micro-blogging for org usuage

8/7/2019 Micro-blogging for Org Usuage

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Micro-blogging for organizational usage

Sharif Tanvir Rahman

Matr. no. 298791

Department of Computer Science

RWTH Aachen University, Germany

August 9, 2010

Abstract

Organizations started to bring some concepts of micro-blogging to im-

prove internal and external communications. It is interesting as a broad

range of collaboration tools for organizations are already available for this

purpose. This paper justifies some considerable potentiality for micro-

blogging tools to improve intra-organization transparency and knowledge

sharing. This work may also be viewed as a state of art of organizational

micro-blogging in various perspective, i.e. related research, existing plat-

forms, possible benefits as well as design and implementation issues.

1 Introduction

Effective communication is one of the key factors for effectiveness for any typeof organizations. Organizational leaders are in a dilemma over the nature of communications. Some argues for paperwork or bureaucracy and so they’reaverse to a high degree of communications. Whereas the other angle of thinkingis to effectively convey and receive information which suggests both internal andexternal communications to increase substantially.

Micro-blogging is a relatively new phenomenon comparing to other commu-nication channels. It is the process of sending short text updates that describes’what you are doing and/or thinking’ . This messages are available to whomeverhas subscribed to view these. Micro-blogging platforms allow tracking messageseasily, i.e., all of the information is saved and can be searched intelligently.

Micro-blogging supports people to broadcast information that they not-likely

to share otherwise, using existing services, e.g., email, instant messaging, weblogor phone. The population of micro-bloggers has grown explosively and hugeamount of data have been generated. Lots of bloggers are office workers andthey post a significant amount of data for work purpose as well. This is obviouslya ground for research whether this data could be classified properly and can leadto serving organizations purpose better. This paper would discuss its potentialfor serving as a new informal communication medium at organizations.

However, micro-blogging adoption within an organizational setting is stillin research phase, although there are some platforms already available solelyfor this purpose. Moreover, organizations are concerned about some issues, e.g.privacy and performance. So, there is a need to discuss the state of art from

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various corners and close the gaps so that organizations get proper rationale to

adopt micro-blogging in a workspace environment.

Outline As said, this paper surveys the state-of-the-art of using micro-bloggingin organization setting. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Sec-tion 2 discusses whether and how an organization can take benefit. Section 3relates some research findings whereas section 4 introduces the reader with someof the popular enterprise micro-blogging tools. Section 5 highlights about someissues to consider while tuning the concept for organization and finally conclud-ing remarks are given in section 6.

2 Organization benefit justification

IBM provides some valuable questions, an organization owner should ask him-self for affirmation, to justify whether an organization can profit from a socialsoftware [19];

• Do you need a more efficient, yet informal way for small groups and teamswithin your organization and supply chain to collaborate and problem solve(outside of e-mail)?

• Do you spend too much time trying to track down the current experts on certain topics within your organization?

• Do you want to do more to promote creativity and the sharing of knowl-edge and key information resources within your organization?

• Do you have a sense for the critical pockets of knowledge and expertisewithin your organization?

• Is there much opportunity for people to communicate and connect acrossorganizational boundaries, such as departments or locations, to solve prob-lems in an interdisciplinary way?

• Are you worried about losing critical expertise and tacit knowledge as key staff retires or move on to other opportunities?

• Are you looking for way to attract and retain younger talent?

Socialtext discusses how the concept can boost-up organization productivity,

”Chances are you only know whats going on in your company when someone elsedecides you should. You probably spend 1/3 of your day in your e-mail client,and 500 hours a year hunting for stuff. You can’t find someone with a particular expertise, leadership and employees are out of touch, and people re-create work.Socialtext 4.0 addresses these problems. With Socialtext, everyone knows whatsgoing on. People and teams are synchronized, engaged and informed.” [7]

It is the design and constraints of micro-blogging that is the key for sup-porting efficient communications inside or outside workplace [14]. For most,micro-blogging is considered a reply-optional medium. It offers messaging innear real-time while messages are kept to 140 characters, the length of an SMSmessage, which encourages brevity, summary and linking [14].

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A common social pattern on micro-blogs, for instance on twitter1, is to ask

questions to find information or people. The results are surprisingly effectiveas well as efficient. Firstly , A colleague can view all messages as well as followpeople to create custom filters to view the people important to him. This is how,besides searching for answers, a worker is “tapping into the collective intelligenceof participants” [19]. Secondly , this benefit is achieved rapidly and without thecosts associated with other communication mediums for asking people questions.

Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd points out a typical daily experiencein their Harvard Business Review [23] which could be replicated inside theorganization, ”Are you using Twitter to reach your customers and followers? Do you update your status on Facebook several times a day? Maybe you daily ask questions of one of your specialized LinkedIn groups?” They commentedthat organizations can expect a jump productivity if these sort of informalcommunication take place with a specialized internal tool like Yammer [16] or

Socialtext [14].

3 Adoption for organization

There has been extensive research about the use of micro-blogging. The pop-ular use is to update family, friends and colleagues about their whereabouts,activities, and interesting thoughts [22] [11]. Micro-blogging offers a quick andeasy way to send a short text message from computer or mobile device, thiscontrasts with traditional blogging activities.

IBM discusses [19] how social software, consisting of collaborative tools builton Web 2.0 design principles, enable participants to actively share knowledgeand build relationships across their network. It also points out how elementsof social software are already finding their way into a growing number of com-panies. It remarks about the increase in productivity by filling the informationgap, ”Social software can make broadly visible information and relationshipspreviously hidden or tacit within an organization”.

Management gradually thinking that introducing informal interactions be-tween colleagues instead of bureaucratic paper work leads to effective manage-ment [3]. Zhao and Rosson [27] discusses how micro-blogging could be a newinformal communication medium at work. It points out a variety of possibleimpacts of on collaboration work, e.g. enhancing information sharing, buildingcommon ground, and sustaining a feeling of connectedness among colleagues.

Zhao et al. [27] conducted research aimed at gaining an in-depth understand-ing of how and why people use the popular micro-blogging tool, Twitter and

explored microblog’s potential impacts on informal communication at work.Gunther et al. [21] conducted focus group sessions and based on the findings,

a model is formulated to predict the adoption of a micro-blogging system in theworkspace. Java, Song, Finin, and Tseng [22] analyze why and how Twitter isused for private purposes.

Ehrlich and Shami [20] examined micro-blogging in the workplace by con-ducting a content analysis comparing posts from individuals who were using aninternal proprietary tool and Twitter simultaneously.

Zhang, Qu, Cody and Wu [26] conducted a case study about the early adop-tion and use of micro-blogging in a Fortune 500 company. The study used

1www.twitter.com

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several independent data sources: five months of empirical micro-blogging data,

user demographic information from corporate HR records, a web based survey,and targeted interviews.

4 Enterprise micro-blogging : Existing platforms

Organizations can choose either an internally-hosted micro-blogging platform,or using a solution hosted by a vendor. Organization structure or type of infor-mation to share may play a major role in selecting the platform, for example,if the employees are likely to share confidential or proprietary information, se-curity and privacy would be a major concern.

Some most popular platforms are discussed below. Only the organizationrelated features are highlighted here.

4.1 Yammer

Commonly mentioned as an ’Enterprise Twitter’ that allows co-workers to sharewhat they are working on. Privacy to each company’s Yammer network isassured by limiting access to those with a company email address. People atCisco Systems, Xerox, and Hewlett Packard are using it.

”Yammer is the private social network for your company” slogans Yammerin their website. ”Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter. If Twitter asks:”What Are You Doing?”, Yammer asks: ”What Are You Working On?”” [25]

Yammer’s business model is interesting, because it spreads virally in a sense.Anyone with a company email address can sign up and start using Yammer forfree. But when a company ”officially” joins Yammer, giving an administrator

more control over security and how employees use the service - it pays 1 dollara month for each user. And unlike Twitter, that limits to a 140 characters ina message, Yammer offers typing as much as the user need to. In Yammer’sfirst six weeks, it had 10,000 companies with more than 60,000 users sign up,although only 200 companies with 4,000 users are paying so far [13]. Uptotoday’s date, yammer is used at over 80,000 businesses worldwide [16].

It supports the following features as detailed in their product page [17]

Enterprise micro-blogging by exchanging frequent short messages with peo-ple at work. ”You ask a question, share news, ideas, documents, and post status updates, and other people within your private network can reply.Unlike email, you choose whose messages you’ll receive by ’following’ spe-cific people and joining groups - creating a custom feed tailored to you” .

Company social network as members can share their yammer profile, whichconsists their photo, title, contact info, expertise and background.

Securely collaborate with internal and external groups

Knowledge Base of a complete archive of messages, profiles and tags. ”If you’re new to your company, Yammer also helps you get up to speed faster because it’s likely that your questions have already been answered on Yam-mer and are therefore searchable”.

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Figure 1: Yammer: A simple real-time communication tool for organizations

(Mobile) Productivity Tool like other micro-blogging tools, supporting thefeelings of ’connected and informed’.

4.2 Socialtext Signals

Socialtext Signals provides micro-blogging integrated with Socialtext’s enter-prise collaboration platform. In addition with basic features of micro-blogging,it provides many additional benefits for organization as colleagues in a company

can use it to work towards common goals.

Improving signal-to-noise ratio. ”Someone may edit several wiki pages aspart of accomplishing a business task. Activity notifications that are part of the collaboration platform, seen by those who subscribe to the person, thepage, or the workspace, can then be amplified by a Signal which summarizesthe outcome of the business task, and which may be received by a broader or different group” [14]

Metadata provision. It shares micro-blog metadata that provides meaning ata glance. ”As people work in the Socialtext platform, context about their changes get shared as Signals. Much like the activity feeds of Socialtext People, these types of Signals give colleagues real-time context about what

others are up to.” [14]

4.3 Present.ly

Present.ly is a enterprise collaboration solution. Unlike Twitter, Present.ly pro-vides a secure and private way to share updates among members of a company,without them being visible to the outside world. Feature highlights as follows,

Groups to Keep Conversations Organized Support for groups for each projector topic of discussion. Users receive messages that are relevant to the topicat hand and are free to move between conversations as desired. This waythe conversations could be maintained focused.

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(a) Present.ly in Android (b) Socialtext in mobile

Figure 2: Mobile platforms dealing ’What are you working on’

Share Documents and Media with Co-Workers Rapid share is supportedwhen there is a necessity of quick share of images, documents, video, andaudioclips with colleagues.

4.4 Indenti.ca

Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software StatusNet tool.It provides many features not currently implemented by other services, for in-stance, Twitter. These special services are listed below,

Personal tag clouds. Identi.ca supports tags to help you organize your activ-ities here. Tags could be used for people and for notices.The most popularcurrent tags on the site can be found in the public tag cloud . Their sizeshows their popularity and recency.

Group support via ’Notice’. It can be used to send a notice to the attention

of everyone marked with a particular tag. For example, ’@#family hello’ will send a notice to everyone the user marked with the tag ’family’.

FOAF standard. Allows free export and exchange of personal and ”friend”data based on the FOAF standard; therefore, notices can be fed in to aTwitter account or other service, and also ported in to a private systemsimilar to Yammer.

4.5 Jaiku

Jaiku is a part of Google. The service is maintained by volunteer Google en-gineers on their spare time [1]. Vic Gundotra, Vice President, Engineering

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mentioned about their process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine

[18], after declaring they would no longer develop Jaiku codebase, “With theopen source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will beable to roll-their-own micro-blogging services and deploy them on Google AppEngine. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we’re ex-cited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source micro-blogging platform”.

In other words, it sounds like Google is working on a competitor to the hostof enterprise-focused micro-blogging tools that have sprung up in the wake of Twitters success, or at least a service that will lure some paying users to GoogleApp Engine [8].

Open sourcing the code is an interesting target Google made, as it meanscore of Jaiku could be extended and organizations would use their own, unique,custom micro-blogging tool .

4.6 status.net (formerly Laconica)

StatusNet is the open source micro-blogging platform that helps sharing andconnecting in real-time within user’s own domain . Businesses, Media & Con-sumer Brands and Online Communities are using StatusNet for their internalcommunications [15].

StatusNet provides the following key features,

Groups. Individuals can follow notices relating to specific topics and connectwith others who share common interests.

Popular Notices. Keep track in real-time of whats popular within user’s net-

work.

File Sharing. Enable file uploads, such as photos, videos, and other files.

Social Network Interface. Status updates propagates to other social net-work accounts, such as Twitter and FaceBook.

Plug-ins. Find or build own custom plug-ins to make a unique micro messagingenvironment.

Customizable Interface. Through themes and clients, you can maintain yourbrand identity and provide a unique user experience.

The above features facilitates StatusNet providing other solutions than main-

taining an online community, for instance,

Solutions for Enterprise : Effective employee collaboration Real-time mes-saging enables employees to communicate more efficiently and becomemore productive. Incorporating micro messaging into organization’s In-tranet reduces complications associated with employees adopting theirown tools and ensures that all employees and teams are connected. ”By maintaining the platform behind your firewall, you minimize risk and maintain governance over the social network itself”. [6]

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Solutions for Media and Consumer brands: Manage communication strategy centrally

By having own micro messaging platform, media and consumer brandscan efficiently manage their social media messaging and communication.”Enable divisions, departments, regional or local outlets to communicaterelevant and timely information out through one channel to multiple social networks (like Twitter and Facebook). Empower your audience to engagewith you and others through social networking within your own domain.Build communities of interest and provide a richer online experience for your audience”. [12]

4.7 Cubetree

CubeTree differs slightly from the pack by offering some cool features like thecollaboration tools of wikis and polls. Carlin Wiegner, chief executive officer and

co-founder of CubeTree, believes that what’s keeping employees from connecting effectively is the current condition of most companies’ intranets [4].

Cubetree has an extensive list of features [10]. However, as said, collabora-tion tools like wikis and polls are unique for a micro-blog but definitely helpfulfor organizations.

Wiki CubeTree includes a full-featured, built-in wiki. Wikis are a great wayto share written content with the co-workers. Other than being easy toedit, one of the most important capabilities of a wiki is making it easy forsomeone to track changes to a wiki page. CubeTree has several optionsfor change tracking. It also provides visual tracking of page views andrevisions for every wiki page (fig 3(b)), complete with links to view thechange. Another cool feature is, it supports partner widgets, e.g. googlecalendar2, a Scribd document or a SlideShare presentation to add richmedia content to shared wiki pages.

Polls CubeTree supports polling and in an easy and flexible way. The userssee when other people vote, a poll can gather momentum and increase itsresponse rate and reach new people.

Trip Itinerary Sharing It supports easy broadcasting travels by synchingwith systems like Google Calendar or TripIt3. This feature seems useful,as by sharing upcoming meetings or trips with the co-workers, a workercan dramatically improve the visibility of her activities as well as theirproductivity. The user has control over which trips are to broadcast andwhich should remain private.

4.8 Rypple

Rypple is social software, built for work environment but focusing especially onfeedback and coaching. It supports different kind of feedbacks [5],

Feedback on goals Staying aligned with clear visibility into goals and actions.The team gets an easy way to collaborate.

2http://www.google.com/calendar/3http://www.tripit.com/

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(a) version history

(b) visual tracking of page views and revisions

Figure 3: Cubetree wiki support

Feedback on achievements Motivating the team with public recognition. Help-ing them learning with a safe way to get honest insights.

Face-to-face feedback Keeping focused, accelerate learning and making workfulfilling with frequent, effective 1:1 coaching conversations.

Meaningful feedback Tracking personal and team progress.

4.9 Applying Twitter for Organization

Although Twitter is not developed for this purpose, there are a number of waysTwitter could be used for the benefit of an organization. First of all, Twitterprovides a free alternative to communicating via SMS and the coworkers cantake the benefit. However, this feature comes with all the above mentionedplatforms.

Intra-group communication is tricky while using Twitter as it does not cur-rently support group functionality. However, free third party services exist to

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Figure 4: Rypple: Sharing meaningful feedback

support this power, for example, GroupTweet [9] helps groups communicateprivately via Twitter.

There are other limitations of Twitter, which makes the other above-mentionedplatforms popular for organizations. For example, only text and links can be

posted by twitter. No other resources like maps , photos or videos could beshared. Even the text and link posting doesn’t support intra-communicationwell for the 140 character limit.

Moreover, It has post per hour limit as well. Additionally, it imposes limits[2] on the number of follow requests, updates and direct messages a user canmake in a single day.

5 Design and Implementation principles

Zhang, Qu, Cody and Wu [26] points out several issues that can help both prac-titioners and scholars build an initial understanding of how knowledge workersare likely to use micro-blogging in the enterprise. As an initial effort to gain a

systematic understanding of the adoption and usage of micro-blogging in cor-porations, they examined how people used Yammer [16].

B.J. Schone [24] mentions ’Involving the right people’ as a high recommen-dation, while implementing micro-blogging at work, i.e., bringing in people fromright departments and help them understand micro-blogging and how it helpsachieving company’s interest. Corporate Communications, HR, IT, Legal couldbe possible prior departments. Schone [24] also suggests to consider runninga pilot program for a small group of users, may be with the training depart-ment. This would give a feelings how the concept works and whether it has thepotential to serve organization’s purpose.

Gunther et al. [21] marked the following issues as key concerns, while imple-

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menting microblog systems for an organization; Privacy concerns, Communi-

cation benefits, Perceptions regarding signal-to-noise ratio, Codification effort .They discussed how micro-blogging like other social software provides otherswith a whole set of user-related information such as personal interests and/orworking routines. It mentions several participant’s worry; ”I don’t want my work tracked, I don’t want to report every step I make” ; another answer ”It’slike a Big Brother... like everybody sees what everybody is doing...” [21].

Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd [23] suggest the following three lessonsto consider while thinking implementing micro-blogging inside organization;

• Start small and monitor results. Build an audience first and then uncover how it can lead to increased employee productivity or faster timeto competence. Since micro-blogging is a modest expense, (often as low as

$ 1.00 per user per month) there need not be elaborate ROl studies prior topiloting the service.

• Provide training to employees. The training is for using micro-blogging effectively. They suggest webinars, online training programs,or face-to-face Lunch & Learns.

• Integrate Micro-blogging into organizations workflow. It needs tobe used as a productivity tool rather than another thing to do during busydays.

6 Conclusion

Being a tool to facilitate informal communication, micro-blogging can improveintra-organization transparency and knowledge sharing, hence increase produc-tivity. Popular tools like Twitter4 and Facebook5 are lacking for organiza-tion settings as they don’t offer a complement of collaborative tools includingthreaded replies, RSS feeds, photo, wiki and file sharing as well as typical work-place concerns like privacy and perceptions regarding signal-to-noise ratio. Wealready see enterprise micro-blogging platforms in the evolutionary process of social networking. It appears that more collaboration suites are to emerge andserve organization purpose more conveniently.

4www.twitter.com5www.facebook.com

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