Gov 2.0 in Local Government: Yammer or Twitter?

Gov 2.0 can and will effect all levels of governments and associated agencies. Over on the Headstar e-government blog there is a case study of Web 2.0 in Local Government which sparked my interest for two reasons.

Firstly and totally unrelated to the subject in hand is that it is about Brighton and Hove City Council which is where I went to school and strangely enough I was there on Wednesday with my Father and Brother watching Sussex take on the might of the Australian cricket team.  A glorious day was had by all and the Sussex team played fantastically well. (To my Australian readers that is a photo of Philip Hughes being comprehensively bowled out for 15 runs while being bathed in bright English sunlight.  Yes, both events can happen in England, it is just that neither of them happen enough for our liking)

The second point in the post was about their use of Yammer which in many ways is similar to Twitter, but with one important difference.  Whereas Twitter is open to anyone, Yammer restricts you to communicating within your own organisation (restricted by email domain eg @microsoft.com).  Instead of answering the question ‘what are you doing?’, instead you answer the question ‘What are you working on?’.

I have tried Twitter, but if I am honest its noise to relevant data ratio is just too high. Like most people over the course of a day I am monitoring multiple inputs.  Phone, SMS and Instant Messaging are pretty well 100% relevant – there is a 1:1 connection between you and the person connecting with you. 

Email is next down on the list.  Microsoft does email like no other company I know with many people having 100+ mails a day to deal with.  I would like to say that the noise to relevant data ratio is better than it is, but I do sometimes spend too much time wading through emails.

Below that are Blogs.  I subscribe to nearly 90 blogs and a fair amount of that is noise, but I also get a enough relevant data out of it to be a worthwhile investment.

Bottom of the list is Twitter.  I subscribed to it not for social reasons, nor to keep up on day to day events, but to get information relevant for my job.  I am sorry, but the noise to relevant data ratio was just to low – it was not worth my investment.  It took up too much time and gave me too little in return.

I think over time Twitter is going to settle down as more of a social service – keeping up with friends, current affairs etc.  But where people are trying to use it as part of their daily job to help team collaboration and information sharing, I don't think it works.

That is where I think Yammer or another similar service will fill that gap.  No offence, but I don't care what you are doing – I however am interested in what you are working on, what you have read that is relevant to your role, information that I can use in my daily work.

Companies and organisations will inevitably move to use social computing as part of their day to day activities, but the usage is sometimes subtly different to the use of non-commercial services and I think the assumption that tools such as Twitter and FaceBook can be used successfully in a corporate/public sector environment is wrong.