Accenture Webinar Follow-Up: Q&A with Tom Barfield (Part 2)

In our recent webinar with Tom Barfield of Accenture, he explored how the company takes a comprehensive hire-to-retire approach for capability development through social learning. In Part 1 of this blog we summarized the viewers’ answers to the question “what imperatives or challenges are causing you to consider a social approach?”

In Part 2 of this blog, Tom graciously took the time to answer many of the remaining questions we did not get to during the live webinar. Here they are by category:

Adoption

Q: How do you define connect, contribute, and cultivate from a measurement perspective? And can you share specifically how you would put people into the 3C categories?

Tom: The table below summarizes the metrics that are aligned to each of the three C’s. Each person receives a total score which is made up of a possible 100 points for each of the C’s. Any one metric may be worth 10-30 points.

Connect	Contribute	Cultivate
Subscribe to e-mail digest	Contribution posted to KX as contact	Respond to Discussion
Download content in the KX	Post Discussion Question	Comment microblog, contribution, video, blog, idea
Vote Idea (KX or Grapevine)	Create Blog	Edit Wiki
Member of a Community	Create Microblog
Rate	Create Idea (KX or Grapevine)
Complete People Profile - bio, photo, additional skills	Create Wiki
Visit an Assets tab	Create Bookmarks
Visit one.accenture.com	Download of content on the KX by others
	Blogs viewed by others

Q: What period of time is used to measure the 3 c's (a month, week, quarter?) How often do I need to contribute to be counted as such?

Tom: Today we run our scoring process after each quarter. Most elements are based on activity during the quarter, but there are some exceptions. For instance, in Connect, if you complete your profile and subscribe to the email digest once, you will automatically continue to receive points in the future. 

Q: How do you address the fear factor (e.g., where someone sits on a painful lesson learned rather than publicizing it for all to learn from)?

Tom:  An excellent question – and one I admit we haven’t completely solved.  From a learning perspective failure has much to teach. I don’t expect that our people proactively share their lessons learned - individually. I do see more of that openness, however, in responses to questions (ex. “I tried this approach and it didn’t work”). I think we do a better job at capturing lessons learned more formally through our offering owners – who are responsible for specific solutions. As we implement these solutions we are able to learn from our mistakes which are then baked back into our offerings for future delivery.

Another type of fear factor can come from general sharing. There can be a hesitancy to share because of a belief that their point-of-view or insight needs to be perfect. One of the ways we try to address this is by encouraging our leaders to be natural in their communication style – lose the formality, spelling mistakes are OK. We also encourage our leaders to engage in conversations – even if it is simply saying “Thank you” - to a post that was made. 

Management

Q: Do you still find the need to have a "librarian" to manage taxonomy, tagging, and findability of the data? Or are you 100% organic in terms of management of the knowledge?

Tom: The Social Learning team I lead is responsible for providing taxonomy management governance; interestingly we have just started an internal debate on my team about the value of taxonomy vs. folksonomy (I believe both have a place in our world). The main purpose of taxonomy and tagging is of course to help improve the findability of content. 

From a content perspective our biggest challenge continues to be search quality. In this past year we have formed a small Search Center of Excellence team whose sole responsibility is identifying and implementing approaches to improve search quality. This can be through search relevancy tuning or improvements to managing our content. I expect that we will start seeing the fruit from this team’s work in the next month or so.

Q: What is the curation overhead? Do you invest in resources directly or expect the end users to do this work?

Tom: We have a central team who are located primarily in India that helps us with the management of content, metrics, and site maintenance. We are also in the process of expanding the responsibility of this team to include community management. Approximately 70% of the content that is contributed is harvested from our client teams vs. posted by end users. We focus our content harvesting on the most strategic content areas where content gaps have been identified. 

Technical

Q: Are you using any product for gamification? Or is it custom software?

Tom:  We plan to use the Spotlight module provided in NewsGator Social Sites.

Q: Do you use FAST for SharePoint for search?

Tom:  Yes

Q: The e-mail into a community to post a question is interesting. How is that enabled?

Tom:  This is native functionality included in NewsGator Social Sites. Questions or insights that are posted with #hashtags cause the system to identify any community or users following those #hashtags and routes the question/insight to those communities and individuals.

Rollout

Q: Can you talk more about the integration between social learning and formal learning programs?

Tom:  There are several areas of integration:

• Organization – We have an organization known as Capability Development responsible for working with areas of our business to understand their skill and knowledge needs. Based on these needs, Capability Development will develop a strategy to meet the performance goals.  This strategy incorporates a combination of formal and social learning approaches.
• Governance – Members of Capability Development (including the Chief Learning Officer) are a primary component of the Social Learning Steering Team that I lead which helps me set the vision and priorities for our social learning investments.
• Technology/Innovation – While our Social Learning system (called Knowledge Exchange) and our Learning Management System (myLearning) are separate technology infrastructures, the teams driving these systems work together in developing the visions and requirements of each system. 

Q: Do you find it works best to organize groups/communities around skill sets (e.g., project management) or industry sectors or product offerings?

Tom: Yes, yes, and yes. Those are all examples of categories of communities that are provided. I wouldn’t say that one is better than the other. Our main categories of communities are Industry (ex. Banking), Business Function (ex. CRM, Strategy), Technology (ex. Testing, Technical Architecture) and Offering.  We also have informal social communities (ex. Running, Gamers).


Thank you Tom for taking the time to answers these great questions submitted by our webinar viewers! Again, if you missed the webinar, you can watch the on-demand version anytime.

As you can tell Accenture has a quite impressive and innovative social strategy where they invest heavily in making sure their employees benefit from social tools like Microsoft SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites. To find out more about how NewsGator can guide you in the right “social” direction, contact us today!

OppenheimerFunds Webinar: Follow-Up Q&A Blog

If you attended our recent webinar with Codey Fredenhagen and Colleen Bridges of OppenheimerFunds, you know their corporate intranet, called MyOFI and built on SharePoint 2010 and NewsGator Social Sites 2010, has grown virally throughout the organization. We had so many questions from the audience we weren’t able to get to all of them during the webinar. Fortunately, Codey and Colleen were gracious enough to take the time to answer the rest of them via this follow-up blog. Here they are:

Rollout

1.  How do you or did you measure adoption and collaboration? Do you use any specific tools or strategies?

a.  We have developed specific SQL queries that export the data out of the database and then report in Excel.  We are taking the basic metrics at this point (e.g., how many events by type week over week, how much event activity per Community).

b. We learned at the NewsGator Collective user group meeting, however, that these might not be the best measures. Some companies are using metrics around how quickly information was found, measuring the perception of speed gained in finding knowledge and the increase in collaboration.  We are looking at how we can best measure this in our environment.

2.  Can they tell us more about the Change Management group?  What was their focus and what type of resources made up this group - HR, Communications, etc.?

a. The Change Management (CM) Group is comprised of Corporate Communications, Project Governance & Delivery, SharePoint Development, Corporate Training, Marketing, Legal and Compliance.  It’s a team of about eight people for a 2,000 person employee base.

b. The CM Group is primarily geared to address “social” collaboration. Their goal is to teach about and introduce people to a new way of getting information to others that need it. The group initially focused on how to drive adoption and awareness, but now is more focused on communicating the value of “collaboration.”   

c. The CM Group was absolutely vital to making the implementation of MySite and Communities a success. You need to build excitement across a diverse group – the CM Group is a cheerleader as well as a fighter when needed. In our functional groups it was crucial to have people that could cross those boundaries easily and effectively. It’s imperative to keep the CM Group diverse and positive. 

3. Did you perform any formal usability testing? If so, what types of insights came from that research? Did any customizations come from that research?

a. When it came to our corporate intranet site makeover, MyOFI, we had an experienced User Experience Team work through how best to lay out the site. It has really paid off. Finding information on the site is far better than it used to be. 

b. Also, the need to incorporate a consistent branding across all the sites was a key component to getting enterprise acceptance. Our previous efforts were not globally branded and it gave people an excuse to avoid an application that didn’t appear to be “corporate sponsored”.

Adoption
4. How are you educating users on E2.0 in general (i.e., why is E2.0 important vs. how to use Social Sites)?

a. There has been a tremendous amount of senior leadership campaigning and promoting the use of E2.0. We hold several demo sessions (Lunch-n-Learn, Tech Dojo, etc.)  We have seeded the community with some evangelists that were early adopters and believers in the medium. And we have specifically done some targeted training about when to use email, IM, blogs, and social (NewsGator). 

b. Education is probably the most important aspect of the implementation. You need to reinforce that it is okay to use this medium to communicate and promote its use. It has been a major shift for our company to communicate in this manner. 

Results/Benefits
5. How are you making the jump from social to business? In other words, what do you think will be the most productive use of this tool in your business environment?

a. It really has been more about the business and much less about the social. We rolled this out as a business tool to be used for business communication. This set the tone. It wasn’t introduced as a “water-cooler” substitute – more as a tool that would enable others to more easily collaborate. People recognize that “social” is effective in a business setting because people get what they need faster and more effectively than other means.

6. Is your implementation purely social or have you formally embedded any business processes (i.e., moved from some previous process to the Social Sites platform)?

a. We didn’t have any previous internal social application, so this was our initial foray into the space. We set the tone as “business only.”  All the business processes are embedded into MySite, the Intranet, and Communities. We found people are too busy trying to do their jobs; that just “social” was not worthwhile. The activities they perform are about getting work done. 

Governance
7. Do you let anyone create a Sphere in Social Sites? Or, do they have to request it and have someone with elevated privileges create it?

a. Spheres are available to anyone to create and manage – unlike Communities which are set up through an approval process to ensure people know the commitment that they must make for the site.

8. What are you putting in place to govern video? File format? File size? Raw/edited? Centralized videographers or does everyone gets a camera?

a. Video hasn’t taken hold too much. We do limit personal MySite storage and each Community also has a limit of 5GB. We can increase that if there is a reasonable request.

b. The governance of video falls under the strict electronic usage policy that we have established. 

c. We have installed some professional video components that comprise the main intranet site. These are managed by our Corporate Communications group and are professionally edited and produced. This was a large investment and commitment on the part of our Corporate Communication teams and it has been very well received. 

Management
9. Who maintains and monitors the social communication at OppenheimerFunds? Is it HR, IT or Corporate Communications? What challenges are you seeing, if any, with this?

a. All social, email, and IM communication is monitored by our Compliance department.

b. Surprisingly, there have been very few issues around the implementation of MyNewsfeed. We have more challenges with “lurkers” and encouraging them to contribute on the site instead of just consuming. 

Compliance
10. What technology does OppenheimerFunds use for archiving and retaining SharePoint content to comply with FINRA regulations?

a. Previous to installing NewsGator’s Newsfeeds, we had installed the company’s 17a-4, retention product. This tracks all of the “social” traffic and routes it to a searchable archival and monitoring solution.  The SharePoint content is also retained in an off-site backup that is archived for seven years. 

Thank you Codey and Colleen again for taking the time to answer these additional questions! If you miss the webinar, you should check it out!

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #7 Intelligent Activity Streams

In today’s digital age, the art of personal efficiency is constantly evolving. Day planners and palm pilots have become nearly obsolete, replaced with faster, sexier tools that encourage rapid information consumption, utilization and sharing.  Everyone wants to know what’s happening NOW and what will be happening 10 minutes from now.  Needless to say, it can be hard to keep up with what’s important and act on what needs to happen. 

Using a social software feature like activity streams is an important part of tracking what’s happening NOW – in your business, with your colleagues, in consumer social media…but keeping track of it all is a fluid affair.  You can literally consume every minute of every day processing the information.  How do you pick out the important bits to use or share?  Fortunately, NewsGator Social Sites 2010 can help in a number of ways. By implementing intelligent routing, filtering and visualization, and recommendation engines, NewsGator cleans up your activity feed – based on your filters and settings - delivering only the information you need.  Just as useful are recommendation engines and intelligent routing. By analyzing your online behavior, in particular, the content you are reading and searching most often, recommendation engines organize and prioritize posts specifically for you, while intelligent routing makes your network more efficient and adaptable.  Keeping your activity stream lean and relevant ultimately improves your productivity. 

After all, who needs just another tool adding to the confusion?  Don’t we want to simply remain current and share relevant information with colleagues?  Leave the passé, wannabe gadgets in the closet; just clean up your activity stream.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #6. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question and we may feature it in our next post.

Eight Reasons Enterprise Social Software Makes Sense: #8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

NewsGator is counting down the top 8 ways Social Enterprise Software will enhance business in 2012 and beyond with our blog series dedicated to enterprise social software.

Enterprise social software takes the “hallway conversation” and brings it into the 21st century as new ways to connect people continue to evolve every day, helping to facilitate collaboration and innovation in ways not previously possible.

“Enterprise social computing, at its core is about working differently and making better use of all the people and ideas in a new way. What NewsGator brought was so much creativity and so many new social tools that made it easier for us to connect our people.” – Steve Brantner, Manager Learning & Communications at General Mills

#8 Fluid Conversations & Problem Solving

Allowing people to ask and answer questions within a community of skilled professionals is one of the quickest ways to drive the value of cross-enterprise collaboration - by helping people solve problems in real-time through ‘simply smart’ collaboration.

As an example: imagine you are a designer integrating multiple elements from marketing to IT to sales and need clarity on a new element’s functionality. With business collaboration software, you’ll be able to quickly tap into your colleagues throughout the organization to see what others are doing and how your solutions will impact their needs. This is how smart collaboration is increasing performance for organizations.

Once a question is posed, notifications go out to community members who can then provide answers. With Social Sites from NewsGator, you can:

 

• Ask a question via email
• Participate using mobile devices (no need for Internet connectivity)
• Launch a poll
• Attach files to questions and include files in responses
• “Like” comments to provide quick feedback
• Utilize IM, video and audio conversations with available co-workers
• Create communities or Spheres to gather like-minded collaborators
• Manage your social business network in real time with easily accessed dashboard tools

The world of work has evolved. Integrating social software for the enterprise into your systems will help transform your business into a more productive and efficient organization that’s ready to compete on a global scale.

Subscribe to the countdown via e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Or, keep watching for next week's #7. Ask a Social SharePoint 2010 question, and we may feature it in our next post.

A vote for the social enterprise

Within any organization, collaboration is key. People want to engage, to be involved in the process, to share opinions and shape important business decisions. An idea developed alone can go a long way, but one shaped by consensus speaks for more and reveals more — enabling people across all ranks of the organization to bounce ideas off of one another, and to innovate and collaborate in a system that is more inclusive and more profitable.

Now, NewsGator has released its latest feature to facilitate internal collaboration. New to Social Sites 2010, “polls” enable users to cast their vote on important topics, share their own opinion, or just see what the rest of their connected world thinks.
Users can now set optional answers on a question, transforming the question into a poll to foster increased employee collaboration on important projects and business decisions. Users check the box corresponding to the poll answer they want directly within the Activity Stream.

After any one of the choices has been selected, the poll will re-order the display of choices from most-selected to least-selected options, providing a simpler way to measure opinions and evaluate responses to actions taken in the system. Also, to make poll results more accessible to the user, the activity stream now contains a specific polls filter, immediately displaying all public polls and all polls in private communities or spheres that a specific user is following. To see the polling feature in action, check out the short polling video on the NewsGator YouTube page.

Cast your vote. Choose NewsGator’s enhanced Social Sites 2010 computing solution and watch as “polls” and other new exciting features streamline your company’s internal processes, increase employee satisfaction, and boost overall company productivity. To find out more about how NewsGator can guide your organization towards a more profitable and collaborative working environment, please visit our website at www.newsgator.com.

Remaining Attendee Questions from Recent eBay Webinar

To follow up on our recent webinar with Ramin Mobasseri of eBay, here are his answers to the remaining questions we were not able to get to during the webinar Q&A session. If you missed it, click here to check out this on-demand webinar!

Q: How has ESN affected the productivity of eBay’s workforce? Has time dedicated to ESN decreased time dedicated to actual work? Have you seen an increase in employee engagement and retention since the solution was implemented?

Ramin: It is too early to determine that but we do have our benchmarks and metrics through the Employee Pulse Survey. Next year we will hopefully do a comparison. There are, of course, other quantitative ways to do this, such as measuring the number of blogs, profile changes, microblog, #tags, etc. The key is to correlate such information to key areas like user adoption, increased productivity, and decreasing attrition rates for instance.

Q: Are you applying standards to community design? Do you enforce/promote standardization?

Ramin: Yes, we have branded the communities the same as the Hub with designated master pages and styles sheets.

Q: How many dedicated resources took part in your project?

Ramin: Seven.

Has NewsGator complicated your migration to SharePoint 2010? Do you see it as a complication going forward?

Ramin: Not at all. We upgraded first and then applied NewsGator to our environment. But remember, we also had NewsGator in our DEV, QA, Sandbox, and Staging environments. I think we practiced enough to know if something was going to go wrong. We also carried out an extensive performance and load test before and after, and all the indications were that NewsGater had not affected the environment negatively.

Q: How has ESN impacted the utilization of email?

Ramin: It's too early to tell.

Q: Where in the organization was this initiative sponsored?

Ramin: Global Corporate Technology and Operational Excellence

Q: If you could offer just three words of advice to other companies just starting to roll out enterprise social computing what would they be?

Ramin: I can give you three phrases instead: start small, test & learn, and focus on user adoption.

Q: Can you provide a few examples of how you encouraged executive sponsorship and user adoption?

Ramin: Executives want to and need to get closer to their groups, and sometimes, simple newsletters are not enough. So suggest building a CIO, CTO, and/or CFO Corner where people can connect to their leaders directly. They can share and learn from all the suggestions and questions they receive.

Use real-life scenarios, for example, a day in the life of a Project Manager, or a day in the life of the Learning & Development Team, HR, Legal, etc.

Also, apply the Find an Expert scenario within various functional groups. Sometimes finding an expert is an extremely costly initiative. So why not find those experts within your own company.

Use the benefits of social to lower costs by reducing travel and emails. Imagine when someone goes on vacation and when they come back, they will need to go through so many emails; however, if there was a community for them, they could simply browse through the community and find out what has been going on.

Enterprise Social Networking Tools to Increase Employee Engagement

The trend in today’s workplace is towards “becoming social”— leveraging the right social tools to increase customer retention and streamline company productivity. Social computing systems are increasing employee engagement, boosting collaboration, and facilitating more widespread recognition of success and ability. However, while research clearly demonstrates that all companies can benefit from enterprise social networking, old ways die hard and there’s reticence to leaving established methods behind and embracing the innovation of the latest social wave. Interestingly, there seems to be a reverse correlation between the degree of need and the level of demand—organizations that need social computing the most, typically the largest and most influential, are slow to embrace larger social adaptations, while social adoption among smaller companies is expanding at a rapid pace.

Big companies need social networking tools
Weighted beneath massive information databases and internationally distributed employee populations, large companies have much to gain by going social. Internally, enterprise social computing solutions let large organizations weed through the clutter in mammoth flows of information, filtering out the noise to hone in on relevant data or efficiently locate a subject matter expert for a given task. Culturally, enterprise social solutions facilitate more widespread engagement through collective ideation and brainstorming, helping to bring more coherence to a very large organization which can often feel disjointed to employees. Externally, social tools such as Twitter and Facebook are bridging the gap between companies and customers, enabling large organizations to stay in tune with changing user demands and perceptions.

Why do large organizations neglect social networking tools?
Despite the real need for social networking tools in large organizations, big business often suffers from social media neglect. While it’s difficult to get hard numbers on internally-facing efforts, their slow-paced adoption of externally facing social media efforts is telling. When it comes to blogging activity, Facebook page management, and Twitter activity, large organizations are falling short; less than a quarter of the nation's top Fortune 500 companies use public-oriented blogs and only 62 percent and 58 percent take advantage of the Twitter-sphere and customer-oriented Facebook pages. Similarly, the most influential global organizations have been cautious about shifting their internal infrastructures towards incorporating social computing tools.

By contrast, smaller corporations - specifically those included in the annual Inc. 500 listing of America’s fastest growing companies - have a strong command of enterprise social networking. In fact, these companies host twice as many blogs as their large enterprise counterparts and a full 71 percent of the Inc. 500-listed fasted growing companies have fully functioning Facebook pages. Unlike enterprise giants, small companies realize they have much to gain from social tools, and a lot to lose by not getting on board as fast as possible. Their willingness to adapt to social allows growing companies to facilitate more open communications with customers and more collaborative work across all ranks of the organization. This means that, as our fastest developing new companies gain momentum and become the “enterprise giants” of the future, the next line of influential companies will be inherently more social. The perception of the modern workforce is changing, and large organizations need to get on board.

How is NewsGator helping to bring social to larger companies?
At NewsGator, we recognize that this social lag in large organizations is a potentially critical problem—that larger enterprises greatly benefit from both external and internal social computing solutions to maximize profit potential and establish a more customer-centric working environment. This understanding shows up clearly in our customer base, which includes global enterprise giants such as Deloitte, Accenture, and General Mills. General Mills, for example, a 33,000 employee strong global company touting well known brands like Betty Crocker, Pillsbury and Cheerios, looked to NewsGator for a social networking approach to internal collaboration that would overcome the challenges of having a large, geographically dispersed employee population. Since integration, NewsGator Social Sites has helped General Mill's employees to better collaborate, streamline innovation and bridge the communication gaps across geographic and functional silos. To learn more about how NewsGator fuels enterprise collaboration at General Mills, check out the following video:

And that’s not an isolated example – it’s something we keep seeing time and time again with new customers. At NewsGator, we’re telling large organizations to stop hesitating—join the social wave and watch your organization transform in both efficiency and client satisfaction.

Social Networking Tools: Flops and Fliers

Why do some social networking tools flop, while others integrate smoothly into the jargon of daily routine—the “posting,” “tweeting,” and “tagging” that become the frameworks of our interpersonal relationships and our involvement in a growing virtual world? What makes a social site work—makes it conducive to real results and public uptake?

When social networking sites work, they REALLY work

When social networking tools works, you see the results and you see them fast. Consider Facebook. Since its launch in February of 2004, Facebook has emerged with startling speed as a social networking giant – attracting more than 800 million active users, and expanding its demographic globally and to both individual and enterprise-level use cases.

Was Facebook a first?

Some claim that Facebook gained momentum due to the “novelty” of its central concept—that it was the first effective virtual space catering to social interactions. However, consider the facts—the first recognizable social networking site, sixdegrees.com, launched as early as 1997, and provided basic social functions such as user profiles and friend lists. Even MySpace was founded before Facebook, in 2003, and, although a formidable offering in its own right, falls significantly short of Facebook’s current popular appeal (As of October 2011, MySpace was ranked 103rd by total web traffic). For some reason beyond novelty, Facebook has emerged as the “gold standard” in social networking tools, and I think it’s important to consider the factors that have led this to success, and how these extend to social in the workforce.

What makes a social networking site work?

The best social networking solutions satisfy several important conditions. First, they recognize the importance of clarity in presentation, that streamlined search engines, simplified profile pages, and easy-to-use features greatly improve user retention. While MySpace pages are riddled with internal distractions such as blaring profile songs and messy wall images, Facebook gets straight to the point, narrowing down focus to the easy essentials such as clear profile pictures and filtered activity stream walls. Next, Facebook is malleable—it listens to its users and understands the importance of shifting along with a changeable user demand.

How does this relate to NewsGator?

At NewsGator, we have really perfected the clarity of presentation and internal malleability needed to produce real business results. Social Sites 2010 provides social networking solutions for any business enterprise. Social Sites presents users with profile pages that are clear and easy-to-use: with profile pictures, interest boxes, and filtered activity stream walls offered as core features. And for the best in simplification, our communities provide a space for people to gather around more specific issues, to watch tutorial videos, collaborate around a specific project, or even brainstorm about a fun event at work. At NewsGator, we recognize that people, and organizations, don’t want to think too much when using social tools, and that internal features that are easy to both teach and learn are absolutely essential.

Finally, NewsGator is keeping up with an ever-changing user demand in a way that really sets our product apart. At NewsGator, we react and listen to the “will” of our users; we stay one step ahead at all times. Perhaps this is what makes Social Sites 2010 one of the leading forces in enterprise social computing solutions.

A New Social Mobile Client Available - NewsGator Social Sites 2010 for Android

As many of you know, the Android mobile operating system has exploded to be the second leading OS in the US (according to NetMarketShare).

If you have an Android phone, wouldn’t it be great to get direct access to NewsGator Social Sites 2010 from your handset – and without the frustration of a mobile Web browser?

Well, now you’ve got it! Meet our new Android Client, a native app for Social Sites 2010. This new app lets you fully participate in your familiar enterprise social computing environment 24x7 (but hopefully not while you’re driving!).

If you use a different type of smartphone, we’ve got you covered there as well with Social Sites 2010 Mobile Clients for the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry®.

Android App Features

The new Android app lets you work in Social Sites 2010 almost as if you were on your office PC. You can:

• Keep up to date with updates from your colleagues
• Update your status from anywhere
• Comment on or like someone else’s status
• Upload photos
• Get notifications about activities related to you and your interests
• See a history of your recent activity
• Browse colleagues and get their contact info
• See the latest activities from any community in which you participate

This new app is available from NewsGator now - download it today from the Android Market. For more info, click here to contact us or call (800) 608-4597.

NewsGator Named to Deloitte's 2011 Technology Fast 500 in North America

We are so proud to announce that NewsGator has been ranked number 192 on the list of Technology Fast 500 for 2011—Deloitte’s ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, and clean technology companies in North America! Congratulations to all who put forth so much effort this past year to keep up NewsGator’s momentum and ensure the best possible product releases for our fantastic customers!

Inclusion in the Technology Fast 500 award program is based on percentage of fiscal year revenue growth from 2006 to 2010. During this period, NewsGator has made serious headway, expanding revenue with advanced 2.0 software releases, adopting new mobile capabilities, and working with new Fortune 1000 customers to elicit real business results and attain positive customer accounts. Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 program recognizes the companies that innovate, overcome obstacles and systematically defy the odds, and NewsGator has proven to embody these criteria time and time again.

This award reaffirms what we have known for some time now; people are social by nature and look to social tools to enable widespread communication and more collaborative knowledge sharing. Alongside the rapid immersion of new technologies and diverse social platforms, people have begun to share exponentially more, to collaborative more readily on questions and topics, and engage more on highly interactive tasks and projects. And the high demand for social extends easily into the workforce, where employee collaboration and combined ideation is absolutely critical to the productivity of any organization.

At NewsGator, we push the boundaries of enterprise social with our award-winning business software solutions. Our Enterprise 2.0 software, Social Sites, boosts any organization’s performance with the power of social computing, innovation management, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, and all within the familiar and secure infrastructure of Microsoft’s SharePoint platform. Our agile software team is at the forefront of a revolution in the world of work, in which enterprises of all sizes adopt social computing to drive innovation internally and externally. Customers seeing real results include Accenture, Adidas, Deloitte, Ericsson, General Mills, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Kraft Foods, Merck & Co., Unisys Corporation, and the US Army.

Congratulations again to all at NewsGator for this tremendous accomplishment! Looking to get social? Visit us at www.newsgator.com to learn more about our latest software solutions and value-add modules.