Yammering on about Twitter as a corporate tool

Two related posts - Forbes says that European CEO's don't like Twitter, and Yammer, last year's TC50 finalist, gets $5m in funding. Re EuroTwitter:

Despite Twitter's success in the U.S., the three-year-old company's service hasn't caught on in Europe. According to Twitter's search tool, Twitter Scan, there is one account under Tesco (nasdaq: TESO - news - people ), the U.K.'s largest retailer, but it has only one outside comment so far. The same goes for financial services firm HSBC (nyse: HBC - news - people ), which has 18 followers but no status updates.

Most European companies haven't even heard of Twitter, and some might think it's a time waster. A spokeswoman for energy firm Total says that Chief Executive Christophe de Margerie has no idea what Twitter is. British Telecom says it doesn't have a Twitter account and doesn't plan to open one. Nestle's (other-otc: NSRGY.PK - news - people ) communications manager says using Twitter "just never came up within the group strategy." In general, experts say Europeans don't latch on to new social networking technologies as quickly as Americans.

"If the E.U. business community wants to have efficient conversations with customers and partners like U.S. companies have, they will get to Twitter, sooner, faster and in greater numbers," says Shel Israel, author of the forthcoming book Twitterville.

Insofar as this is actually a story rather than a bit of PR puff to raise Twitter's Europrofile and flog a few books, all it really shows is that most European CEO's (in fact most people outside the small band of the Euroblogosphere) have never heard of Twitter. Its still firmly in the Early Adopter camp in the Other Moore's law.

Notwithstanding the PR-puffy nature of the article, the Eurotwitterrati are all chirping huffily and fluffing their feathers, but the key question everyone seems to have lost sight of is this - is Twitter actually of any use for businesses anyway, or is it just the latest bit of ephemerality that corporate PR peeps should espouse to look "with it".

Which brings us to Yammer, which is essentially a Twitterclone but aimed at Enterprises rather than duking it out for consumers - who have just taken $5m in funding:

Yammer is a spinoff from genealogy site Geni, which also just received another $5 million from the same investors in a series C financing.

The Founders Fund is a $220 million seed fund whose partners are mostly former execs from PayPal, where Sacks himself was the COO.

The A round should help Yammer make more inroads into companies big and small. Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter that helps people in companies keep up with what everyone else is doing. It works especially well with far-flung employees (we use it every day at TechCrunch). But many competitors have already sprung up, including Present.ly and WizeHive. And Twitter itself could easily move into the enterprise market simply by launching a groups feature, as it has done in Japan.

Not to mention popping up your own service via identi.ca or the soon-to-be-opensourced Jaiku. So - why hand $5m over to a near pre revenue company with no discernable IPR advantage in a market with no real barriers to entry? Apart from it being being a Paypal Mafia company , is there any rational reason to do so? (After all, there is an entire book to be written on the risks of investing in the schemes of previously successful executives...)

Strangely enough, its because so few people have heard of Twitter that you would probably do it - there is clearly potentially some "there" there - despite the teething problems - with this stuff, and Twitter has not yet jumped the Enterprise chasm yet, and thus an enterprising startup could potentially do so - or at least sell themselves to some CRM behemoth in 2 - 3 years time when it wakes up (and the $5m is nearly all gone)


(And of course there is always Critter, the Microbotblog for the coming m2m revolution)