What is microblogging?

Microblogging is a form of blogging that allows users to send brief messages or updates (upto 140 characters) to communicate with a group of people.

A quick microblog gives users a way to learn about what their friends and colleagues are doing - "right now". The "right now" aspect of this new form of blogging plays a big role in increasing interactivity between users. The 140 character limit enables you to get to the point of your message quickly and in a succinct way.

Microblogging works as an easy-to-use communications instrument to solve daily problems, swap ideas, assign tasks, ask questions and keep each other up-to-date. It works as another channel for keeping people in the loop about day-to-day stuff.

Twitter is the most popular public microblogging tool along with other service providers like Yammer.

Use of microblogging in the Enterprise

"I am on my way to meet the purchase head at Acme Steel" Imagine if you had to phone 500 people from your organization prior to the meeting, to know if anyone has worked with him before!

Microblogging creates a broadcast type of a communication channel keeping you up to date with all the details on who's been where, done what and why etc. It enables to create a context around your colleagues making you aware of daily developments in your organization as they happen.

So with a microblogging tool, you would just type out the above message and it would be sent across to everyone in the organization. Anyone with useful feedback can reply back instantly. The immediacy and informal nature of the medium is the key here.

Apart from keeping all employees in sync and creating transparency towards business activity, the power of microblogging can be leveraged to:

• Talk to customers and partners
• Collaborate with colleagues around projects
• Document discussions and decisions
• Documented contextaul feedback on the micro-information - that normally get lost in email chains
• Build and support a creative and innovative environment
  

Microblogging with cyn.in Desktop

cyn.in brings microblogging to the desktop for enterprises as a two-way communication channel. First the activity stream of cyn.in constantly flows the recent happenings on the site to your desktop, notifying and updating you based on your access rights. Second, it gives members a great way to start, jump in and participate in conversations sparked by the statuses posted by colleagues or topics they may have raised to solve their problems.

Several businesses are using the cyn.in desktop to keep employees and key stake holders aware of the business activity along with building an innovative environment.The key advantage that cyn.in provides over public microblogging services is that the conversations are focused on the organizational work happening inside the cyn.in environment and not chaotic.

cyn.in desktop enables knowledge workers to perform three major activities to increase business productivity:

• one-to-one conversations
• collaborations around content/projects and
• notifications about changed information

Some of the key benefits that can be derived from the cyn.in desktop are:

Instant Collaboration

• Ask a question, post your status right on your PC or MAC with a single click
• Start a discussion on content available in the cyn.in site. Have threaded conversations that remain persistent creating context to the content.
  
• Reply back to user statuses and manage people's tasks making it useful for general project management

Presence

• Get notified about colleagues who are traveling or not available
• Knowledge of the user's availability enables faster decisions like escalating customer queries

Stay productive anywhere

• Get notifications of all activities in the cyn.in site, in the office, at a customer site, on the road, and from home
• Keep your team members and yourself up to date with your status and content you've been working on the cyn.in site
• Debrief projects - Shorten review cycles
  

Knowledge Management

• Discussions on updates and statuses act as structured documentation of how and why a decision was taken
• Search for content in cyn.in right on your desktop - find snippets of information that would've been beyond reach; within seconds

TimeLog

• A river of knowledge snippets flowing throughout the day create a log of events indicating when new content was added, modified or updated in the cyn.in site
• The timelog of activities can also double as the billable hours at the end of the business day.

Information Dissemination

• cyn.in desktop as a channel to send out news to the entire organization rapidly.
• Distribute marketing messages internally in a concise format
• Remind all users about an upcoming event

The cyn.in desktop is a rich internet application (RIA) built on Adobe AIR empowering the engaging user-experience delivered right on your desktop. It works on the MAC, Linux and Windows.

To know more about how cyn.in can help your organization, set up a meeting now.