions. In SharePoint 2010, users can do this by both responding to questions for help and by identifying themselves as an "expert" in the new feature of the user profile called "Ask Me About."  In the Ask Me About field, users can identify topics that they can help with. Organizations can provide guidance regarding what constitutes "expertise" when it comes to Ask Me About topics.  However, my advice is to not be too fussy about how well you have to know about something when it comes to emerging disciplines in your industry or company.

This study provide some valuable information that could help make the case for the benefits and effectiveness of social computing features in your SharePoint 2010 deployment.  Definitely worth a read!

• Microsoft
• microblogging
• SharePoint 2010
• social computing