At the Socialtext blog, the company’s marketing manager Christopher Lynch says that activity stream evangelism needs a reality check, and provides some helpful ideas on how to make the case for activity streams in the enterprise.
As we’ve said before, status updates are a must-have feature for enterprise collaboration tools – and have applications far beyond collaboration. Yet some enterprises are slow to recognize the business value of this technology. Lynch blames a culture of exaggerated claims and marketing hype and recommends an alternate course for spurring activity-stream adoption.
“Even today, we still see blog posts that call for the end of e-mail or bombastic presentations that call upon companies to cast the ‘dusty’ systems of record that they invested millions on into the corner,” writes Lynch. “The phrases like ‘this is like Facebook for your company’ or the ‘why aren’t your tools at work like the ones you have home?’ are tired, old and not good enough.”
So if you want to sell your manager on an activity stream or microblogging solution, what are you supposed to do? Here are Lynch’s key points for making the case for activity streams in the enterprise:
1. Admit Activity Streams Are Another Tool (It’s OK That It Is)
2. When Done Right, Activity Streams Quell, Not Add To, Information Overload
3. You don’t have to stare at activity streams all day
4. They’re Cheaper and Easier
In the comments, Socialtext’s Luke Closs’s makes the case that simple filtering tools like Facebook’s “Hide” button are much easier to apply than most e-mail systems’ filters – another great point in the favor of status updates as a tool for managing information overload.
If you’re in the position of having to make the case for activity streams in your enterprise, the whole post is worth reading.
