Getty Images Drives New Business Opportunities with Enterprise Social Software

Getty Images provides photography, footage, music and other digital media that is published by news sites, blogs, magazines and newspapers all over the world. A pioneering digital media company, Getty Images saw the possibilities the Web offered for new distribution and content licensing models long before its competitors.

But as we’ve learned from our many customers in the media business, the industry changes fast. As the company adapts quickly and evolves its product offerings to meet the needs of the market, Getty Images employees must not only collaborate more efficiently across the company, but also have immediate access to the most relevant marketing information and sales tools to drive new business opportunities.

To help enable this enterprise-wide effort, I’m proud to report that Getty Images chose Socialtext.

In their own words, Getty Images wanted to build “a community-based, interactive platform to transform the way employees share and receive information at Getty Images.” The integration of Socialtext will allow them to streamline existing training programs for new products and communication channels that have typically been jammed in e-mail inboxes or exchanged in other ad-hoc ways, enabling all employees to exchange information seamlessly.

With Getty Images’ enterprise social software platform, every employee has a homepage where he or she can access links to company systems (Learning Management System, Performance Management, Travel, Expense Reimbursement, etc.), internal social networking tools (microblogging, blogs, profiles) and personal accounts (email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). This is made simple by Socialtext’s embrace of OpenSocial, an open web standard that makes it easy to surface applications and content of any kind inside of widgets that people can customize on a personal homepage.

Jennifer Fox, director of learning and development for Getty Images, remarks that “Success for employees at Getty Images starts with having the resources they need available in one place, immediate connections to colleagues around the world and a streamlined work experience. We are excited to introduce the Socialtext platform, which we have branded ‘Mixer’ to our employees.”