In Challenging Media Landscape, Meredith Publishing Stays Ahead with Enterprise Microblogging

By Christopher Lynch | April 16, 2010, 12:57 pm | 0 Comments

As the media industry reinvents its business model to contend with the disruptive effects of the Web, I wanted to highlight a Socialtext customer, Meredith Publishing, that’s continuing to thrive by making sure its employees seize on new opportunities and react to change faster than competitors. One tool that aides Meredith employees in that effort is Socialtext Signals, our enterprise microblogging tool, which allows them to share information openly.

Today’s Harvard Business Review article highlights how Meredith employees use microblogging to track competition and move faster on ongoing projects.

At Meredith Corporation, the publisher of Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, microblogging tool Socialtext Signals is the platform of choice. Using Signals, the marketing function can post alerts to employees and partners on a wide range of marketing issues, such as researching competitors, brainstorming new ideas for a direct marketing campaign, or analyzing the outcomes of current campaigns.

Says Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing for Meredith, “Signals allows us to break down the silos and easily share information with each other internally. We also use Signals to communicate with groups of external vendors, so we can brainstorm current campaigns with them, propose new ideas and share best practices. It is amazing how much we have cut down on email traffic while increasing our productivity.”

While the companies that benefit from Socialtext hail from a variety of industries, media companies have embraced enterprise social software more urgently than their counterparts in some other verticals. At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, our co-founder and president Ross Mayfield held a panel with two clients, McGraw-Hill and The Washington Post, to highlight their use of enterprise social software to drive business value inside their companies. We also wrote a case study to highlight how St. Louis Public Radio utilizes Signals to improve collaboration across departments.

Meredith’s use of microblogging also highlights the strength of our Signals product in comparison to our competitors: It’s integrated with other critical tools employees use to get their work done. For example, Meredith also uses SocialCalc, our social spreadsheet, to track the progress of their direct mail and subscriber campaigns. With Signals, employees can Signal links to each other, which brings those numbers — and the people and context behind those numbers — into the flow of work.