Web 2.0 platform enhanced to overcome employee skepticism
A Web 2.0 platform used by McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Newsweek and other large customers is being upgraded to improve moderation and convince skeptical employees that social media has a place in the enterprise.
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.
“Everything we talk about is about some place,” D’Agnese says. “And the experts who are contributing to some project are distributed throughout the country, in some places in other parts of the world. So we’ll have a distributed network of providers and we know where they are at all times.”
The product upgrade also lets community administrators use a rules-based workflow to automate the process of moderating content. This can automatically delete curse words; set aside messages that mention a competitor’s product until they have been approved by the human administrator; or replace certain phrases with links to associated content.
“You’ve got this moderation happening as people are submitting content,” Carter says.
Awareness is also improving its infrastructure to make its service move faster, he says.
Carter boasts that Awareness was able to address the security concerns of Northwestern Mutual, a customer that wanted internal blogging but was worried it would have to make compromises about security. “They’re not the poster child for free and open communication,” Carter notes. Awareness’s security sales pitch emphasizes identity servers that manage who can log in and contribute content.
Newsweek uses Awareness to provide forums for readers to comment, while the New York Times Co. uses the platform on the Web sites of various regional newspapers it owns.
McDonald’s uses internal blogging, notably with former company president Mike Roberts, who would answer live, unmoderated questions from blog readers about once a week, Carter says.
Awareness tries to differentiate itself from competition, such as SpikesSource’s SuiteTwo, by placing all types of content into one program rather than offering “an amalgamation of products.”
“The participation experience is independent of the way we store the data,” says Eric Schurr, vice president of marketing. “The user can, on the fly, change the way the participation experience exists. You could write a blog entry that the next minute becomes a wiki entry someplace, or you can write an e-mail that ends up as a blog entry.”
User demand for new ways to collaborate seems insatiable at times, says D’Agnese of EarthKnowledge.
“Just about every functionality we put in front of users, they come back to us with two or three other needs they have,” he says.
Annual subscriptions for Awareness start at $1,500 a month, which covers 100 users. Typical customers pay about $2,000 a month, and can be charged per-user or for each page view, Carter says.
Awareness also announced today that it has received “many millions of dollars” in venture funding from Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Exact details of the financing were not released.
