Dion Hinchcliffe – Determing the ROI of Enterprise 2.0
Alistair Croll – 7 Questions to Evaluate SaaS
Jill Konrath – Sales Stimulus: Is Email Hiding Your Personality?
Susan Scrupski – Hinchcliffe Ties Enterprise 2.0 to Economic Lift
Hutch Carpenter – Enterprise 2.0 and the Trough of Disillusionment
Nicholas Carlson – Twitter Explained In 267 Seconds (CLIP)
As you can imagine, we think about return-on-investment (ROI) all the time when talking about or selling our collaboration software. Most of us inherently know lots of goodness comes from collaborating more effectively with our colleagues, partners or customers, but the really important thing to focus on for ROI is not collaboration by itself. Collaborating more effectively yields other goodies that generate ROI like time saved, expenses reduced, increased sales, etc.. To really calculate ROI, you need metrics, a baseline, and measured improvement. This sounds obvious but people don’t often take it one step further. I’m finding they rarely have a business case or even have access to metrics to prove it out.
I’ll give you a very simplistic example I used with a customer the other day who was asking about ROI for a consulting organization:
My guess is these assumptions are very low and the ROI is probably higher. The high growth, decentralized, new employee characteristics lead me to believe we can probably save more time for people than 2 hours per month, especially when they are new and learning how to consult.
We are going to talk more about ROI in future posts. In fact, we are going to discuss how there is a whole range of ways to think about and measure ROI. Certain things like reduced call volume to a support organization are easy to quantify. Other benefits like increased sales are not as easy to pin down, but we have some ideas. What do you think?
We just released a significant upgrade to the GroupSwim online community software. This software has been in the works for months and the team has simply done a fantastic job! We are all extremely pleased with the results – check it out and you will be impressed.
This release introduces two of our most requested features, several “pet” engineering features and a bunch of productivity enhancements that make GroupSwim easier to manage and more fun to use. The major themes are described below.
Content list
Widgets: Easily one of our most requested features. We’ve had a steady stream of requests to provide a simple mechanism to “embed” GroupSwim content within other web applications and properties. Widgets are our answer. Self-service, no coding required, JavaScript and IFrame support, this is powerful stuff. We included nine widgets as part of this release:
To use the widgets on your site, contact us and we will turn them on for you.
Site appearance and white label controls: This was another top requested feature (the introduction of widgets made improvements in this area even more important). With widgets, site content can be collected and used in many new and exciting ways. Effective widget deployment also requires deeper branding and site appearance control for a seamless user experience from the widget to the GroupSwim site. We added significant new capabilities in three areas:
Restricting group membership: Thanks to Thorsten for suggesting and pushing this great feature. You can now “restrict” a member to a selected set of groups (one or more.) This means the “restricted” member will have no access or visibility to any other group or piece of content on the site. This is a great feature for adding clients and consultants so they stay contained in just the group/groups you intended.
Image Lightbox: This has been Luke’s pet feature and he has done a great job. We’ve long been dissatisfied with our image quality. To address, Erik and Luke dug deep to tune our image processing and newly inserted images look vastly better. But, that was still not good enough. Luke’s question, “Why do you have to download the image to see it in full resolution?” Introducing the Lightbox. Click on any image and we provide a full resolution preview of the file. It’s slick and very handy.
Google Analytics, Webmaster tools and SEO: Now you can use your Google Analytics and Google Web Master Account with your GroupSwim site. We also added support to control robots.txt and add your own META tags.
Of course a whole slew of bug fixes and tweaks have been applied across the site. You can read the details of the release, here, on the GroupSwim Pool.
Enjoy and keep the feedback coming – its been great. Also, as a preview, this release was actually a double-header and a couple of amazing features will be released soon. The team has been very busy.
One of our new customers recently rolled out a beta version of their customer community – in 8 days. MarketLive is a leading eCommerce software and service provider for midsized retailers. They have thousands of customers using their software, and heard loud and clear at their annual user summit that their customers wanted a way to communicate with each other and share best practices. I spoke with Tiffany Riley, Senior Vice President of Marketing, to learn how they did it.
Based on customer feedback, MarketLive decided to make Customer Community one of the core tenets of their solution along with Technology and Services. Their goal for creating this community is not a means to reduce support costs. It is to create a vibrant relationship with their customers and so the customers can collaborate with each other. Much like other software packages, getting the most out of MarketLive solutions is as much art as science. Customers and developers have great information to share among themselves, which helps them and MarketLive.
Once MarketLive decided to quickly implement a customer community, they surveyed the providers of community software and decided to go with GroupSwim. They were looking for great software that they could get up-and-running in a very short time period. They were impressed by our current feature set and the 3 month roadmap we presented. They also felt we were extremely responsive during the sales cycle and stood out among the other vendors.
After they selected GroupSwim and our online community software, they quickly moved into implementation mode and were up-and-running in less than 2 weeks with 8 people working half time (they were rolling out a new website at the same time). Here is how they did it:
Early feedback from the customers they have already added has been excellent. Tiffany told me “they were wildly thrilled”. The team will focus on getting internal processes, roles and responsibilities nailed down through the rest of March and then add the entire customer base in April.
Their decision to go with GroupSwim is one we deeply appreciate, and it is a great case study of how a committed team can use our software to build a customer community in dramatically less time than the competition. It was important that they have great software to execute on their excellent planning and roll-out. We look forward to working with the MarketLive company as they grow their customer community into a fantastic strategic asset.
Jari Koister, CTO ofGroupSwim, presented and participated in a panel at CloudCamp in Cologne, Germany. The camp was organized in conjunction with the Webhosting Day, one of Europe’s largest events for that sector. In addition to GroupSwim, a number of leading cloud computing companies presented, including Martin Buhr of Amazon, Michael Crandell CEO of Rightscale and Kristof De Spiegeleer Cloud Visionary of SUN, and founder of Q-Layer which was acquired by SUN.
It was interesting how strategies and products have evolved over the last 12 months, and how many more example of applications of cloud computing exist today. At GroupSwim, we leverage cloud computing to provide scale, reduce cost and enable innovation in our product.
My biggest take ways were:
I think CloudCamp is a great format for companies who want to use cloud computing, learn and share experiences. The Camp is a mix of presentations, unconferences and panels and provides for a great way to share ideas in this new and exiting space. Here are the slides I presented. Let me know what you think.
GroupSwim is pleased to announce that Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, has selected GroupSwim as one of its Cool Vendors in Social Software for 2009.
Gartner has identified Social software as one of the hottest areas in the software industry in terms of innovation, press attention, and client inquiries. Gartner’s report highlights new and interesting companies. In order to be a “Cool” vendor, you must:
GroupSwim also received the 2009 Collaboration Solutions Product Innovation of the Year Award from Frost & Sullivan.
You will need to be a customer of Gartner or Frost & Sullivan to read the respective reports. We are very pleased that both recognized GroupSwim as a leader in the space.
We attended the Sales 2.0 conference for the last 2 days. It was a great experience. While I didn’t get to hear every speaker, the ones I did hear spurred great discussion and ideas. Here are some of the things that caught my attention:
There was much more than this at the conference but I missed much of it while sitting at the GroupSwim booth. What did you learn or take away?
It’s been a while since I’ve been able to bust out some alliteration like that. We had a great day at the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco. This is a collection of sales and marketing professionals meeting to understand and riff on how the sales process is changing, and how the tools and process everyone uses must morph as well.
We had a great time speaking with folks at the breaks. It was a real pleasure to show GroupSwim to people who instantly understood the business problems we solve and the value we provide. We explained that communication and collaboration with sales and marketing teams is usually bad, and mostly reliant on email. GroupSwim provides an excellent way for everyone to collaborate as a team, in a very easy and cost effective manner. Our integration with SalesForce was a big hit and the application sold itself once we moved into demo mode. As usual, I got very sick of hearing myself talk by the end of the day but it was worth the sacrifice.
We are looking forward to meeting more folks tomorrow. Swing by if you are at the conference.
Microsoft recently announced a significant win and overall traction with their online business services offerings. On one hand, this makes hosted Sharepoint a stronger competitor. We don’t have any trouble finding customers who hate Sharepoint and want alternatives. On the other hand, it shows more and larger companies are becoming increasingly comfortable with moving services and applications to the cloud. In this case, Microsoft landed GlaxoSmithKline with over 100,000 users. I’m thrilled to hear this. This is very consistent with other trends where companies, given the economic pressure, are going to increasingly look offsite for solutions. I’m happy to see Microsoft also blazing the trial that SalesForce.com started years ago.
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