DEMO: Hashwork hooks companies up to Twitter

Employees are lukewarm about using internally-developed Twitter-like tools in the enterprise. So Hashwork has created a business tool that brings externally developed social networking tools, including Twitter itself, into the enterprise for work purposes.

The New York-based company, which is launching at DEMOfall 09, provides a social presence on the web for a company and its community of employees, customers, prospects and partners. It integrates Twitter into work by letting people work socially with their relevant work partners in both a public or private setting. The idea is to help a company participate in conversations about the company in a social way. And why learn some new internal tool when everyone knows how to use the microblogging service and it works just as well.

Anyone can sign up and use Hashwork for free. You don’t need a company administrator to do it for you. When new users sign up by entering a work email address, they automatically become part of their company’s community on Hashwork. And Hashwork ensures the privacy of internal communications between co-workers by limiting access to the people who have a valid email address at the company.

One of the company’s customers is The Spoken Hub, a voice communications firm that serves political campaigns and corporate clients. Hashwork helps the distributed team stay organized and connected, said John Giesser, chief executive of The Spoken Hub. With Hashwork, you get your own feed with a personalized URL associated with your company. You can post public updates to your feed for customers, or post private updates for coworkers. You can also communicate within groups on an invite-only basis and attach files, images, or Wiki-style formatted content to your updates. The public updates are automatically tweeted (sent as a 140-character maximum Twitter message).

The free service also lets you discontinue the accounts of former employees and back up your data. For a paid version, you get more management features. The standard plan is $3 per user per month, with a max of $95 a month for an unlimited number of users. The pro plan is $5 per user per month, capped at $195 per month. The enterprise plan starts at $195 per month.

Hashwork was founded in 2008 and has two employees and two consultants. It has funding of $450,000 from its founders and two unnamed angel investors. Rivals include social customer relationship management software and community software vendors such as Jive Software, Lithium and CoTweet.

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