More social tools vie for your attention

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Facebook is getting a lot of love from Facebook wannabes. But the difference is these upstarts want to be the social collaboration tool you'll be using for your next projects.

Just this month two companies, Yammer and MangoSpring, launched new versions of their social collaboration platforms for businesses. The tools offer great potential for marketing projects, especially if teams are scattered across the globe.

Yammer was launched in 2008 as a microblogging platform for businesses. Its revamp makes it look a lot like Facebook. Meanwhile, MangoSpring's website explicitly says it's "Like Facebook ... but designed to get work done." The two companies compete with Salesforce Chatter, a social collaboration tool from the well-known enterprise cloud company. Dell's sales and marketing departments just deployed Chatter. Salesforce launched Chatter 2 this month.

I used Yammer at my previous employer, a midsize company with staff scattered around the country. It was a good tool to post inane chatter, but it never really took off. We were already heavy users of instant messaging and, of course, email, so Yammer was a new toy that we never fully embraced.

Yammer now describes itself as a full-fledged enterprise social network. You can create polls to tap the wisdom of your colleagues, and find answers in a searchable knowledgebase. You can invite coworkers to company or group events, and share Web content in your status updates. Like Facebook, you can view who's online. Yammer is also working with other developers to create applications on top of Yammer. For instance, there will be a Lithium application that enables employees to share and discuss feedback from brand influencers and customer conversations taking place on the Lithium platform.

Meanwhile MangoSpring's updated MangoApps offers microstreams, instant messaging, and presence. MangoSpring says it has "deep" integration with third-party apps. Integration with Google Apps allow for automatic sync from the desktop and two-way integration with email. MangoSpring is pretty aggressive in its marketing, saying that it's currently 33 percent cheaper than Yammer and almost 90 percent cheaper than Salesforce Chatter.

Salesforce says Chatter 2 includes filters to enable workers to find and focus on posts relevant to their work. You can also receive recommendations of colleagues to follow and groups to join, and receive reports and dashboards on Chatter usage.

I'm always interested in tools that can help project teams be more efficient. But it seems these new tools could do just the opposite of what they're designed to do. You could find yourself spending more time managing social tools than actually doing any work on your project.

How do you collaborate with your teams? Do you use one of these social tools for businesses, or do you stick with plain old email and shared file repositories?