Microblogging efforts that are inside company walls, such as ESME, could have a better chance of success than utilizing online tools that cause employees to venture outside the firewall in order to collaborate, Yehuda adds.

"If employees are establishing their own social network externally, that's actually a risk," he says. "It may not be a bad thing, but it's risky, and if companies don't give their employees the ability to network internally, that's just what they'll do."

Resource Library:

Companies that haven't yet explored enterprise social networking would do well to look at initiatives like ESME, IBM's Beehive, and Oracle's OraTweet to understand how employees can link together, and to outside vendors and clients as well.

"Smart business managers are seeing that they can have an internal Twitter conversation, and they're talking to IT development folks to make it happen," says Michael Gartenberg, Vice President at Jupitermedia. "This direction is the kind of rich enterprise technology that we've dreamed about, where Web 2.0 tools can be adapted to the business."

In addition to linking peers and clients, applications like ESME help to streamline operations by speeding up problem solving, an issue that consumes about 80 percent of knowledge workers' time, Howlett says.