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Media & Publishing Companies Embrace Enterprise Social Software from Socialtext and Turn Industry Disruption to Their Advantage

July 15, 2010, Palo Alto, California

To adapt quickly in a challenging market, many media and publishing companies are embracing enterprise social software internally to make it easier for their employees to share critical information with each other across organizational boundaries. With social software that enables them to collaborate on key projects and respond to market changes, media and publishing employees are empowered to create new business opportunities with greater speed and agility than ever before.

Meredith Publishing, Oxford University Press, Thomas Publishing and other media and publishing companies have harnessed the very social technologies that disrupted their industry. Microblogging, for instance, is a new technology that enables people to share short messages and work actions that they perform throughout the day. In Socialtext, a secure enterprise social networking platform, these messages keep employees much better informed of what’s going on around them, and the message stream can be customized to show just what they need.

“Social networking in the consumer world has reminded us that the ability to connect people and information is a powerful thing,” says Rebecca Cullen, Digital Product Manager at Oxford University Press. “If we are to understand how these technologies affect our business, the best place to start is for us to use them ourselves, internally. With Socialtext, our people now use social tools to propel our business forward.”

Here are some examples of how media companies are harnessing enterprise social networking to improve their businesses:

  • Oxford University Press. As the some 5,000 employees at this storied publishing organization create a digital strategy, employees use enterprise microblogging to accelerate best practices, ask business questions openly and get answers that benefit the entire group.
  • Meredith Corporation. The publisher of 23 magazines titles, including Better Homes & Garden and Ladies Home Journal, Meredith employees now use microblogging to share fast-changing information, online workspaces to collaborate quickly, and social spreadsheets to stay apprised of the latest state of the business. As a result, the department has been able to quickly take advantage of successful test results and generate new ideas for future promotions and products.
  • St. Louis Public Radio. Employees at this local National Public Radio station use microblogging and online workspaces to create better awareness of late-breaking news and to keep employees in synch, improving the station’s ability to serve listeners.
  • Elsevier: This world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services created an innovative new product that allows it to expand into a new market, capitalizing on one of the company’s greatest assets: its information resource. Social software allows Elsevier employees across all departments to execute the go-to-market strategy for selling their new product into this new target market.
  • Thomas Publishing. With a highly specialized executive audience that subscribes to its magazines, Thomas Publishing built a gated, community extranet on Socialtext so members can share best practices with each other, and interact with magazine editors and writers more intimately. This provides the readers with a useful, exclusive service, while giving Thomas an additional revenue stream for its membership business.

“While companies across virtually every industry get business value from Socialtext, media organizations use it consistently for strategic business transformation,” says Michael Idinopulos, Socialtext’s vice president of customer success. “Though some believe the media and publishing industry is stuck in the past, these firms who run their business on Socialtext have proven they understand that these social applications improve their employees’ ability to make smart decisions and pursue new opportunities faster than competitors, both new and old.”

About Socialtext

Socialtext addresses the critical issues organizations face as their people and teams struggle for better ways to share knowledge, ideas and expertise. With Socialtext’s enterprise social software platform, people and teams are synchronized, highly engaged and able to move fast. The Socialtext collaboration platform employs a broad set of social software technologies including microblogging, social networking, filtered activity streams, widget-based dashboards, blogs and wikis. Socialtext offers both the convenience of SaaS and the security of an on-site appliance, for the fastest time to value. More than 6,500 businesses world-wide have accelerated their business performance with Socialtext, including Oxford University Press, Meredith Corporation, OSIsoft, Symantec, The Washington Post, and Epitaph Records. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.