I've gone on record as being a little dismissive of the utility of Twitter, this despite the fact that I was a reasonably early adopter of it and use it pretty frequently.
I posted the other day about a nice service that uses both Twitter and more traditional electronic communication channels (if that isn't a slightly oxymoronic statement) to ease the information gathering process between public relations people and journalists.
In a vaguely similar vein, over on FreshBooks they've taken what would have been a long involved project for a marketing person, and turned it on its head using crowd sourcing via Twitter. Just the other day I was discussing the difficulty of getting customer testimonials with some people. The person who was describing the problem they're having is the founder/CEO of a company doing back-end services for e-commerce - they're a hugely successful company with some big name clients.... that unfortunately they're having a hard time crowing about.
It seems their direct contacts are happy to provide a testimonial, but getting one created through traditional means involves communication at many different levels of the corporate ladder.
FreshBooks approach was to tweet a message asking for testimonials from customers - mere minutes later they had a bunch they could use on their website.
I believe that this sort of process could be extended - it's understandable that corporate communications will want to be involved when a long winded endorsement is needed for an outside contractor - but what about using Twitter to aggregate short testimonials for direct contacts within client companies?
Anyone out there utilised microblogging for this sort of function? We'd love to hear your stories...
The New York Times presents the perfect showcase for what I've been preaching in my recession / business models mini-series here:
The showcase compares Twitter vs. Yammer and their categorically different approaches to business.
Twitter is the leading micro-blogging service – they have a strong brand, even if you use a competing service you’ll likely say you’re tweeting. Wired magazine declared blogging dead since we’ve all moved to Twitter. Have we, really? The NYT says 3 million users have tried it – compare that to the 133 million blogs Technorati keeps track of. But numbers aside, Twitter is clearly the leader in popularity. What it does not have is revenue – not a single cent. They live off VC funding, to the tune of $20M, and have recently hinted they would announce their business model early next year.
One concept is to charge companies who use Twitter to reach out to customers. I’ve already said I’d pay a buck or two, if that’s what it took to keep twitter alive – although it’s unlikely they would charge consumers. And of course there’s always the classic exit: get acquired.
So one could clearly characterize the Twitter approach to business the classic VC-backed, growth-oriented Web 2.0 formula: get big, then figure out how to make money.
Copycat Yammer is following the exact opposite model: they focus on revenues from Day One. Their twist on the Twitter formula: they focus on businesses, providing domain-based closed groups to tweet chat within. Many Twitter fans were sceptical when Yammer launched, saying Twitter could put them out of business in a second by launching private groups. I somewhat agreed:
But Twitter has not added groups, so Yammer is growing happily and virally (we’re using it here @ CloudAve), albeit not to Twitter’s level: they have about 60,000 users in 10,000 companies, of which 200 companies are already paying for 4,000 users. This isn’t hyper-growth, but stability.
Let’s be fair though: Yammer could not have grown virally, had Twitter not laid the foundation for them. Twitter had first been a weird concept, not even the founders could have predicted the wild popularity they gained. By the time Yammer appeared on the market, they had no explaining to do at all, the “aha moment” was there: “aha – this is Twitter for Business”.
The two companies represent two different approaches to business, both of which were valid when money was flowing free. The NYT quotes Paul Kedrosky:
“Now it doesn’t matter if you want scale first because you just can’t have it,” said Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. “You have the luxury of being able to decide between small and focused on revenues or large when you have capital. When there isn’t money, there’s no choice.”
Socialtext, the enterprise wiki company is no more… a wiki company, that is. Not since Socialtext 3.0, the new release announced today. Founder and Chairman Ross Mayfield calls his new baby a Connected Collaboration Platform, that’s modular, built on a widget framework, and consists of:
A fourth piece, Socialtext Signals is in the works, in private beta testing – I guess we could call it Twitter (Yammer? ESME?) for the Enterprise. Actually more, since it involves active microblogging – quick messages – as well as pulling in what users do elsewhere (FriendFeed?)
The platform is flexible, easy to customize via widgets, clearly the vision is that in an enterprise environment actionable information is pulled in from the transactional systems, too – i.e. ERP, CRM.
Knowing Ross as the uber-social guy something tells me this is what he always wanted to to: create Social Software. But I tend to agree with Jevon MacDonald, who differentiates social software from the wiki, which is primarily a collaboration tool. So Ross was really in the collaboration business and given his name became synonymous with wiki evangelism, he will no doubt have a hard time changing that image.
This is not to say the wiki part, should be neglected… It is the primary collaboration facility for anything not well handled by process-driven, transactional systems, and all this social layer is just the glue that holds it all together. (Hint: you will hear a lot more about Glue soon).
I had in the past been quite critical of Socialtext’s wiki component, and am looking forward to revisit it, as part of our wiki-series in the coming weeks @ CloudAve. In the meantime, enjoy this video:
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=07e6aa86-f4fd-4dbc-89fa-d8fa9d33947c)
