There are plenty of tools out there that promise to offer a way for organizations to keep all of their team members on the same page. They usually center around giving team members a simple way to offer updates on their status that inform the rest of the organization of progress, ask questions and provide necessary information.
In fact, such a purpose was the genesis of Twitter: in early 2006, Odeo developed Twitter as an internal communications tool. Twitter has since outgrown that purpose, but many other business-focused tools have become available.
Enterprise Updates
Tools like Yammer or Qvaq tend to focus on asynchronous conversations. Rather than providing real-time collaboration (which can be difficult when you’ve got team members in different time zones), these tools concentrate on giving your team a way to leave messages and review others’ comments as it’s convenient. The specifics of how that works out vary: Yammer creates a microblogging environment not unlike Twitter, forcing your team to keep updates short and to the point. In contrast, Qvaq is more conversation-oriented. The choice of which type of tool to use is more a matter of style. Depending on how you prefer your team communicate and even how much time they spend on it, one may be a appear better option. However, there are other factors that make certain tools stand out.
Control of the Conversation
If you work in marketing, you’ve likely heard that you can’t control the conversation — that your audience will say what it wants, when it wants and where it wants. But that’s only true of external conversations — whenever the conversation is an internal matter, it’s not only possible to control it, it’s necessary to do so. Unless your organization is willing to practice some sort of radical transparency, you’ll need to keep internal communications centralized and private. That means choosing a tool that you can control. An example of a tool that provides a great deal of control is Status.net, which you can install on your own servers, behind your firewall. Other tools require less effort on the part of IT staff, while offering different levels of privacy.
Other considerations include whether or not you need your team to keep updates to a minimum. With productivity concerns about something as prevalent as leaving one’s email inbox open, the questions that creating what amounts to an internal social network can mean that your team members have something other than work to spend their time on. It’s something worth taking into account before choosing a new tool.
What considerations do you take into account before choosing a discussion tool?
Image by Flickr user 13stock, licensed under CC 2.0
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub. req.):

{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2010\/10\/12\/discussion-tools-the-options-for-enterprise\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_cadd792ef098efbf4ffc2d435fdf9b5e","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}