Thursday, September 1, 2011

Top 3 Web Services That Bring The Power Of Twitter To Your Business

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In small and large business alike, great ideas can come from the CEO all the way down to the summer intern. However, many ideas that come from the lower ranks are lost for a variety of reasons: employees do not think the idea is worth sharing, or even the higher ups would not give them the time of day. Realistically, it would be hard for any manager of a large department to be able to go through all of the ideas that his or her staff come up with. In addition, ideas generated by an employee in one department may be very useful to another department.

What the following services have done is that they saw a solution to this problem of lost ideas by using an already wildly successful service in a different arena: Twitter. Users on Twitter can follow their friends, top celebrities, and even the President of the United States to hear what they have to say. Because of Twitter’s low barrier of entry, it is possible for regular people to influence those that have power and influence, provided their tweet was interesting enough to be noticed. These next three companies had the idea to take that idea of Twitter into businesses: if CEOs had the access to their employees inner thoughts and day to day activities (without being overwhelmed), then those good ideas that start from the bottom could more easily pop up the organization chart. Here are three of those services:

Salesforce’s Chatter. I personally use this service for my business. What Salesforce has done with Chatter is create a Twitter like service that is restricted to people of the same domain, i.e. for Trifecta Tech anybody with a @trifetca-tech.com email address. The idea is that every employee has an account and instead of calling or emailing people to find out the day to day operations of my company, you instead can follow your employees on Chatter to see what they are posting about. You can create groups around a particular topic, attach files that you want to collaborate over, and use hash tags and @replies just like you see on Twitter. Chatter also offers mobile desktop apps in addition to their web interface allowing you to know what is happening at your company wherever you go. Best of all, the service is free for the basic version, and is now integrated to Salesforce‘s CRM and Saleforce’s other applications.

Yammer. A very viable Chatter alternative, Yammer pushes to be the most extensible of the corporate Twitter clients. In addition to many of the features that Chatter has, Yammer also adds the ability to add external members to your network on a limited basis. This feature can be used in many great ways such as adding independent contractors or clients into the conversation for a specific project. You can manage all of those interactions inside Yammer instead of resorting to email. Yammer has also worked to integrate itself into many services such as Google Talk, Sharepoint, and even Twitter itself. Yammer is also free for a domain specific network.

Present.ly. I have recently stumbled upon Present.ly and it is offering several new features not offered in Chatter or Yammer. You have the ability to create other kinds of networks that do not require a domain specific email address. You can add users by email invitation, or by a secret access code. Also Present.ly’s administration panel has detailed statistics and graphs about the activity on your network, and you can personalize your network by modifying the look and feel of the site. The most interesting feature is that in addition to getting a free hosted account, you can opt to download code to run your own Present.ly network with your own servers. If your business has their own servers and has a requirement to run all company services in your network, then Present.ly may be a viable option for you.

Businesses are learning from social media and are finding out that you can generate great value by accessing the ideas of people that you do not rub against on a daily basis. Maybe Twitter should get in on this sector and sell corporate versions of their software?

What do you think?

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