Enterprise Twitter: Fad Or Tipping Point

Blogger: Mike Gotta

If you are a Burton Group client, just a reminder of the TeleBriefing available to you this week. Below are the possible topics and discussion areas we'll cover:

Business Topics

• Why are these tools relevant? What capabilities are driving interest from enterprise strategists?
• Who is the “buyer” (business and/or the IT organization)
• Solutions: general conversation and community-building vs. specific applications
• Business case, ROI, and metrics
• Legal, compliance, and security issues

Technology Topics

• Platform architecture
• SaaS and/or on-premises (appliance)
• Alignment with unified communications (e.g., instant messaging, mobile)
• Integration with existing enterprise infrastructure (e.g., identity, security)
• Integration with enterprise content management (e.g., e-Discovery, compliance)

Organizational Topics

• User experience (and the influence of Twitter)
• Cultural issues / barriers
• Behavior change and social messaging adoption
• Community & social networking dynamics

Futures

• How do these tools evolve?

TeleBriefing Description

Social messaging, sometimes referred to as micro-blogging, has become incredibly popular on the Internet, exemplified by soaring use of consumer services such as Twitter. Twitter’s growing audience has raised questions as to whether such communication models are applicable within the enterprise. Strategists are considering social messaging as a means to improve not only information sharing and collaboration but also facilitate social networking and community building. There are concerns however. How does social messaging conflict with ongoing unified communications efforts (e.g., instant messaging)? What level of security and compliance requirements are there for these tools? Join Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group, along with CEO Tim Young of Socialcast and CEO David Sacks of Yammer as they discuss all of these topics and address questions from audience participants.

Presented by: Mike Gotta, Tim Young CEO Socialcast, David Sacks CEO Yammer

Dates:

Tuesday, May 19, 2009
2:00 p.m. EDT/11:00 a.m. PDT/18:00 UTC GMT/20:00 CEST

Wednesday, May 20, 2009
9:00 a.m. EDT/6:00 a.m. PDT/13:00 UTC GMT/15:00 CEST

Comments

[Saqib Ali]

Twitter/yammer carry a number of legal implications. Users twittering/yammering from corporate networks could expose company secrets. These conversations, much like their electronic predecessors (e.g. email), are legally binding and subject to the legal rules of electronic discovery and can be subpoenaed in a lawsuit. Just like we need retention/destruction policies for email, we need the same for twitter, yammer etc.

Yammer provides the tools for destruction and retention of messages, but the cost is high - $1 per user per month. That is too steep of a price to pay.