Socialcast leverages the power of feeds.

One of the 20 (now probably 30) Enterprise Microsharing tools on the market is Socialcast. Today they announced some interesting news. Let me share what I know about them with some context.

Socialcast is somewhat more than just an enterprise microsharing platform, but less than a full blown enterprise social networking suite.  It’s a lightweight employee social networking platform. Another way to see it – it’s FriendFeed for the enterprise. If you understand why FriendFeed is important and how it enables conversations better than Twitter does, then you will understand what makes Socialcast interesting to the enterprise microsharing space.

About two years ago, Socialcast implemented a lightweight employee social network at a national musician supply company with many retail outlets.  The retailer employs musicians to sell their products. These musicians understand the products well. They know the brands and the popular sounds. They know the difference between fads and classics. They certainly understand their customers. The problem? Musicians are not known for being focused on developing their long-term careers in sales. So the company had to figure out how to retain their best talent, or at least capture the knowledge of their best talent while they were still employed. The set up Socialcast so employees could connect with other sales people in their corporate retail network. After all – the dude who sells microphones in one store has a lot to share with his counterparts in the other stores. Without a social network, they would probably never connect. But as a connected community, they can share all sorts of information. Much of it related to making better sales. An interesting outcome of this tool was that retail reps felt more connected to their company. Attrition rates were lowered, and this meant that the cost of training new reps were lowered too.

Socialcast has since rolled out many other workplace communities – including some in well known organizations, such as NASA, and in lesser-known organizations, such as The Bedside Trust, a hospital and health-care consultancy focused on saving lives (what I consider the infinite ROI case study).

Socialcast now provides their service for free. If you want to enable employee to employee collaboration, you can use the SaaS version of Socialcast for as many people and groups as you want. In fact, you own your communication. They are not planning on playing the “if you want your content, you have to pay for it” game. Their business model? They sell premium services that are valuable to serious users of their platform.  It you want SMS integration, multi-domain or directory integration, or installation behind the firewall, that will cost. Also they will soon provide Social Business Intelligence™ data about your company’s social network usage – also for a cost.

What this means: if you eventually become heavy users of Socialcast within your organization, you may come to a point where you will want to get detailed analytics of the social graph and usage patterns. But, if you indeed are a heavy user of the tool, it will be money well worth spending. I have not seen the details of the Social BI service, so I cannot comment on what it does or does not yet provide. But they are building the capability in-house with BI experts they recently hired. So I’m interested to see how this develops (and who copies them).

If you want to deploy Socialcast in your own data center, you can do that too. There is a cost associated with licensing their tool in this way.  You get a VMWare or Xen virtual machine instance which you can upload to any available server you have configured for this use. Socialcast decided to stick with a VM deployment rather than ship appliances.  After all, if you want to host your own platform, you probably have the infrastructure you need – or you can get it with relative ease.

Here’s an interesting tidbit of information that may help you decide between the SaaS version and the on-premise installation: Socialcast encrypts your data on their SaaS server. So even though you are sending communications outside the corporate walls – it’s encrypted all the way though and back. It’s even encrypted on server disk. This feature pretty much defeats many of the security concerns that some companies still have with SaaS. This does not mean that your security czar will still not challenge this architecture. But it does mean that Socialcast understands the reality of enterprise computing needs and is providing a solution that follows the best industry practices it can.  (Readers may recall that PBWorks’ Legal Edition also encrypts data on the cloud servers – covered here.)

In addition to the freemium model, Socialcast provides some consultancy services to help you adopt microsharing in your organization.  I was a bit surprised to see that TechCrunch thought this was a service that customers would not need.  Sure it’s easy to use if you already understand microsharing, but you’d be amazed at the kind of support some enterprises need when getting started with behaviors that are fundamentally counter-cultural.

One of the most interesting features that I have seen here is the email integration. The reality is that prying email out of a typical worker’s hands does not happen so easily. Outlook is the place that most information workers spend most of their time. Socialcast integrates with your email environment in a way that allows participants to hold discussions on email, getting shared on Socialcast – or on Socialcast, getting shared on email. In other words — you don’t have to convince every co-worker to abandon email in order to use Socialcast.

You can feed email, RSS, and other feeds into Sociacast, and then collaboration on that content, in context. And you can create groups and filter content in Socialcast too.  So Socialcast is much more like FriendFeed, and therefore very suitable for enterprise conversation.  Now let’s explain to enterprises what FriendFeed is…!

Tagged as: collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, success story, tool, virtual familiarity, workplace