Do You Need a Chatter Channel

I think the microsharing functionality of clients like Socialcast or Yammer or others make a lot of sense in Enterprise. I know in the kind of work I currently do, this way of collaboration would be much more effective and productive.

I suspect that organizations may in fact derive more benefit by using these services internally before using them externally. So yes, I think we could use more Chatter in the Batter.

how is socialcast better than friendfeed?

The #followup tag got me thinking about the concept of having mutable metadata inserted into the content of a status update. I'm disappointed in how people are emulating Twitter to the point of avoiding innovation. If a tool is going to be intended to be used in ways like this, why can't they *extend* the Twitter model to allow meta information to be separate from the content of messages? (it could still easily allow #hashtag syntax within messages)

Being able to add/remove metadata (such as a “followup” tag) is just one type of evolution. Why not add time-sensitive information, like project milestone deadlines and whatnot? Obviously, content-embedded tags formatted as “#due20090523″ and “#due20090523″ can't be sorted easily. Having a metadata layer on top of the messages would allow fields like this being tied to messages with simple relational-database methods.

AH! I see you met the incomparable Scotty D when you were here. Well, then your visit did not go to waste. :)

A lot of people have tried out Yammer at the Ed but it's hardly used at all. It seemed like everyone just went back to IM and email because there wasn't enough critical mass to make it useful. And there, then, is the problem; not everyone's going to pile in to try and do that without a reason to. Chicken, egg.

Thanks for the great post, Chris.

I think one simple way that a “chatter channel” can benefit businesses is that it simply documents, stores, and organizes this casual conversation. There's no other way in business to do this – unless you're writing a formal email or posting to a wiki, the ideas you've got swirling around in your brain either stay up there or only exist between you and the person you verbally share them with. When a company can capture discussions that normally aren't retained, it creates a whole new hub of knowledge that the company can tap into.

For some of the posters below, here are a few answers to you questions. First, Socialcast is different than Friendfeed because it's a private network only for your company's employees. What you share stays within the company. As far as complexity concerns go, there are definitely other ways to filter content vs. tags. While using tags is by far the most efficient way to organize your data, you can also use custom categories and public and private groups. Finally, while there are benefits to a one-person operation (documenting links, using it as a personal idea documentation tool, storing documents) – Socialcast was designed for enterprise use. So, having critical mass is important. We see highly successful sites with 5-20 people, but the real power is when you have many, many users.

Chris,

Interesting to see how y'all are using it. We've not tried SocialCast yet but we have played around with Yammer. Mostly we've used it to create a web based knowledge base and by making disciplined use of hastags we've come up with a pretty nice little knowledge base with no real expenditure of time or money.

Have y'all considered that aspect yet with SocialCast? Given your team's need to stay abreast of information and insight… might be a cool thing to consider.

@TomMartin

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