A great internal social knowledge sharing tool?

I have had the pleasure of chatting with Chuck Van Court, CEO of Fuze Digital Solutions, on a couple of occasions to discuss Social Support Communities, Social Design, and the products they are building at his company.  To be honest, I was a little concerned about Fuze when Chuck told me he was an engineer.  Yes, I am a CTO/CIO/Uber-Geek…  However, technology-biased CEOs are often a red flag as I have seen too many companies fall in love with “bright shiny new toys” and lose sight of the markets they are servicing.  However, after chatting with him for a while, and learning about that finance background he has, I’m not overly concerned.  Fuze is focused on the market first, technology while important, is not the primary driver.

What does Fuze do?

Simply put, they are delivering social tools like Social Support Communities (SSC) to for both on-demand (SAAS) and on-premise (behind your firewall) delivery.  Their customers range in size from a 2 named-user credit union up through some impressive Enterprise customers and pricing is lower than what I have seen from many of their Enterprise-level competitors (pricing starts at $500/month and you can subscribe on a month by month basis if desired).

What do I like about Fuze?

While the majority of their customers are using the SSC solution for external customer support I see great potential for Fuze, and others that choose to jump in, to deliver social solutions to meet internal corporate needs in powerful new ways that companies largely ignore today.  One of the nasty buzzwords of the past, “knowledge management”, becomes practical and realistic with tools like this.

The internal knowledge holders, the gatekeepers, are often not provided enough of a reward system to disperse that knowledge to the points throughout the company where it is needed.  Beyond that, it is not possible to identify  who needs the information in the first place.

John, you were born in the 60s, were your parents at Woodstock?

I know I have focused a lot of time, and will continue to do so, discussing the benefits of social media as it relates to CRM and broader business issues.  However, there are compelling arguments for the use of social internally and I feel these arguments are getting louder and clearer.

Oh yeah, for the record, I did grow up near Woodstock… Woodstock, Vermont though…

Alright, listening?  Fuze and internal social excites me because…

• A robust reputation engine exists that rewards “the right” behaviors.  The reputation engine, in very simple terms, gives you points for your engagement.
  • Your reputation, your points, are always visible to you as a member of the community.
  • You earn points as other members of the community review and rate your content.  If you stuff is good, your points, and your reputation increase.
  • Editors of content, the company, can boost points even further if someone has “hit it out of the park”.
  • This part is critical…. Your reputation varies across the categories that you engage in.  In other words, a company might have categories for sales people like Cold Calling Tips, How To Close, and categories for Engineers like Debugging Tips, Corporate Coding Standards.  One sales person may have a high reputation in the “How to close” category but very low in the “Cold Calling Tips” category.  Guess who people will seek out to learn how to get better at closing?
  • Even if no one rates your post you get points based upon how often content is viewed.
  • Guess what, if your content is archived away because it’s no longer relevant or useful, your points go away with it.  Stale tips and knowledge are not useful.  Stay relevant, stay helpful.
• Content is organically created yet controlled through a straight-forward editorial process.
  • Sometimes information can leave you in a state of “too much of a good thing”.  Since all content must be “approved” before the community can use it there is a level of quality that you can maintain.
• Enough security exists to limit need to know information to those that truly need to know, both inside, and outside, the corporation.
  • While I will not go deep into the security in this post I wanted to note that you can control if content is public, if it’s private, and go through other settings to fine tune levels of access. 

I like the fact that the system enables easily setting up contests based upon your reputation points, making it easier for the smart business to drive internal knowledge sharing in critical areas.  People thrive on competition and feedback, the system makes this easy.  Be creative, be social, share.

What about integrating, especially with your CRM?

They have at least one customer that has already integrated their solution with Salesforce.com and are working through the steps to make this an off-the-shelf capability.  Stay tuned.

I like what I’ve heard and I like what I’ve seen.   I could write for another hour or two but I’ll save you from that for now.   What do you think?

John