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Socialcast Harnesses Power of Online Conversations

10/8/2008

If social networking seems to be the intranet buzzword of 2008, you're right. Just last week we looked at Telligent, which is bringing tools such as blogs, forums, and wikis to the intranet, and now we've caught up with Socialcast, which offers a kind of MySpace for the workplace.

Socialcast was founded three years ago by Timothy Young, who originally wanted to help companies create social networks where they could communicate with their customers. Socialcast's first customers were entertainment giants, including Sony, Nickelodeon, and Viacom, and the Socialcast platform was first used on a site for the Pussycat Dolls.

But things change fast in the online world and by mid-2006 the music companies no longer had the same budgets for building entertainment properties. Socialcast's team decided to take what they'd learned and apply it to building social software for the enterprise.

An Internal Focus

The new Socialcast launched in January, 2007, with Guitar Center as the first client. With Socialcast's software, it offered employees a social space to meet online and exchange ideas with other employees.

Since then, Socialcast has turned form consumer sites to internal sites. The company's goal, says Young, is to "empower employees to create, expand, and exchange knowledge."

He's finding a lot of willing takers. Companies both large and small find themselves drowning under an e-mail tidal wave, unable to share or catalog the ideas that get passed around every day. The idea behind Socialcast is to make those discussions public, shareable, and searchable.

The MySpace Look

The Socialcast interface will be familiar if you've used MySpace or other social networking sites. The difference, though, is that everyone on Socialcast is a company employee. The interface is customizable with your company's colors and logo. Every employee gets a profile page that they can populate with their personal and professional interests, as well as a picture.

After that, Socialcast is about posting and sharing. Sites contain areas for posting ideas, questions, pages, and links. Users can easily create an entry or comment on other people's entries. They can give status updates about their latest projects or mark postings that they especially like.

Aiming High

Socialcast recently completed a pilot program with NASA, which tested the service's abilities to improve communication and share knowledge. People at NASA were concerned that its scattered workforce wasn't exchanging knowledge well, and that it would soon be losing valuable information from its aging workers.

The pilot program, which ran from May to August of this year, began with only 76 users, but grew organically to over 300 users at people in the company took interest. The initial results were impressive: 93 percent of questions posted were answered by employees working at different centers. NASA is now studying the results, with widescale deployment a possibility.

Young says that Socialcast is targeting companies with 1,000 to 40,000 employees, but that it's being used by companies with as few as 5 employees. Smaller companies choose the software-as-a-service (SAAS) version, which only requires a browser for access, while large companies and government organizations go with the installed appliance, which comes on a 1U or 2U rack.

For each version, pricing starts at $5 per user per month, with discounts for high volume orders. The rack appliance costs around $3,000, but the cost is waved for companies with over 800 users.

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