In the Concourse Connect social networking suite, every individual profile, whether a registered user, a company, a group or a project has a wiki tab that allows users with the proper permissions to add content. Wiki's are useful in a number of ways, but there are two use cases that stand out. Let's call them the Smooth and the Knowledge.
The Smooth Wiki is used in a business to keep a process moving along. Suppose your loading dock is tracking shipments into your plant. All along the route, people are adding infprmation about the shipmemts location, size, distribution, etc. Anyone reading the wiki has an up to the minute view of the status of that specific order. Now imagine a company receiving hundreds of shipments a day and the Smooth Wiki becomes a useful tool.
The Knowledge Wiki may be even more important to an organization. Every person has knowledge about their own area that would be useful to share so that others could benefit from. Giving access to the Knowledge Wiki to a wide variety of users in various departments - sales, marketing, human resources - and encouraging short entries that are organized around specific topics creates a real time operations manual written by the people using those processes every day. Imagine a new hire being able to access a deep wiki category, updated regularly, to learn about his new responsibilites from the people he'll be working with, instead of an SOP manual that gets updated once a year.
Since they're not perceived as being mission critical, Knowledge Wiki's have a harder time getting established. But if management realizes the value and encourages their use, they can become every bit as important as the Smooth Wiki.
View Full Post and Comments
A business decides to set up a social marketing presence where they can do a few things - communicate directly with customers and prospects through blogs, wikis and forums, provide a venue for customer support through company posts and customer comments, or introduce new products or services to a targeted audience. The site is membership based so users can participate and communicate, and they get a profile page themselves.
Now suppose the business has suppliers who would like to reach that same audience - how would they do that? Concourse Connect has built in a middle layer of access, think of them as storefronts, called business profiles. Any supplier, vendor or interested organization can create a business profile in our application. Each profile has a full suite of Web 2.0 tools so each business can set up their own community within the main one. Here's an example of a business profile inside our Gourmet Oasis demonstration site. Now these busineeses are addressing the members of that community directly and benefitting the owner of the Community by creating more traffic and awareness.
Would those suppliers pay for the privilege of having a presence in the community? We have a number of ideas on how directories can generate revenue for the owners.
View Full Post and Comments
You are a company with 9 locations, many workers on the road or working from home, you read an article about a competitor rolling out a new process and you think your company can improve upon it and use it in your business. In this scenario, the emails fly, the conference calls start and everyone involved in the process has their own spreadsheets and notes.
ConcourseConnect, when configured as a collaboration tool for a company Intranet, as shown here, let's you set up a dedicated Group with features that include project management, document library, discussion forums, blogging and more. When a new idea evolves for a different process, employees will set up an Idea project with the same collaborative functionality to work collectively to flesh it out.
A company's intellectual resources can be spread out across the country, around the world or on the same floor of an office building. Those companies need a centralized location with easy to use tools to leverage their employees experience, imagination and desire to make the company a more efficient and competitive place to work. Read more here about how ConcourseConnect can enable your organization's intellectual capital.
View Full Post and Comments
A community by definition is a "unified body of individuals". When it comes to building communities of people on the Internet, the more tools that a person has to display the public side of themselves or their company, the better. Blogs, wikis, forums, and review tools for the members of a community to use to promote themselves are as important as they are for the businesses and organizations in the community.
But companies may want their employees to work togehter in groups or projects that they don't want the public to view. This would be the private side of a public community. A user starts a project, invites others to join it and they collaborate to resolve an issue or complete a customer requirement. Only those users that have been invited can see the project and participate. To everyone else, it doesn't exist.
Concurse Connect has a robust project management capabitlity that allows a team to work together privately in an otherwise public directory. Users and businesses have their individual 2.0 tools to educate others about themselves and the community owner uses the power of emplyee collaboration to advance the interests of the business.
View Full Post and Comments
Recently, Jet Blue tested a blog and wiki software package with 200 members of their internal training division. There was much discussion about whether to allow users to generate personal information or use the software strictly for business.
It was decided that if the JetBlue users were allowed to talk to one another, not just about innovation in learning and development programs, but also to share photos from family vacations, weddings and birthdays, they would get to know one another better as individuals, and would more easily share ideas and participate in virtual groups and projects.
As the JetBlue example illustrates, the process of getting to know one another better through the corporate community promotes adoption of the technology and generates the collaboration and innovation that companies are looking for.
Concourse Connect, a full featured collaboration package, is highly configuable and gives customers the flexibility to enable users to generate personal information from a menu of social tools. View a demo of our collaboration configuration here.
View Full Post and Comments
Search Engine results pages don't look the same as they did a few years ago. While websites still show up in the native results, the variety of of those results has increased dramatically. A typical search page may include a blog posts, Facebook links, forums, videos, postings about promotions and events, and wiki entries.
The path to optimizing a website no longer runs exclusively through meta tags and home page content. User generated content is creating a whole new world of options that search engines are using to validate their search results. By providing a variety of relevant, indexable content to the search engines, you can increase your online visibility.
Concourse Connect provides a number of options to start a community that not only provides brand promotion or customer support, but also give a whole new meaning to search engine optimization. Major search engines are indexing everything and customers are looking for you everywhere.
View Full Post and Comments
According to Forrester, the leading Internet marketing research company, in their latest report on the social media scene, over half (53%) of the 145 interactive marketing professionals surveyed plan to increase their social media budgets.
Why is this? Social business marketing provides a unique opportunity for businesses to use the Internet to interact with potential and exsiting customers in a much more personal way. A business can inexpensively create a community of people that want to share ideas, review businesses and products, collaborate on new ideas and tell others a little about themselves.
Concourse Connect give a business the tools to develop a community around a theme - the business. And themes create users who are passionate about it and share it with others. And that's why the recession isn't holding back saavy marketers who recognize the power of passionate communities.
View Full Post and Comments
So you might be thinking-
- My customers don't know what a blog is
- I don't have the time to blog
- What would I say, anyway.
Let's take them one at a time -
My customers don't know what a blog is
You're probably right - MANY of your customers probably don't know about blogs, but SOME of them do, and for them it can be very helpful to provide timely information that they can read and maybe tell others about, in person or by creating a link to your blog.
I don't have time to blog
Time is scarce, but 10 minutes a day three times a week is all you need to produce simple messages aimed at building a Community of users around your business and inviting them to add content for the benefit of all.
What would I say, anyway
You don't have to stick to happenings in your business. Tell them about new ideas in your industry, what people are talking about in the company, your last fishing trip. The idea is to get propsects comfortable with you and your company.
Concourse Connect provides a set of easy to use tools that allow businesses to start online community building and social marketing quickly and inexpensively. Social networking has become a driving force for all kinds of businesses, large and small.
Continue Reading
