I had a great conversation the other day with Tim Young, CEO and Founder of Socialcast about Enterprise 2.0. During the conversation Tim talked about, what he calls, invisible and visible conversations. Invisible conversations are water cooler conversations, the conversations in our heads, the conversations that aren’t traditionally visible to an organization. I really liked the way he described it. I think there is value in capturing the invisible conversation.
We use Yammer at my company. Yammer, like Socialcast is a micro-blogging tool for the enterprise, similar to Twitter. About month ago, I Yammered about heading to NYC for a partner meeting. Before I got into the meeting, I had 3 replies asking if I needed anything and offering help. At the end of the meeting I Yammered the outcome as I was getting on a plane home. When I landed, there were 4 replies to my Yammer. The V.P. of product, and a cast of supporting folks had read my Yammer and had started developing the response and the strategy I needed to respond to the partner. It was amazing! Traditionally, it would have taken me several hours in calls and emails, with days of planning to collect the appropriate players, and formulate a response. By capturing the invisible conversation it was done in hours, on it’s own.
Yammer, Socialcast and other Enterprise 2.0 applications capture the invisible. Conversations that once occurred in our heads, with friends during casual phone calls, or while walking through a convention hall are now becoming visible and this visibility has value.
Enterprise 2.0 and tools such as Socialcast and Yammer put new information on the table. They flush out information normally hidden deep within our networks and casual conversations and allow companies to capitalize on that knowledge base. They speed the flow of information and allow for faster decision making. They can make companies more agile.
Agile companies that make better decisions perform better and performance is something you can measure. Can you capture the invisible? If you can’t, you should. There is value in it.
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