Jeremiah Owyang is very well respected as an analyst and has valid, thoughtful commentary on social networking for business. I’ve typically agreed with him enough not to be able to add a lot to his discussions (despite the fact that commenting on his blog might be good for business.) His recent post, List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet caused me to think about the value of tools like Yammer versus using Twitter in a more transparent way, or even using Twitters privacy control to keep things closed off. I know some things need to be internal, but I worry that Jeremiah’s post won’t motivate Enterprise organizations to see the opportunity in opening their doors a bit.

Missed Opportunity for Enterprises

Shouldn’t any Enterprise want an opportunity to create searchable discussions about their brand? Isn’t this a great brand marketing and SEO opportunity for the Enterprise? According to Oracle, who just announced the launch of “OraTweet”, their internal microblog platform, that an internal microblog platform “allows us to broadcast messages safely in our own microcosm”. To be clear, ALL businesses have the need for non-public discussions that have nothing to do with marketing.

Missed Opportunity for Twitter

So why hasn’t Twitter added deeper functionality, possibly as a paid option to Enterprises? Maybe the best bet for these organizations is to use one system for internal discussions - and Twitter for discussions that should be accessible to the public. I think there are going to be a number of organizations, and Enterprises, that can use Twitter for internal discussions in a more transparent way and gain marketing/branding value from it. But is this something Twitter cares about? It certainly raises the question about how Twitter plans to monetize.

I’ve long held that Twitter, or even microblogging as a platform has the potential to replace forums, intranets, help desk systems and more. We’ll see if this new wave of Enterprise Microblogging leads organizations to see the broad capabilities of such a platform.