TamTamy Blog

After talking about Blellow, it is right to mention another microblogging service meant for business, but in this case addressed mainly to companies and organizations: Yammer.

Awarded by Techcrunch as best start-up of 2008, Yammer is very similar to Twitter, but with a different mission and a more structured business model.

Just like its predecessor and, even more, like the microblog we presented yesterday, the mechanism is still based on the frequency of updates by the users who, in this case, answer the question “What are you working on?”.

When a new user answers the question, a feed is created that is passed on to the colleagues who are subscribers, with whom it is possible to exchange opinions and answer problems using the usual system that we all know by now thanks to Twitter.

For every profile it is possible to insert information and details on your professional carrier, the projects you are working on, telephone contacts, etc.
In a way, Yammer replaces the company’s intranet and is similar to a wiki for problem solving or to have an easier communication, when it is not possible to use tools such as Skype, where the communication is not addressed to everybody but rather to a limited number of people, chosen by the user.

Paying a further monthly fee of $1 for every employee, the companies which have decided to adopt it can use a series of extra services such as the control of users, the cancellation of subscriptions and messages, the inclusion of the company’s brand, and above all the creation of a network reserved only to the employees through the authorization of specific IP addresses. This is exactly what the business model of social networks (designed by the same creators of Geni) is based upon, which would otherwise be completely free and with no income.

Yammer is available also as widget desktop and for iPhone and the more popular Blackberry, at least in the Italian business world. Its success is decreasing compared to when it was launched, when a lot of companies took part at once, reaching the number of 2.000 organizations and more than 10.000 users, but it is still quite a populous community.

A new social network for the business world has just been created. It is Blellow, a microblogging system similar to Twitter which, instead of asking its users the general question “What are you doing?”, asks “What are you working on?”

Although it is addressed mainly to freelancers, Blellow can easily be used also by companies. Its objective is to help people solve problems connected to their work with the collaboration of other users.

Through the creation of groups or, even better, by navigating in them or in the social network in general, companies can use the database of professionals it contains for recruiting.
It is a system that, in a way, is similar to the valid and reliable LinkedIn which is now, in my opinion, still one of the most useful and effective networks for business.

Together with this, just as it happens on Twitter, Blellow is used as a support when you have a problem working on a project. The number of users in the community can answer and help anybody who has already build his or her own network of contacts.

Finally, it is possible to post jobs, that is, create a sort of announcement with an optional sum offered, as in this case.
As I said at the beginning of this post, the service is mainly addressed to freelancers and, consequently, the kind of collaborations required usually refers to temporary or occasional jobs and not to open-ended hiring, also because this would change the essence of the project.
Blellow is not meant to be simply a site for job announcements, such as Monster, but rather it is a way to establish a network of professional contacts to interact with or rely on.

But still, once a certain harmony has been created with one or more contacts and their skills have been proved, companies can decide to establish with them a more durable relationship.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the discipline that analyzes and measures social relations and flows among groups of people, individuals, enterprises, web services and anything where an exchange of information takes place.

In a graphical visualization, social networks are all the relationships made up of knots that represent people and groups, and lines that represent the interactions between them. These maps are thus called sociograms.

SNA is a relatively recent discipline that was first applied in sociological and anthropological sciences, as well as in psychology and economics. Even if it was born and developed in universities, it is today applied also in business in order to better understand different, quite interesting aspects which would hardly emerge otherwise.

Companies can get several benefits if they use work tools for Social Network Analysis. When a company decides to make a merger or a joint venture, it can be an effective support and facilitate the settling that follows an aggregation. In general, it is widely used in organizational restructurings with other partners, but not only. An analysis of the internal dynamics of a structure can in fact greatly facilitate work, better understand the connections among people and departments and help their flows.

Through the study of sociograms, company analysts can find answers to questions that, even if they seem banal, are often exposed to mistaken judgements based on prejudice.
Some of the information that emerges from such diagrams certainly concerns the relations among people, but also the composition of groups: who possesses a higher number of contacts in an organization or a network, how the subgroups are divided, how many units belong to a network, what the relationship between managers is and in which ways and how often the exchanges among them happen.

The potentialities of the tools that highlight SNAs are clear, and the results that emerge can be very important for the success of a company in the financial market, independent of the sector.

As Laurence Lock Lee, one of the most important Australian experts of Social Network Analysis for organization development, explained in an interview, the work tools aimed at SNA are several: in the commercial field there are, among others, Inflow and NetMiner, in the academic sector the most popular are Netdraw and Pajek. An interesting solution is offered by Condor View, which Lock Lee describes as “a tool based on the digital data available on intranets”.

This presentation shows very simply and clearly the fundamental aspects that characterize the new companies and how they are different from the previous model. In few words, what enterprise 2.0 is.

As we have already seen, the elimination of geographical barriers, seen as a complete freedom to collaborate together on a project also from different continents, is one of the aspects that have revolutionized the way people work in 2.0 companies.
Similarly, also wikis and the correct use of tags, of RSS feeds and of bookmarks are reproposed in these slides, and their importance is underlined once more adding an elements which we have not talked about yet, but which we are soon going to discuss: the use of podcasts.

Finally, among the other aspects highlighted, a very significant one is the value added that every single employee can use to his or her advantage working in a company based on enterprise 2.0. A good knowledge in information technology and the “social” opening towards the outside world through 2.0 channels such as social media and communities become part of the know-how of everybody, who will at the same time enrich himself and the company he works for.

Carrying out an action of marketing in a 2.0 environment requires a different approach from traditional marketing. The company which decides to change its structure, its IT tools, the way its employees work, besides working on the message itself, must also be ready to find a strategy on how to let the change be seen and spread outside.

The key points in a good 2.0 communication addressed to customers are basically five:

1. Use a Corporate Blog
We have already seen in detail what a corporate blog is and how companies can use it to their own advantage. Besides starting from the comments made directly by the people on how to improve the quality of the products, when companies build a common ground between themselves and their consumers they show a side of their “personality” that had remained hidden up to now. Personality, thus, in the sense of showing a human side made up of many people, and no longer only a brand.

2. Create a flow of information exchange
Just as companies learn from the consumers, who will punctually speak out through the posts they create on a specific brand, the comments, the links, etc., also the consumers can learn to trust the company and welcome important information they receive personally.

3. Create your own audience
Reaching all categories of consumers is highly improbable according to any kind of marketing plan, and companies themselves are very unlikely to even take it into account. What they will have to learn is getting popular online and offline, becoming a reference point for an audience of faithful listeners that is more limited but much more devoted to the brand.

4. Involve the audience interested
As we saw in the previous posts, the communication between consumers and company must be biunique. The dialogue must be open and companies will have to devote some time to talking with their customers and actively answer their questions, doubts or comments, raising further questions in their turn. When the audience feel committed and properly involved in a structure – be it even a simple corporate blog or a wiki – they will want to take part at more levels: simply adding the blog to their feeds, participating in the forums, or collaborating more concretely.

5. Be excellent and, above all, present communicators
Public relations on the Internet must be cultivated with all the tricks we are analyzing day by day in this blog. The presence of companies on the net must be widespread. The vaster their presence on social media, applications and communities, the stronger the viral effect that will follow.

Summing up, we can say that the empathy between companies and consumers is a basic factor that cannot be built only in part. When the division between “We are” and “You are” gets thinner, in that precise moment the user will stop being a simple observer and become a devoted customer.