When I was a kid, there was an incredibly stupid (but apparently memorable) ad campaign for Meineke mufflers, in which various characters stubbornly declared “I’m not gonna pay a lot for this muffler!”

I thought of that ad campaign while reading our recent case study on Egon Zehnder’s use of Socialtext.

Enterprise social software is supposed to be cheap. There’s open source, there are plenty of low-cost competitors, and there are hosted options. What Egon Zehnder discovered, however, was that a lot of these options–even the so-called “free” options–weren’t nearly as good as they first appeared. Here’s how EZI’s Bill Hopkins describes it:

“Once you factor in the total personnel cost of implementing and maintaining a Sharepoint or some other major piece of on-site infrastructure, the price gets a lot higher than just the software. We didn’t have budget for dedicated FTE’s we could devote to this project.”

Bill’s thinking immediately went to the possibility of a SaaS solution, but he was concerned that a traditional hosted solution was a non-starter for the Firm’s leadership.

“Security is incredibly important to us,” said Bill. “One of the reasons why our clients trust us is because they know we are utterly, fanatically discreet. Often the very fact that we’ve been engaged to fill a position would be front-page news if the papers found out about it. From an IT standpoint, that means our data must be completely secure. There was never any chance of letting our data leave the firewall. It just wasn’t going to happen.”

Bill has put his finger on a fundamental economic challenge for enterprise social software deployments. On the one hand, companies want the comfort and security of keeping their data inside the firewall. On the other hand, they’re concerned about the ongoing maintenance burden associated with traditional on-premise installations. This tension is particularly acute for mid-size companies, who have all the same confidentiality concerns as their larger competitors, but fewer IT resources to throw at the problem.

The good news is that, as Bill discovered at Egon Zehnder, a managed appliance provides the security of on-site deployment without the ongoing cost of maintaining a traditional on-site deployment. You can get your organization–your entire organization, not just a pilot group or two–quickly, easily, and without ongoing support burden. No fuss, no muss.

You’re not gonna pay a lot for this muffler.

Socialtext has posted our newest case study on enterprise social media: Executive search firm Egon Zehnder International. It’s a real success story of how one of the world’s great professional services firms has transformed its intranet from a crufty document warehouse to a dynamic forum for firm-wide collaboration.

Amid the globalization of the executive search industry, Egon Zehnder is using Socialtext to connect researchers and consultants world-wide for things like:

• Current research on specific industries, functions, and executives
• Up-to-date information on the firm’s work with strategic clients
• Approved templates for engagement proposals
• Current marketing materials describing the firm and its approach to specific types of searches
• Thought leadership on industry and functional trends
• Expert help handling exceptional searches, i.e., searches with specific and non-standard requirements

The case study talks in detail about what made Egon Zehnder’s project a success, including:

• Compelling business case, closely tied to the firm’s strategic objectives in a rapidly changing environment
• Secure yet cost-effective deployment with the on-site managed appliance
• Tight partnership and alignment across Training, IT, and the firm’s leadership
• A solution that took off like wildfire, because it met the needs of users

I’m personally very excited about Egon Zehnder’s success. Michael Kieran and I worked closely with James, Bill, and Ramona throughout the process. We witnessed first-hand the project’s evolution from a concept in London to a whiteboard sketch in New York to a global rollout to a strategic capability of the firm. It has been an exciting journey and a true partnership.

Read, enjoy, and tell us what you think!

We’ve just published a new case study on how FONA International is using Socialtext to help their employees reduce email, break down silos of information, heighten the sense of internal communities, and increase customer satisfaction.

A few of the benefits include:

• Reducing one processes’ email output from 4,000 messages per month to 1
• No longer emailing around Excel attachments, and having to manually merge multiple versions
• Increased customer satisfaction by providing a self-service extranet, where customers can access the information they need, tailored to their account

Read the full story here

One of the things I really like about FONA’s implementation of Socialtext, is the navigation they use, which reminds me of the periodic table.

Socialtext just posted a new customer support case study on the success achieved at OSIsoft. Support plays a key role in delivering enterprise infrastructure for management of time series data and events for energy, manufacturing and other industries where systems infrastructure is mission critical. With Socialtext, OSIsoft is serving their customers better from across the globe — with 200 global support engineers all pull in the same direction and tapping into collective brainpower.

OSIsoft’s story was recently covered by CRM Magazine. See part one, Support as Career Destination, Not a Journey, and part two, The Power of Information: OSIsoft uses Socialtext to revamp an outdated knowledgebase.

For a broader look at Social CRM, from Enterprise 2.0 to public-facing Social Media, see last week’s post The Social CRM Iceberg. From there, the conversation continued with some great posts by Vinnie Mirchindani, Bob Warfield, Tom Foremski, Michael Krigsman, Paul Greenberg and Dennis Howlett.

Creating a new product category isn’t something that emerges magically from napkins and whiteboards. Not only must the marketing team collaborate effectively, but it requires alignment with sales, continuous feedback from the field and iterative learning for entire organization.

Socialtext customer Echo360 shares their success in a new case study: Mobilizing the entire team in unison.

For more information about the Socialtext Marketing & Sales Solution, see the CIO Magazine interview with MKTG and contact us.