chrisbrogan.com» Yammer

Do You Need a Chatter Channel

ceb — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:30:33 +0000

I’m still trying different ways to use Socialcast* for businesses. My team is using it for workstreaming. Here are some of the ways I’ve used it so far, in that regard:

Where: We use a status tag of #where to point out where we’ll be on any given day.
Followup: We use a tag of #followup to remind ourselves of notes. Add a #clientname tag for better sorting.
Question: Socialcast has a “question” feature that lets us do internal questions.
Client notes: we keep running streams of client info (easy sorting).
Document distribution. We can attach docs to share. Not easy for collaboration (we prefer Google Docs), but a nice spot to attach a doc to a project.

We’re looking for some new features, like something persistent like “tasks,” but Tim Young, CEO and founder of Socialcast is baking that into a future iteration of the product. I’d also love an Adobe Air client version, but I’m willing to wait. The web one is nice enough, and the iPhone rendering is nice.

Chatter

Businesses could also use this as a running “chatter” channel. For instance, if I’m about to launch a new content blog (like workshifting), this would be a way to keep the flow of “have the new logos come in?” and “where’s my password?” in a nice easy space. Businesses thrive on unstructured data, and this kind of a tool really helps capture this.

Is it too messy? Not if we discipline ourselves to use tags. Thus, when I search #citrix , I see everything we’re doing for the Citrix Online team. If I search #where, I can determine if someone’s due for a bit more office time. It flows as one big stream, but lets me sort and dice by using tags and search. (It feels a lot like gmail. If you get gmail, then you get this.)

I’m thinking of how a chatter channel can improve internal business processes. I hatched the idea a bit with Scott Diller at Citrix Online over the last few days, and it’s still germinating.

What do you think?

* (and you can say Yammer or Blellow or lots of other things here).

Running Your Business at Lightspeed with Socialcast

ceb — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:05:21 +0000

First, a quick disclosure: Socialcast has kindly sponsored our Inbound Marketing Summit events. If you have attended our events, you know that I only pick sponsors that have a product or service I like. That said, this is in no way a paid endorsement. I just like the software. So there, let’s talk about Socialcast.

To get you up to speed, Socialcast is software that acts as a private twitter (more accurately, a private FriendFeed). It’s built for internal collaboration and communication. It lets you send messages to multiple people in a group wit a one-to-many kind of method. Messages can be text, an image, a link, or a file. It’s web-based, serves up to 10 users for free, and then has pricing for over 10 users. It’s pretty cost effective, judging by what I saw (and my guess is Tim Young, founder and CEO, would work with you, if you had a huge order).

We’re using it here at New Marketing Labs. We’re using it for an internal presence stream. This bounces between client-specific conversations, to issues of our time and availability. Here’s an example:

So, what’s cool is that we can tag things inline with hashtags (you know, like #hashtag), and it translates to searchable tags. We can edit our posts. We can add details into a “details” area per post so that it lets us stay slim, but go fat. We can upload files and append/update posts, too.

It doesn’t have an iPhone app, but it does have a very nicely formatted website designed for iPhone (so, if you’re not too nitpicky, it has an iPhone user experience). I’ve used it on my iPhone and it works great.

Probably the most popular competitive product would be Yammer, and we haven’t set up an evaluation for that product yet. We will over the next few weeks (and I’ve heard good things about Yammer, too). But so far, we’re digging Socialcast.

How We’re Using Socialcast

What we’re finding about Socialcast as a team tool is that it allows for a better snapshot of how the day is going, a better way to call out how projects are going, a useful method to call out what’s on our plates, and a much better way to gauge the flow of office experiences than email.

We’re using it for collaboration, for simple q&a, for talking about what’s upcoming. I’m happy so far. Of course, we’ll need to test a bit longer to see how it holds up over a few months, but if you’re looking for an interesting internal collaboration tool, this is a pretty neat, lightweight product to consider.

Have you tried Socialcast? Are you considering which tool to use for internal collaboration? This might be the right fit.

Twhirl Makes Yammer Irrelevant

ceb — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:10:24 +0000

Reading this news that Loic LeMeur sent me this morning, I see that Twhirl, the social software front end client, now supports any laconi.ca install. If you’re not yet up on laconi.ca , it’s an open source, run it on your own servers version of Twitter. See the flagship install of it at identi.ca.

So, to sum that all up: Twitter inside the firewall, private for your business is Twhirl+laconi.ca. Twitter outside the firewall with your business colleagues and friends is Twhirl+Twitter. Easy cheesy. One app.

Recently announced at TechCrunch50, Yammer is angling to be the Twitter for the enterprise client. Believe me, lots of companies have asked for this very thing. And while I don’t want to take away from the technical qualities of why Yammer is cool, and why it might well do the trick just fine for businesses, I’m thinking that what Loic LeMeur and the Twhirl team just did kind of trumps Yammer. Why?

Single client.

Logged into my Twhirl account, I can have a tab for Twitter, a tab for FriendFeed, and a tab for my laconi.ca install of choice. That means I can have a behind-the-firewall and a lets-share-with-everyone install all in one client.

This is pretty darned clever, Loic.

I’m digging into it further now, but I think I’ve just found a great recommendation for a dual-use Twitter-like environment thanks to this bridging strategy by Twhirl.