My friend and col­league, Matthew Hodg­son, has sug­gested I was being timid in my last post for not delv­ing into the busi­ness alter­na­tives to Twit­ter for those times pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion may not be appro­pri­ate. Not at all, my friend. Sim­ply some­thing I wasn’t delv­ing into in that post. I think Matthew’s being delib­er­ately chal­leng­ing. That’s good. I’ll be inter­ested to see the out­comes for the client work he’s doing where risk assess­ments along these lines are being conducted..

I think for a num­ber of busi­ness con­ver­sa­tions, Twit­ter isn’t appro­pri­ate. I’d be delighted if lots of busi­nesses jumped on the Clue­train and became rad­i­cally trans­par­ent. But we know that’s not quite real­ity yet.

I’m pretty cer­tain Matthew agrees. There are, how­ever, many busi­ness con­ver­sa­tions that can be con­ducted some­where like Twitter.

For those con­ver­sa­tions not appro­pri­ate for Twit­ter, tools like Lacon­ica or Yam­mer that let you estab­lish your own Twit­ter equiv­a­lent inside the wall (or hosted but closed access) facil­i­tate those con­ver­sa­tions in the same light, fast man­ner, but prop­erly mit­i­gate against some of the atten­dant risk. Com­pa­nies like IBM, Get­Sat­is­fac­tion, SlideShare and Janssen-​​Cilag are already doing this, as well as oth­ers. It’s sim­ply an evo­lu­tion from inter­nal IM use (an evo­lu­tion­ary step many Aus­tralian busi­ne­ses are yet to take…).

It’s a mat­ter of choos­ing the appro­pri­ate tool and chan­nel. Enter­prise 2.0 and cor­po­rate social tool use is a Pandora’s Box if not han­dled prop­erly and the risks iden­ti­fied, addressed and mit­i­gated — which is what Matthew is say­ing in his port and is what I say to every client that I have this con­ver­sa­tion with.