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  • January 2010

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    Industrial Mold Uses Enterprise Microblogging and Social Software To Serve Customers Faster

    One of the coolest parts about working at Socialtext is to see the diversity of our clients and the types of businesses they run. Today, I’m happy to announce one of our newest customers, Industrial Mold & Machine. Industrial Mold is one of those companies that works quietly in the background of American business, yet whose work touches the lives of millions of consumers each day. As the name might suggest, the company makes metal moldings for a variety of manufactured products, helping shape things like plastic cups, playhouses, sleds, milk jugs or kitchen utensils (to name just a few).

    According to Larry Housel, Knowledge and Information Manager of the Twinsburg, Ohio-based company, Industrial Mold needed enterprise social software to serve its customers faster and better. With employees residing both in the offices and the shop floor, Larry and his team wanted a central, searchable place to store meeting notes and customer information. He also wanted to improve internal processes and workflow by providing tools that enable the company’s employees to share information with each other openly. So Industrial Mold turned to our enterprise social software platform, and is now using secure enterprise microblogging (Socialtext Signals) and wiki workspaces.

    Because Socialtext is as software as a service (SaaS) product, it’s easy for people on the shop floor to access our applications via a web browser. In addition, Larry installed Socialtext Desktop, our Adobe AIR client that runs locally on people’s machines and provides an elegant and fast way to consume Signals, Activity Streams and other areas of our platform.

    industrialmold.jpg

    “We want to appear as one unit in everything we do,” Larry told me this week. “To do that, we want process improvement. We have a lot of people thinking about how we can improve our daily workflow and serve customers better, and I want to capture that information. For instance, how do we accept a piece of material? Who needs to be notified? Who needs to be here for things coming in? These ideas will now go into a Socialtext for us to figure out, discuss, and act on.”

    For the back and forth conversations that occur between employees during the day, Larry says Industrial Mold employees will update their colleagues using Socialtext Signals, our private, Twitter-like tool that enables people to share short messages with each other in real time. Industrial Mold wants more of its communication to happen openly, opposed to being locked away in e-mail boxes or people’s brains. “Signals allows all that communication to be searchable and discoverable later,” Larry says. “The more stuff we’ve normally done in e-mail that we can pull into a Signals is a victory as far I’m concerned.”

    So why did Larry and Industrial Mold choose us? He told me he likes the fact that the social features in our product mirror those that employees use at home, such as Facebook and Twitter. In addition, he appreciates how each social feature ties in nicely with another. For example, when you edit a wiki page in our platform, you can choose to Signal that action to your colleagues so it appears in their microblogging stream, where they can click on the link to view the changes made to the page.

    We’ll be tracking Larry and Industrial Mold’s progress, and we’re happy to welcome them to the Socialtext family.

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    Serendipitous Signals: How Microblogging Helps the Sales Process

    The serendipitous nature of enterprise social networks continues to amaze me. Take what happened here last week here at Socialtext over our microblogging platform, Socialtext Signals.

    One of the reps on my sales team Signaled that she just gave a demo to a prospective customer at a very large company. Less than 5 minutes later, our director of marketing responded (via another Signal) that his brother is CIO at that company, and how can he help? An offline conversation ensued, an introduction was made, and now we are having conversations at a level we would have had to work 10 times as hard to get.

    People in your own company probably have a closer level of connection to your customers — and potential customers — than you might think. To make sure those connections happen, you need an open environment where you can ask questions, find the right people, and get answers. That discovery process is much harder without a tool like Signals. In e-mail, information becomes locked away. If our director of marketing, for example, hadn’t been CCed on an e-mail message about that potential client, we never would have found out that he had a connection there that could help.

    My guess is that a simple message — such as “I’m trying to get in to BigCo, can anyone help?” — to a company of 1,000 people will initiate responses from 5 – 6 people who at least might know someone. From relatives to close family friends to old acquaintances from past lives, they might have an in. In most cases, they will be stronger introductions than anything you’ll get from LinkedIn or any public social network.

    Selling is hard work. You need to have a lot of different moving parts all line up in order to get a signed contract. One of those things is getting all of the right people on board. This requires a lot of skill, planning, presentation and sometimes, a little bit of serendipity.

    Learn How To Use Socialtext Effectively

    Are you ready to become a collaboration super hero? Your training is just a click away.

    hero.pngAs companies recognize the benefits of social software at work, products such as wikis, profiles, and microblogging are quickly becoming standard tools within enterprises.

    To help ensure that you get the most out of Socialtext, each month we offer a series of free webcasts designed to help you learn to use these new tools as effectively as possible.

    There are three classes:

    1. Getting Started With Socialtext – A Platform Overview
    2. Collaborate Effectively With Shared Workspaces
    3. The Benefits of Enterprise Microblogging and Online Spreadsheets

    These classes will show you how to move beyond the world of email and file attachments, and teach you how to create information that can be contributed to, and consumed by everyone in your company. You’ll learn how to get answers faster than a speeding bullet, break down the knowledge barriers between departments, and easily discover the colleagues that can help you get your job done.

    Are you ready to begin you training? Click here to register today.

    Socialtext Enjoys Record 2009 Performance

    Momentum fueled by doubling of user base, record quarter-over-quarter bookings growth.

    PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 4 /PRNewswire/ — Socialtext enjoyed a record-breaking year in 2009, setting its highest quarter-over-quarter bookings growth in the company’s history. Businesses are turning to Socialtext’s social software platform to gain higher levels of employee engagement, commitment and performance not achievable in the past. As the leading enterprise social software company moves into 2010, it expects continued growth in new bookings and renewals, and another record year in overall bookings and revenue.

    “In 2009, there was a collective awakening about the value of greatly improved knowledge flows among a company’s greatest asset, its people,” says Eugene Lee, Socialtext’s CEO. “In 2010, social software will become a staple for enterprises looking to improve the way their employees communicate and get work done.”

    Large and midsized enterprises across many industries — including media, health care, manufacturing, and technology — have deployed Socialtext so their employees can collaborate more easily and tap each other’s expertise, enabling them to stay connected, aligned and informed. With greatly improved knowledge flow and teamwork, these companies can now respond faster to changing market conditions and new revenue opportunities. In doing so, they better meet the needs of their customers.

    “Socialtext got all my smart people pulling in the same direction.”
    Don Smith, Vice President of Customer Service, OSIsoft

    “People call it the single most useful tool that Davies has introduced to staff, period.”
    Brandon Edwards, President & COO, Davies

    To meet customer demand for its enterprise social software platform, Socialtext is expanding, hiring across multiple departments in 2010. While Socialtext is looking forward to the coming year, highlights from 2009 include:

    • From Q1 to Q4, the company grew bookings by more than 200 percent.
    • The company grew its customer base to 6,500, while active users doubled.
    • Each quarter, the company beat its record for renewal bookings.
    • Bookings growth from customer expansions nearly tripled, in large part due to organic adoption of Socialtext’s fully integrated social software platform inside companies.
    • “Once people saw what they could do with Socialtext, each business unit started their own social software revolution.”
      Steve Brewer, Customer Connection Mgr. & Systems Integration,
      FONA International

    • Socialtext released its Microblogging appliance, allowing companies to deploy secure, private microblogging enterprise-wide very quickly, and then expand into other uses of the Socialtext social software platform later, such as deploying a social intranet, a social corporate directory, and letting the activity streams and other automated mechanisms do the work of keeping the organization informed.
    • “With microblogging from Socialtext, people understand each other more, and they know what others are doing. This lets us respond more quickly to new opportunities.”
      Tim Eby, General Manager, St. Louis Public Radio.

    • Socialtext shipped SocialCalc, the first and only social spreadsheet integrated with a social software platform, developed with VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin. SocialCalc has allowed companies to stay in touch with the state of the business.
    • “With SocialCalc, I can go in at one point in the day and see what’s going on in all our active campaigns right now. It helps us distribute information and knowledge faster, so we can react more quickly.”
      Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing, Meredith Corporation.

    • Socialtext Desktop allows people to access the Socialtext platform via a fast Adobe AIR app, providing a real-time experience for Activity Streams and Signals.
    • The new Socialtext Mobile brought the enterprise social software platform to employees on-the-go.
    • The company’s new service partners program complements their in-house professional services organization and ensures customers get the fastest adoption and path to strategic business results.
    • The company launched a “freemium” package that allows companies to get up and running with secure microblogging in minutes, providing a replacement for microblogging networks that have cropped up organically among employees, and that are neither secure or IT-friendly.

    About Socialtext:

    As the enterprise social software leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies such as microblogging, social networking and wikis to the critical challenges facing large and mid-market businesses. Socialtext’s enterprise social software platform allows employees to share expertise, speed workflows and get their jobs done faster. Socialtext provides hosted and appliance-based solutions to more than 6,500 customers world-wide, including EgonZehnder, Epitaph Records, Mayo Clinic, McGraw-Hill, OSIsoft, Symantec and The Washington Post. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.

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    About This Blog

    Weblog on gaining business results from social software.

    On this blog, Socialtext staffers and customers explore how companies can gain the most business value from their use of enterprise social software, including microblogging, social networking, filtered activity streams, widget-based dashboards, blogs and wikis.

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