How Activity Streams Can Improve Your Business?

Article Written By: LonelyPen

For those of you unfamiliar with Facebook, the news feed is the hub of your social world. It's a list of all of the notifications for status updates or microblogs, likes and dislikes links, audio, video, and images that have been published by a group of users. Activity streams are actually social news tickers that keep you apprised of everything your friends, colleagues, or acquaintances are up to. Until now activity streams have been used for primarily non work related social uses. However, more and more companies are beginning to realize what a strong business tool activity streams can be.

An example of one way that a social activity stream can be used for business purposes is that the members of a team can all friend or subscribe to each other's activity streams. This will give them real-time access to ongoing conversations and information that is relevant to the whole team. This is much easier than forwarding long chains of mass emails. It's also searchable and you can filter out all of the unwanted noise so that you only have to take in the information that you care about.

Since updates are instantaneous you don't have to wait until the right people get around to sending out an email that you may or may not be included on. Since you're subscribing to the activity stream you get the information automatically and in real time. You can even customize how you receive notifications that a new post has been published. You can setup notifications based on various criteria such as the subscriber or group publishing the post, if the post contains specific keywords, or even if the post contains specific attachment types.

Activity streams also give subscribers the ability to "tag" and "like" items from other subscribers. To "tag" or "like" something is to mark a specific item of interest so that all of the subscribers to your activity stream are notified of something that is important to you and could possibly be important to them as well. For example, if a new report on this quarter's sales figures is published by one of your "friends" in another department, but the rest of your team aren't "friends" with the publisher then you can "tag" the item or you can "like" it so that the rest of your team will have access to the resource as well.

This helps to spread valuable information throughout the organization much quicker than forwarding an email 100 times and clogging up the mail servers with copies of attachments. The resource is published only once and the subscribers who wish to consume this resource can go to that location and obtain their copy of the resource if they so choose.

Activity streams are fairly new to the business world, but they are catching on like wildfire. Users can subscribe to the news feeds that they are particularly interested in to obtain the specific information that they need. This is great for events that may occur in an organization where users wish to be updated in an automatic fashion without having to process and wade through a ton of email.

The news feeds are also searchable and users have the ability to filter them. This gives subscribers the ability to narrow the scope of the information flow in order to tailor it to fit their specific needs. Pretty soon activity streams will be as common a business tool as the cell phone or email. It's a new world and it'll be easier to navigate if you go ahead and get on board at the beginning.

About the Author

For Jon Harwokey and his team, business social networking is a necessity. As microblogging is one of his primary sources of information at the software company he works for, it allows him to be instantly notified when new updates are published that contain important information.

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This Article Has Been Published on Fri, 24 Sep 2010 and Read 290 Times

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