With all the hullabaloo around Social media Marketing and its ROI. A facet of this paradigm shift in communication tools is being ignored. I am talking about microbloging tools for internal knowledge sharing, no not just twitter. In-fact not twitter at all.
The paradigm of communication, where “whats on ur mind” or “what are u working on” or “what do u need help with”, can be made self evident to a whole legion on individuals who are empathetic towards you, is simply amazing. (if your employees are not empathetic to each others needs, then you have a bigger problem at hand.)

Having worked in knowledge based industries like software development and Automotive design, I realize the importance of being able to ask for help passively and receive it at the right time. All those who have gone through the onerous process of post -project harvest meetings, must share my pain? You must have questioned the fact – will anyone ever be able to reach this document that I am creating ?. The motive behind these Knowledge management practices was noble. But was it accomplished ? Were we ever able to leverage the past experience of another employee sitting at another campus ?

This is where tools like Yammer, status.net (open source) , Identi.ca (based on status.net) come in the picture. Here are more if u want to explore. Say for instance, your organization is in a closed microbloging environment like Yammer , i.e. all ur yams (tweets) are only visible to people within your organization. Now you wanted to know if there is there is anyone in the organization who has implemented a open source CRM tool. Will you send out an email to everyone ? Will you rummage through a repository of harvested projects ? I would rather just Yam “hey, working on an open source CRM project. need help!” . And I guess within , even the largest of organizations- your degrees of separation from the right person would not b more than 2. ( yes I know I need to substantiate wild claims. But it seems sensible enough.)

To really substantiate these ideas I would love to talk to an organization that might have implemented internal micro-bloging tools. let me know if you know of one, either in the comments or @gagantweet (twitter).

The web has always been hailed as the great leveler, as it allows equal access to information. But information has greater relevance if available at the right place and the right time. Shortening this gap between information-need and answers is the goal of  search tools, which fall into the following categories:

Search Engines: It all started with Archie Veronica and Jughead in the pre-web days, reaching their present form in Google, Bing and ask. Their basic function being the ability to crawl, index and search the web. In other words a an “algorithm” decides what matches our queries and presents the results.

Decision engine (specialty search or activity based search): Although Bing would want to call itself a decision engine, the real decision engines are, specialty search sites like expedia, priceline or amazon. A user goes to these sites to to make a decision or perform a certain task. The UI is designed for specific interactions, as against a generic interaction paradigm in the case popular search engines.

Knowledge engines: Websites like Wolfram Alpha, can provide complex answers to knowledge based questions , instead of just links  to website.

Social engine / Help engine: Real time help engines like Vaark , malaho and Yahoo anwers take search to the next level. Instead of connecting people to information, they connect people with others who have knowledge about the subject. This is more true about serveries like aardVark which gather information on people’s expertise and learn with time.

This is not to say that the relevance of search engines is less, but now their role has been restricted to stuff that is not real time and information that we expect to be common enough to be documented somewhere. But as social engines learn and build on accumulated interactions, the paradigm for searching information would surely change.  People would have the choice to ask real people or ask a web repository.

Where would Wikipedia fit ? Would it be an answer engine or a social engine ?

oh its her again. reply or not, Its a mess, either ways . why the hell did I leave my gtalk status online !

…unwanted chat pings, feeling awkward while closing a conversation, don’t know if ur reply will be missed as they log out.

Well that is what i call the transactional mental burden of an IM (gtalk, yahoo cha, AOL messenger ).
DM (direct messaging) on microblogs (twitter, identi.ca, yammer..) wins on all counts- no one will ever “miss” a direct messages, they have their own repository, there is no urgency in replying ( a real emergency would warrant a phone call not an IM or a DM) and I can remain in my zone away from the unwanted pings.

On top of it I am not tied to the chat client – I can access my microblogger from websites, browser apps, desktop apps and even over the phone. None of it is a push, i.e. microblog when I like, where I like.For an added plus – everyone in the twitter stream is a contact I can chat with ! I dont need to search for their email addreses to add them to the chat client !

So here is what DM’s trum IM’s in :
1) location / device independence
2) response time flexibility
3) scalable friends list
Though I think spam is till an issue with DM’s but Its is much less embarrassing than the unwanted pop-up at the wrong time!

And if you really really need to talk to me call me .

Have you switched to a DM only mode yet ?