Channel management (of the communication variety, not the sales/transaction sort) is becoming increasingly difficult for businesses. As consumers adopt new tools (and as tools mature and become more advanced), their expectations of brands grow. We want our MTV, and we want it via RSS, SMS, QR code, through Twitter, and, well, you get the picture.
What needs to happen is a crossing of communication streams (a la Ghostbusters) to produce a more powerful solution, one that informs customer service departments, product teams, and the monitoring arm of the marketing department. Can Talkwheel do that?
About four years ago I was with a software development company. We had around 50 employees spread over two floors of a sprawling office building. As busy tech-y people will do, we used several software platforms to keep the myriad of project managers, developers, product owners, and designers running in synch. We were the original App Store, I tell you. Some client info resided with our proprietary time tracking system. Other info lived within our project management system. There was also company email and IM. Near the end of my tenure some of us adopted Yammer, but it didn't really take off. Social media was still scary stuff (for my boss).
Fast forward through the mainstreaming of social media to Twitter and Facebook, the white-hot YouTube explosion, and the mercurial mayorships of the Foursquare ilk. We've experienced information overload in our personal and professional lives. You want info, you got terrabytes of it. Mostly in disparate places, though. Messages - standard internal email, customer service form submittals, press inquiries, vendor solicitations, logistics updates - abound, richocheting around the four corners of the office, warehouse, retail store, and outside salesman's Avis budget rental. Tablets and rugged handhelds are surfacing as yet additional tools enabling the creation even more information, delivered faster.
All this knowledge only serves to tangle us up if the proper information systems, taxonomy and accessibility isn't baked in.
Spokes Without a Hub
Separate lines of communication can be hard to maintain, and harder to scale. By function of the channels, they remain independent (email serves one purpose, Twitter another), not part of a collective body of resources. No way to clearly see downstream connections or dissemination. In real-time business, communication silos (which often happen to be data silos, as part of a larger CRM) can cripple. Breakdowns can lead to loss of time, reputation, and money.
Today some enterprise-level solutions exist in Yammer (different from the version I trialed way back when) and Salesforce. While I haven't used either in their current release form (and cannot speak to pros or cons), a new alternative has emerged with San Francisco-based startup Talkwheel. Talkwheel (group discussion platform) team member Patrick Randolph gave me a high-level overview earlier this week, and I was definitely intrigued.
Conversation Visualization
Visual learner that I am, the notion of using images to express complex relationships and ideas gets two thumbs up, right off the bat. And as I understand from Patrick, the premise of Talkwheel is to map messages (conversations) from disparate internal and external systems into categorized groups, permit the application of filters (like permissions, workflows), and centralize the information along with related documents (PDFs, spreadsheets, etc.). Voila! Enterprise users then have a command center with threaded messages, RSS feeds, tweets, and the like. Future iterations of the software are supposed to have sentiment analysis and intense analytics. With this kind of information display, there are fewer chances for the "squeaky wheel" to drown out a valid albeit possibly less vociferous customer inquiry.
Contiguous Conversation Flow
I look forward to learning more about Talkwheel as the platform matures. Their spanking-new partnership with ZeroDesktop (content unification in the cloud) could up the ante. As for my firsthand knowledge of the platform, I think the demo could have been a little more fluid, and I would have liked to have seen (or played with) a functioning working model over the partially built-out model containing mock conversations. But I think I'll have a chance to create an account in the next few days and try things out. There's great potential there, although I think the road is steep in terms of mass adoption.
From a marketer's perspective, I long for simple, clear infographic-based sales support to create a compelling case for adopting the platform (we all know new tools can sometimes take an act of Congress for the bespeckled guys in IT to allow under the firewall). This is a case for "Show me" not "Tell me." Talkwheel's "Why use" page has some good support language, but I think the visitor has to work too hard to connect the dots and translate benefits to their real-world communications problems. After all, we kind of just accept the fact that corporate email is separate from twitter mentions. Talkwheel needs to help prospects understand how the platform can actually enable faster, more informed discussions and knowledge-sharing.
Have you tried Yammer, Salesforce or Talkwheel? What do you think? Do any of the platforms reframe the way your company receives, shares, and stores critical messages? Or do you see this as another unnecessary social media tool?