Social Apps

Companies now more than ever have the need to connect people and resources across geographies, organizational hierarchies and across their supply chain. Whether you are connecting company experts with clients or promoting dialog within the enterprise, social applications enable discovery and interactions that might otherwise not take place, across all facets of the enterprise - marketing, sales, operations and product development and support teams. Social software provides the collaboration, information sharing, and discussion enabling tools that enable enterprises to unlock existing resources and harness social capital in order to improve their operational efficiency and meet and exceed their business goals.

Social apps are characterized by a combination of the following tools and components that are configured so as to meet the specific objectives - be it improved employee communication and collaboration, idea management, customer communities to build customer loyalty, support groups, gated business communities etc.

We regard the ability to match strucutre and content to usability and adoption as the key consideration determining the success of a community. The right structure and organization of the community enhances the ease of use and promotes participatory behaviors on part of the users. Providing the right content gives users a reason to visit and participate, as well as meets business needs such as communicating key messages. Careful selection of the right features and functions coupled with a singular focus on keeping the user experience as simple as possible ensures usability. Integration with key data sources and tools that are tied to existing functions, services and habits accelerates adoption.

We understand how to build and grow communities. By following our tested application development approach and using our own social application development framework we can very quickly have a prototype developed to visualize and refine the concepts. In addition to our own social/collaboration framework there are numerous open source (Drupal, Joomla, Lifestream, Elgg) and commercial (Jive's Social Business Software, IBM Lotus Connections, Altassian) tools that can be selected based on your requirements to get your application up and running quickly.

Once the application is deployed we work with our clients to ensure that the community is moderated and new features are periodically added to keep the membership engaged and the community growing.