Do You Have Cases of Enterprise Micro-blogging (aka Twitter style communication) to Share?

I am looking for examples of successful implementations of micro-blogging within the enterprise. This would include Twitter and all the Twitter like tools (see Rise of Micro-messaging in Enterprise Collaboration Platforms and Pistachio Consulting’s Enterprise Microsharing Tools Comparison) sometimes known as micro-messaging. I am not looking for cases from tool providers but rather from companies who operate in non-technology fields but are using these tools. I want to talk about the non-technical aspects of implementation and adoption. I would like to use these examples for posts on this blog and possibly on the FastForward blog. If you are interested you can put a comment on this blog or send me an email. I cannot guarantee that I can turn all cases into posts, depending on the response.

I am especially interested in people who are willing to share the obstacles they faced and how they overcame these obstacles and what lessons were learned, along with the benefits obtained. Thanks in advance.

Comments

[Samuel Driessen]

Great idea to collect experiences with internal microblogging. I'm looking forward to your post. We're using Yammer at Oce. I blogged about it twice:
- http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-microblog-in-enterprise.html
- http://info-architecture.blogspot.com/2008/11/implementing-enterprise-microblogging.html
And I actually should blog about it again. In short: we are still going strong.

[Amir Mehrani]

I have some thoughts about Micro blogging and its affect of the way teams in organizations works and I'm going to share with you.

1. Micro Blogging instead of daily reports: I think daily reports are hardest part of daily job. People always experience problems when they want to write formal reports. It can be time consuming, boring and solid. Micro blogging can be a great platform for daily reports by letting people express themselves and achievements as they feel more comfortable.
It can easily replaced by formal reporting process.

2. Micro Blogging instead of forums and Chats: Micro blogging can be a new generation of discussion forums. The way people can ask questions and answers or share ideas and thoughts can be totally different by same process in forums. Micro blogging let people to share as they speak and even more real time than forums. It's not like chats with many irrelevant sentences and not like forums with limited alerting mechanisms.

3. Micro Blogging and Enterprise Search: In case of integration of micro blogging platform and enterprise search applications the result will be a knowledge base across organization. I believe tagging can add value to enterprise by exploring hot topics across organization, departments and teams.

4. Micro Blogging and Task Management: People may ask this question: "I'm managing my tasks by task management applications, why I have to Micro blog it?" well these are totally different subject but can complete each other. As I mentioned before it can be a daily report platform. In addition by micro blogging on current tasks people can attract others opinion about the way they're doing their job, and receive feedbacks. In project management methodology like PRINCE2 or PMBOK guides we have templates to log projects experience. These experiences usually logs after a phase or project completion. It means additional effort for writing it down. Micro blogging can log projects experiences in real time.

5. Micro blogging and Enterprise Governance: Like other technologies governance is a requirement for micro blogging. Micro blogging can bring people closer and it means exploring new ways of influencing people on each other. Expressing feelings and personal issues can be a threat to Micro blogging. Publishing secrets and direct critical topics may bring unsuitable results.

[jonathan denison]

we are starting to grow our use of Yammer in BT. Looking for application to share best practice, learning, collaborate between sales and service agents, accelarate decision making.

There are about 170 users at present, but rapidly increasing.

Happy to share learning.

[Jordan Frank]

In the last week i've spoken to a customers at a Fortune 100 and a Government Agency who had great success using Traction TeamPage Live Blog micro-sharing (http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Product577) for event driven, highly interactive discussion. In both cases, there is a need for the conversation to be persistent and referenceable.

At the Fortune 100, they used Live Blog to support a 50 person IT group in their efforts to brainstorm on disaster recovery.

At the government agency, they've started to use Live Blog as an interactive chat channel to discuss draft presentation slides. At the end of the meetings, they exported all the content to a WordML document and worked through word format as they updated the slides.

[bill Ives]

Jordan, Jonathan, Samuel, and Amir - Thanks for sharing your stories. Bill