Utterz: A New Social Tool With Business Possibilities
January 10, 2008 · Print This Article
Last night I was once again treated to a great great show from Jonny Goldstein. His guests last night were Chris Parandian of mobilediner.com and Sim from Utterz. Chris gave some great insights on the happenings on the mobile space over the past year and where he sees it heading in 2008. We are looking for more open platforms and a more seamless experience between mobile and the web.
The rest of the discussion revolved around Utterz and its recent rise. I have signed up for Utterz, but have not used it yet, although I do see the draw and the possibilities for it. Twitter has become our micro blogging text tool and Utterz could very well become the audio equivalent. While it seems to be a social tool now, as the conversation progressed I started to realize some other possibilities for Utterz. There are definite business uses for this tool. Imagine the following:
- A weekly sales goal utterz
- A weekly status utterz
- A corporate message utterz
- and so on …
These days, people and the teams they work with are scattered around the world doing business. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to use Utterz to reach them. That way, through RSS, they don’t have to come get the message, it goes to them.
The other day, I touched on the possibilities of using Twitter as a disaster communications tool. Utterz could perform in the same fashion. Remember those “This is a test” things on the TV ? In the event of an emergency, those would notify us of what was going on. As our networks between mobile and legacy become more and more seamless, as Chris mentioned, we will have more and more data pushed to us. We are spending more and more time shifting our habits of media consumption. Tivo has changed our TV viewing. So if we are never watching “live” tv, we need something different and a tool like Utterz could fill that void. Literally, it could become a “quasi” emergency broadcasting system, pushing those important emergency details out to us in a timely manner to our mobile platforms or wherever to we may be.
Just a thought. Great work again Jonny, and thanks to the guests Chris and Sim for some terrific insights.
Great post and thanks for tuning in last night.
Best, Chris
Thanks for your thoughts Jimmy. I agree that Utterz would be a great internal biz communications tool. The audio utters can be private also, so it’s just kept among the team.
As for emergency broadcasting—That sounds interesting too. When radio goes down, does cell phone communication usually stay up?
Good thoughts…got me thinking. I haven’t dug too deep into Utterz yet, but regarding “utterz for business,” maybe a way to monetize the site would be to enable companies to create private “channels” where employees, from the executive on down, record their messages that can be streamed by the employee pool at any time. A way to keep the whole company in the loop about what’s going on.
[…] UPDATE: Jimmy Gardner previously posted this regarding business and disaster uses for Utterz…and I commented on it! I need a nap. […]