Jim Storer had the line of the morning at Social Media Breakfast 5, held this past Wednesday, February 13, at the S & S Restaurant in Cambridge, when he referred to microblogging as the “gateway drug to social media.”

And he’s right.

Think of the people you’ve spoken with or trained for whom traditional blogging seemed daunting: Three posts or more a week? How will I keep coming up with new material? Do *I* have to write every post, or can I get some help?

But now, what if you told those same people that they could take some baby steps to blogging by trying microblogging first? Instead of 300 words, how about 140 characters? Instead of several paragraphs, how about a couple of sentences? Well, now, that sounds much easier. And it is.

As we heard at the breakfast, a microblogging tool like Twitter also has the potential to open new users’ eyes to the power of online social networks, keep them informed, and bring in business. Heck, it might just “change their lives.”

Sounds like the perfect way to hook your clients onto social media.

Microblogging for small groups and the enterprise
Jim hinted that his company, Mzinga (full disclosure: I do some podcast production and consulting for Mzinga), would soon be offering microblogging as one its enterprise products for clients, and whispers have also been heard that Twitter itself might be testing out white-label solutions for businesses.

Imagine a Twitter-like application for internal applications behind a company’s firewall. In 140-character bursts, co-workers can share links, post quick updates on their projects, and even show off a bit of their personality.

In my day job at Monster, for example, I’m testing out the WordPress’s new Prologue theme, which layers a Twitter-like application over a basic blog. The theme allows for easy tagging and date archiving, so we can quickly begin to build a digital repository of our collective work. I’m hope it catches on.

To see two public examples of Prologue in action, check out the pages from a group of law.librarians and a Youth Twitter class.

(Photo from Flickr stream of davefishernc)

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