A Web 2.0 platform used by McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Newsweek, the New York Times and Northwestern Mutual is being updated Monday with features to improve moderation and encourage participation among employees who may be skeptical about social media in the enterprise.

The vendor, iUpload, announced a name change to Awareness and the release of Awareness Summer 2007, the latest version of its hosted suite of tools to create and distribute blogs, wikis, discussion forums, videos, photos, voting, podcasts and audio.

One new feature allows the creation of rich profiles for contributors. If a company administrator wants every profile to say what school the person went to, he or she could require all contributors to provide an answer the next time they log in. Employees can then search for user-generated content based upon answers to the questions.

New questions can be added gradually and be based upon current events to provide context, whereas employees tend to be put off when they are asked to fill out a 10-page demographic profile when they first register, says Awareness CTO David Carter.

Awareness also added more than 25 “participation widgets” for voting, commenting and quick posts. One such widget can ask employees to write down their “thought of the day.”

These new features encourage participation from users who otherwise would not embrace social media tools and aren’t familiar with sites like Facebook and MySpace, Carter says.

“What we want to do is take anyone who’s super intimidated by this and make sure that there’s lots of places for them, while they’re reading content, to start some new content,” he says.

More new features included shared bookmarks; keyword tags allowing users to classify content; user interface enhancements; and geo-tags to map content by longitude and latitude. The platform was already integrated with Google Maps.

The ability to organize content by location as well as category is a powerful tool for environmental experts looking to engage with colleagues, says Frank D’Agnese, president of EarthKnowledge, which uses the Web and the Awareness platform to connect government officials and other stakeholders in environmental projects to news, information and each other.

EarthKnowledge began using geo-tags a month ago and is now able to sort content by state, eco-region, or watershed, he says.

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