BrandPilgrim has a great new blog post on The Case for Enterprise Micro-blogging that deftly summarizes its main characteristics, uses, and benefits. It provides a pretty good explanation of why an organization would implement microblogging, though one could quibble about a point here or there.
But there’s one issue – an important issue – where I humbly disagree.
BrandLogic posits that the “elephant in the room” is the question, When employees are micro-blogging, are they still working?
In my view, this question’s already been answered (as it was answered with email, instant messaging, and the Web itself): Yes, people are working when they’re micro-blogging. I’ve worked with dozens of large organizations that have seen major, significant benefits from their use of Signals, the micro-blogging component in the Socialtext platform. But note, this is internal micro-blogging.
As micro-blogging becomes a routine part of an organization’s IT infrastructure, a bigger elephant is security. Not data security, but the security of knowing that employees aren’t blabbing about corporate secrets on Twitter. There’s a cultural shift afoot, as people move toward using fast, lightweight socially-empowered communications technologies such as micro-blogging, rather than other tools, especially email.
Which is great, but part of that shift is that people need to learn that when micro-blogging simultaneously in both private and public realms, be sure to keep the two separate.
BrandPilgrim September 13, 2010
Michael, your blog post says it all. I agree that security is a bigger issue. The question is – how can organisations promote efficient information exchange without being perceived as ‘Big Brother’? Establishing a vocal code of conduct and assigning security levels to projects seem like simplistic solutions. Maybe there is a human element here? Anybody who wants to compromise confidential corporate information would find a way to do it, regardless of security protocols. In that case, organisations need to build loyalty more than ever. And I believe enterprise microblogging is a loyalty builder. Perhaps we could discuss this issue further.