Findings from Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies 2008 study suggest that microblogging will be a key emerging trend among businesses in the next two to five years. A few years ago it seemed that every company was trying to start a blog (and it’s still happening today) and now companies are trying to dive into microblogging.

Like blogging, microblogging started with consumers, but as its popularity has risen, many organizations have been investigating the channel for business benefits. Companies seemingly seeing the most return out of microblogging are news outlets and consumer driven organizations. Dell recently held a news conference with a back channel team answering questions from reporters via Twitter and many news companies now push headlines and breaking stories across microblogging platforms as an even more immediate way of spreading information.

Jackie Fenn, Gartner vice-president and Fellow, said:

“Following the trend of the last few years, many of the new entries on this year’s Hype Cycle, including microblogging, social networking platforms and cloud computing, are making their impact in the consumer world before they hit businesses.”

[Source: Internet Search Metrics]