My Conversation with Matt Moore on Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

I was recently interviewed by Matt Moore, from Sydney Australia, who writes and records the blog, Engineers without Fears. The interview is available as a podcast through his post, podcast - puneet gupta - connectbeam. I was first asked to compare Connectbeam to applications on the consumer web. I mentioned del.icio.us along with Facebook and LinkedIn since we combine social bookmarking with social networking. We made this combination since we feel that connections within the enterprise are best done around ideas and information.

With Connectbeam the content you bookmark can come from many sources inside or outside the enterprise. We can then build a social framework around these tags. This allows you to discover the social context of tags. Matt asked me about usage levels and benefits. I said that we see increased uptake as awareness builds. We are often brought into a firm by people who saw similar capabilities on the consumer web. Then awareness spreads as people see the value.

Another aspect of our solution that is most appealing to businesses and enterprise is the deep level of integration we offer into existing IT infrastructure. For example, if you have an enterprise search engine (e.g. Google Search Appliance, FAST, Microsoft Sharepoint, ...) - Connectbeam can enhance the search experience for your users by turning 'raw' search into 'social' search. Showing you what was useful to whom, and in what context. And providing you the ability to tag search result content, and connect with related users and experts.

As for quantitative benefits, I said we are finding that our customers are not squarely focused on that question just as when email and IM were introduced nobody sat down to draw out a detailed ROI spreadsheet. We are seeing customers receive value in areas like expertise location, helping to pull together the right people for the right job, onboarding new employees faster, retaining and capturing knowledge and information from workers which is otherwise lost in transition or worker turnover. Connectbeam can save a lot of time in this area and lead you to find the people that might not have been uncovered by other means. This can be very helpful in large global organizations.

There is much more on Matt’s podcast. I invite you to listen to our conversation.