Posts Tagged ‘ Engaged Enterprise ’

Have any of you ever heard of Formspring.me?  Neither had I, until recently.  Mashable.com, the popular social media blog, recently reported that Formspring raised $10MM dollars in its second round of funding.  I mention that to demonstrate that this stuff is cutting edge.  But what is it, and why does it matter to the enterprise?

Social Inquiry Defined

At its core, Formspring is essentially a Q&A platform.  You find a friend (or stranger) ask them a question, using your name or not, and they answer it.  Some of the content is highly personal, some of it is completely superficial, but in essence it is an always-on, always-open Q&A session.  It’s the Twitter version of the traditional Q&A, and aside from being unbelievably addicting, I think it represents a next big thing in enterprise social media, both internally and externally.  (For this post I’ll focus on internal, but the opportunities are nearly as limitless outside as they are inside.)

Simplicity Drives Usage

Imagine if, with a simple search and a one sentence question, you could access the insights and thinking of practically every employee within your organization.  Imagine if you could, in a matter of moments on your Smartphone, answer a question on the company’s updated approach to manufacturing safety or its new benefits package.  For that matter, imagine you could ask the manager of supply chain in Asia how they managed to get employee buy-in to the radical changes they’ve already adopted and you’ve been banging your head against the wall to make any headway on at all.  And you could do it without spending three weeks trying to schedule a meeting.  You could do it in minutes.

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