Drew Benvie over at Hotwire has an interesting post today about Dell generating revenues of $1 million using Twitter – the micro-blogging service that limits postings to 140 characters – to publicise its sales alerts.
While this sort of money is not massive for a company like Dell, it shows the growing power this kind of platform has as a marketing tool for companies. So while Twitter is proving itself as a marketing tool is one thing, however, I’ve never been sure whether a tool like Twitter can help organisations when it comes to internal communications.
Twitter is mainly for social use and there are several areas that go against it working in an enterprise setting: at work, people don’t necessarily want to hear about what their friends are doing five times a day, but they would probably like to hear about what their co-workers are working on several times throughout the course of the day. Security is another point that goes against Twitter, many people would baulk at the inner workings of their company being visible for all to see on a public platform.
There is a solution it seems. Yammer is very like Twitter except it’s specifically designed for businesses. Users must stay within the 140-character limit on Yammer and it is closed to everyone apart from those of that company.
Its aim is to improve communication between employees and team members and, when judged against instant messaging platforms, seems like a less invasive way to update fellow employees, have questions answered and provide insights in response and ultimately increase productivity.
Costs are low and it’s
proving popular: 10,000 people and 2,000 organisations signed up for the
service the day it launched in September. Maybe micro-blogging is just what
your internal communication needs right now?
Daniel
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