Yeah, you heard me. I don’t mean something corny like sitting around a campfire singing Kumbaya, My Lord. Instead, I mean giving your team a way to interact regarding everything that is valuable to them — not just work. It’s all about building a team environment that makes people want to interact with eachother. Think about it: you spend a month hiring the perfect person to fit in your team, so why not facilitate the exchange of music between the people that you think are so perfectly fitted to each other? The good thing news is that there is a great site that allows you to do exactly that, with a little finesse. And now, I introduce you to Blip.

So what exactly does Blip do? Well, Blip takes the Twitter model and lets you microblog, but with a twist. On Blip, you associate each bleep (?) with a song. This song can be nearly anything, they have access to a wide range of online materials, or you can even upload your own song.

My first question with services like these: How do they make money? Well, Blip actually has a business model. Direct from your homepage, you can click on a track that you particularly like and you are taken directly to where you can purchase it from Amazon, and Blip receives a portion of that. Seems like an excellent, symbiotic relationship.

Next question: Why in the world would I encourage my team to use this, and possibly decrease productivity? Well, one of the best things about microblogging is that it is designed to restrict the possible amount of time that you can spend on any one post. Of course, people can always take posting to the extreme, but you just have to be careful that doesn’t happen. My biggest justification is that the best teams I have worked in have always had close (ish) personal relationships. This allows them to develop the sense of intuition required to work seamlessly with other people. A service like this helps people interact in a way they may not have before, and can help bring relationships closer together.

In short, having a well functioning team is a function of the interpersonal relationships in the team, and whatever can be done to improve those should help the team performance. And Blip could help bring your team together in a novel and exciting way.