Where I Shamelessly Plug Signals

Alright…. before I get a bunch of hate mail – you all know I don’t normally plug anything here, I make a conscious effort to restrict the conversation to best practices and my experiences working with customers. It wasn’t an easy decision to blog about Signals, but I’m literally so excited about it that I don’t think I can possibly do anything BUT blog.

“What’s so amazing about Signals – it’s just internal Twitter, right?”
Well, yes – and, no. The reason I’m SO excited about it is that in the real world use cases that we’re seeing at Socialtext, Signals is actually (not just theoretically!) revolutionizing the way that our customers work. Holy smokes. Allow me to digress.

I would posit that the value proposition for external discussion forums (capture the conversation yourself, control the dialogue) is diminishing daily in viability, namely because the nature of online social interaction is moving away from visiting a corporate web-page to engage in their discussion forums…that’s soooo 2007! Instead, the world is shifting to a model where folks go to Twitter and comment on their experiences with everything from praise for their local florist to arcane technical questions. We filter our attention stream so that as people interested in those things we’re kept up to date. One place online for all those conversations to happen, and all kinds of aggregation and attention stream options to make it your own. As you’re no doubt aware if you are active in this realm, loads of brands are leveraging Twitter for marketing efforts as well as engaging both evangelists and unhappy customers in a public dialogue. Signals allows you to seamlessly incorporate social tags from Twitter into your Signals environment. Obviously this has impact across the organization – from Marketing to Executives to Sales to Support… and allows you to internally network with the right resources before responding officially. In real time. Um, yeah – that’s what I’m talking about!

Ok, so that’s cool – but obviously we’re talking about more than just that one use-case here. The internal use case for discussion forums has always been engage the wider audience of people, maybe cross-functional who might have an answer to your question. Well, that argument is not dead yet, but guess what? It will be once Signals gets wider adoption and better market understanding for just how flexible and powerful it really is. Instead of having to navigate to a section of the site where it might be a good place to post a question (or might not) and hoping for the best, we’re seeing discussions, updates, activities, announcements, questions happening across groups or the whole organization in real-time in a non invasive way, getting real-time responses, available in a sweet Adobe Air desktop client that includes all of the context of your collaboration space, people, content, activities to boot…. it just doesn’t get much cooler, easier to use and adopt, or sexier. Seriously.

I can tell you that after less than a week with Socialtext, I’m absolutely convinced that this technology IS the future of internal and partner/B2B collaboration. We aren’t playing Ent. 2.0 catchup here, folks. We’re developing truly innovative applications that change the frame of reference around collaboration, that work with you to make what you do easier, better, smarter, faster. Did I mention I was pumped?

Edit: if you’re interested in learning more in the frame of a Socialtext customer’s use of signals, check out: http://www.socialtext.com/customers/casestudy_davies.php