Social media is not only a time waster for your 15 year old, it can also be a tool to enhance the effectiveness of your organization.  With the inspiration of Twitter, the microblog platform can offer most organizations a tool to collaborate, share accomplishments and reduce the time and money spent on R&D.  As a scientist, engineer, technician or manager tackles an innovation project they begin to learn.  They learn through studying publications, through studying textbooks, through experimentation, through convestations with others in the field, through making purchases and through brainstorming sessions with subject matter experts.  The learnings can be highly technical or simple market facts.  Regardless of what is learned, the learning itself is a necessary step for the organization to succefully innovate and penetrate their target market. The more people in the organization the greater the need to share learnings.  This is typically done through periodic reporting to the supervisor and sometimes through collaboration meetings

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I can see an opportunity for individuals in an organization to teach others via a twitter like microblog internal to each organization.  Perhaps call it a Learning Blog or a Teaching Blog, whatever it is named, the learning blog application holds the potential to reduce money spent on learning by much faster organization-wide teaching and learning.  Yammer is one such tool that can be used for this, microsoft recently purchased Yammer and pland to incoporate this concept into their operating platform.

The R&D learning blog (if used!) can reduce siloed learning that is so common in large organizations.  Incentives may be necessary to kick start participation.