Sean R. Nicholson

Many Intranet professionals are already leveraging the power of Twitter to market their activities outside of the firewall, but few have taken the next step add microblogging as a feature to their organizational Intranet. Luckily, the great folks at the Laconica project are building an open source microblog application that can easily be installed in both Windows and Unix/Linux environments and rolled out in a matter of hours.

What Is The Laconica Project?

The Laconica Project consists of a group of volunteer development professionals committed to creating an open source microblogging application that allows users to share 140 character messages.  Basically, you can install the application on a Windows, Unix, or Linux server inside your firewall and ensure that the “tweets” (or whatever you choose to call them internally) are only visible to your organization.

How Can I Test Laconica To Make Sure It Will Work For My Organization?

If you’re interested in testing out Laconica without having to install it on one of your servers, just create an account at www.identi.ca. Identi.ca is the largest implementation of the Laconica and includes all of the functionality that you’ll see when implementing the application in your environment. Keep in mind that Identi.ca is open to the world, so anything your post there will be published to the Public timeline and is visible to the everyone.

Collaboration Is Key In Any Organization

What Added Benefits Can Microblogging Add To My Intranet?

The key benefit to implementing microblogging withing your organizations is collaboration. I am a firm believer that any tool that gets your organization “talking” and sharing information is a good thing. There are a variety of additional benefits, however, that can help you complete your microblogging strategy proposal:

One-To-Many Communications

One of the most common questions I heard when proposing internal microblogging was “How is this different from Messenger/Jabber/SameTime?”. These tools are primarily used for one-to-one communication where one user engages with another user to seeks answers to questions or discuss a topic. Some messenger clients allow for the creation of group discussions, but these tools are not primarily used for group conversations.

By allowing your users to share with the group as a whole, you facilitate “one-to-many” communication where the post can be shard with the everyone. This allows other users to then seek out the content by browsing or through searches.

Archiving Of Important Conversations

One of the unfortunate downsides to Messenger/Jabber/Sametime clients is that once the conversation is over and the dialog box is closed, the conversation disappears into cyberspace and is lost to the organization. If your organization uses one of these clients, think about how many questions are answered in one-to-one conversations each day that would be valuable to the organization if they were retained, indexed, and made searchable. That’s where microblogging beats messenger clients, hands-down.

With microblogging, all of the messages are stored in a database, made searchable and, if your organization leverages the hashtag functionality, the information can be categorized for easy retrieval. Hashtags are keywords preceded by the # sign, which allows microblogs to group posts by topic. So when discussing microblogging, any user that adds #microblog to their message will automatically categorize their message with others with the same hashtag.

Open Communication Beyond Email

In organizations where messenger clients aren’t present, the question about microblogging is usually “How is this different from email?”. Like messenger clients, email is a siloed communication vehicle that allows only those on the distribution to read the content. The only way that the information can be shared with the entire organization using email is by sending it to a distribution group that contains everyone. And we all know how much we love those types of emails. Organizations quickly become desensitized to content in mass-emails, so you risk losing the value of the information.

Microblogging allows users to seek out the information when they need it, instead of having it pushed to them in an email and stored in their their personal mail folders. As a result, users can easily get the most up-to-date information based on how the microblog conversations have progressed. Additionally, since the information is public to everyone in the organization, you break down the communication silos that exist within email.

Knowledge Management

Let the experts in your organization share their knowlege one tidbit at a time.

One of the difficulties that organizations constantly wrestle with is getting the information stored inside their employees heads into a format that can be stored, indexed, and searched. Microblogging does exactly that by allowing employees to share small tidbits of information with the organization at their convenience. They don’t have to devote vast amounts of time to writing “job aids” and how-to documents. Instead, a simple message like “Remember to put cover sheet version 2.2 on all of the new TPS reports. #tps” will provide users with a reminder that version 2.2 is the correct cover sheet. By adding #tps to the message, any user who searches for #tps will find the latest message in chronological order. This way, when another user posts a message stating “A new version of the TPS cover sheet should be used, version 2.3. #tps” all users will see the new post at the top of the timeline. Combine these posts with hyperlinks to the new version of the TPS report, and you have a great knowledge management combination.

Topical Filtering By Hashtags

Is I indicated previously, hashtags really bring out the power of a microblog. Any microblog training should include the use of hashtags so that users understand the value of categorizing their content. Not every post requires a hashtag, but the more your users use them, the easier it will be to location content.

Interest Organization Using Groups

Microblogs like Laconica also allow users to create groups. Groups allow like-minded individuals or those working on a common topic/project to share information among the group. By posting a message that says “!financianalyst To all the financial analysts, be sure to submit completed expense reports by 05/05/09.”, the user is sending a reminder to anyone in the financialanalyst group. While the message is still posted on the public timeline (viewable to the entire organization), any Financial Analyst can filter their messages to just those targeted at their group by visiting the timeline dedicated to their group.

How Do I Drive Adoption Of A Microblog?

Driving the adoption of microblogging is all about value. If your users see no value in participating, they won’t adopt the technology. The best way to drive value is to show it in action. Identify a group of Twitter users in your organization and ask them to participate in a pilot project. Spend 30 days posting to the microblog,  ensuring that you are using the hashtags and group functionality. More than likely, after 30 days of posting, you will be able to show some specific topics, groups, and posts that have driven value in your organization. By demonstrating the value, you’re likely to have a much easier time showing why microblogging is useful than just simply trying to explain what Twitter is and how it works.

Have thoughts or input? I’m always open to constructive feedback in the comments! I’d love to hear successes (and yes…even failures) of internal microblogging. Share those stories in your comments!