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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 type
of organizations. Organizational leaders are in a dilemma over the nature of
communications. Some argues for paperwork or bureaucracy and so they’re
averse to a high degree of communications. Whereas the other angle of thinking
is to effectively convey and receive information which suggests both internal and
external 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 whomever
has subscribed to view these. Micro-blogging platforms allow tracking messages
easily, 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, weblog
or phone. The population of micro-bloggers has grown explosively and huge
amount of data have been generated. Lots of bloggers are office workers and
they post a significant amount of data for work purpose as well. This is obviously
a ground for research whether this data could be classified properly and can lead
to serving organizations purpose better. This paper would discuss its potential
for serving as a new informal communication medium at organizations.
However, micro-blogging adoption within an organizational setting is still
in research phase, although there are some platforms already available solely
for 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-blogging


in organization setting. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Sec-
tion 2 discusses whether and how an organization can take benefit. Section 3
relates some research findings whereas section 4 introduces the reader with some
of the popular enterprise micro-blogging tools. Section 5 highlights about some
issues 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 social
software [19];

• Do you need a more efficient, yet informal way for small groups and teams
within 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 expertise
within your organization?
• Is there much opportunity for people to communicate and connect across
organizational 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 else
decides 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 whats
going 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 in
near real-time while messages are kept to 140 characters, the length of an SMS
message, 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 effective
as well as efficient. Firstly, A colleague can view all messages as well as follow
people 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 intelligence
of participants” [19]. Secondly, this benefit is achieved rapidly and without the
costs associated with other communication mediums for asking people questions.
Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd points out a typical daily experience
in their Harvard Business Review [23] which could be replicated inside the
organization, ”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 commented
that organizations can expect a jump productivity if these sort of informal
communication 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 and
easy way to send a short text message from computer or mobile device, this
contrasts with traditional blogging activities.
IBM discusses [19] how social software, consisting of collaborative tools built
on Web 2.0 design principles, enable participants to actively share knowledge
and build relationships across their network. It also points out how elements
of social software are already finding their way into a growing number of com-
panies. It remarks about the increase in productivity by filling the information
gap, ”Social software can make broadly visible information and relationships
previously 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 new
informal communication medium at work. It points out a variety of possible
impacts of on collaboration work, e.g. enhancing information sharing, building
common 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.
Günther 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 the
workspace. Java, Song, Finin, and Tseng [22] analyze why and how Twitter is
used 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 an
internal 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
1 www.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 organization
related features are highlighted here.

4.1 Yammer
Commonly mentioned as an ’Enterprise Twitter’ that allows co-workers to share
what they are working on. Privacy to each company’s Yammer network is
assured by limiting access to those with a company email address. People at
Cisco Systems, Xerox, and Hewlett Packard are using it.
”Yammer is the private social network for your company” slogans Yammer
in 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 for
free. But when a company ”officially” joins Yammer, giving an administrator
more control over security and how employees use the service - it pays 1 dollar
a month for each user. And unlike Twitter, that limits to a 140 characters in
a message, Yammer offers typing as much as the user need to. In Yammer’s
first 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]. Upto
today’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, which
consists 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 the


feelings 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 as


part of accomplishing a business task. Activity notifications that are part of
the collaboration platform, seen by those who subscribe to the person, the
page, or the workspace, can then be amplified by a Signal which summarizes
the 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 at
a 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 project
or topic of discussion. Users receive messages that are relevant to the topic
at hand and are free to move between conversations as desired. This way
the 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 supported


when there is a necessity of quick share of images, documents, video, and
audioclips 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 popular
current tags on the site can be found in the public tag cloud. Their size
shows 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 a
Twitter account or other service, and also ported in to a private system
similar 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 the
open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be
able to roll-their-own micro-blogging services and deploy them on Google App
Engine. 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 host
of 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 Google
App Engine [8].
Open sourcing the code is an interesting target Google made, as it means
core 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 and
connecting in real-time within user’s own domain. Businesses, Media & Con-
sumer Brands and Online Communities are using StatusNet for their internal
communications [15].
StatusNet provides the following key features,

Groups. Individuals can follow notices relating to specific topics and connect
with 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 messaging
environment.
Customizable Interface. Through themes and clients, you can maintain your
brand 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 become
more productive. Incorporating micro messaging into organization’s In-
tranet reduces complications associated with employees adopting their
own 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 brands
can efficiently manage their social media messaging and communication.
”Enable divisions, departments, regional or local outlets to communicate
relevant and timely information out through one channel to multiple social
networks (like Twitter and Facebook). Empower your audience to engage
with 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 the
collaboration 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 helpful
for organizations.

Wiki CubeTree includes a full-featured, built-in wiki. Wikis are a great way
to share written content with the co-workers. Other than being easy to
edit, one of the most important capabilities of a wiki is making it easy for
someone to track changes to a wiki page. CubeTree has several options
for change tracking. It also provides visual tracking of page views and
revisions for every wiki page (fig 3(b)), complete with links to view the
change. Another cool feature is, it supports partner widgets, e.g. google
calendar2 , a Scribd document or a SlideShare presentation to add rich
media content to shared wiki pages.
Polls CubeTree supports polling and in an easy and flexible way. The users
see when other people vote, a poll can gather momentum and increase its
response rate and reach new people.
Trip Itinerary Sharing It supports easy broadcasting travels by synching
with systems like Google Calendar or TripIt3 . This feature seems useful,
as by sharing upcoming meetings or trips with the co-workers, a worker
can dramatically improve the visibility of her activities as well as their
productivity. The user has control over which trips are to broadcast and
which should remain private.

4.8 Rypple
Rypple is social software, built for work environment but focusing especially on
feedback 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.
2 http://www.google.com/calendar/
3 http://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 work
fulfilling 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 ways
Twitter could be used for the benefit of an organization. First of all, Twitter
provides a free alternative to communicating via SMS and the coworkers can
take the benefit. However, this feature comes with all the above mentioned
platforms.
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 communicate
privately via Twitter.
There are other limitations of Twitter, which makes the other above-mentioned
platforms popular for organizations. For example, only text and links can be
posted by twitter. No other resources like maps , photos or videos could be
shared. Even the text and link posting doesn’t support intra-communication
well 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 can
make 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 workers
are 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 from
right departments and help them understand micro-blogging and how it helps
achieving company’s interest. Corporate Communications, HR, IT, Legal could
be possible prior departments. Schone [24] also suggests to consider running
a 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 the
potential to serve organization’s purpose.
Günther 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 others
with a whole set of user-related information such as personal interests and/or
working 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’s
like a Big Brother... like everybody sees what everybody is doing...” [21].

Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd [23] suggest the following three lessons
to 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 time
to 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 to
piloting 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 to
be used as a productivity tool rather than another thing to do during busy
days.

6 Conclusion
Being a tool to facilitate informal communication, micro-blogging can improve
intra-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 including
threaded replies, RSS feeds, photo, wiki and file sharing as well as typical work-
place concerns like privacy and perceptions regarding signal-to-noise ratio. We
already see enterprise micro-blogging platforms in the evolutionary process of
social networking. It appears that more collaboration suites are to emerge and
serve organization purpose more conveniently.

4 www.twitter.com
5 www.facebook.com

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