Socialcast- Enterprise Microblogging and Social Networking

By now, most of us are familiar with the term “social networking”. What started out as a tool to connect with friends, and lately even customers, has now gone even a step further.  This month, our “gadget” takes the form of a web tool that incorporates social media collaboration and communication directly into your business world. You probably never thought that a tool similar to Facebook and Twitter could be used to better your firm and enhance productivity, did you?

Take a look at Socialcast – “a simple, secure collaboration tool that helps employees communicate in real-time”.  Some of the features this tool brings to the table are microblogging, real-time conversation tracking, custom tags, private and public groups, link sharing, file sharing, and search-ability.

Reduce email and provide search-ability:

Think about all those group emails that get sent out and take up space in your inbox. Socialcast can allow your group or company to reduce those mass emails by putting group conversations and collaboration in one place. Another great feature of social networking are tags. You could start a conversation about an upcoming conference and tag it with “#conference”, which will make your conversation easier to find in the future by looking at the “tag cloud” (which is kind of like an index).

Basically, if you are familiar with Twitter and Facebook, that is what Socialcast is, but exclusively for your business.

Microblogging:

Talk about something you are working on, share a tip that might help others, or ask a question to get some feedback. You can also “@mention” other coworkers, in a Twitter-like fashion, so that your message will show up on their page to alert them that something has been posted relating to them.

Platforms:

Socialcast can be used via the web site, a desktop application for PC or Mac, as well as a newly released native iPhone application.

desktop application

iPhone application

Conversations:

You can subscribe to specific people in your company and watch what they have to say. Or you can watch the whole company stream at any point in time. You can also “flag” conversations, even if you don’t have anything to say, so that you can keep track of what is being said about that particular topic.

Groups:

Private or public groups can be created to collaborate in more of a streamlined manner for conversations that don’t need to include the entire company.

These are just a few of the features and benefits that Socialcast brings to the table. They offer a free version of their platform, as well as a paid version which offers a few more features. The adoption of a tool like this could seem hard to incorporate to a company that has relied on email for so long. However, there is a Socialcast Cookbook which contains best practices and simple tips for growing a community, which may help put your firm on its way to being savvy in the area of social networking. They also offer a NASA case study which tells of NASA’s use of the tool.

For a first-hand look at the service, visit the Socialcast Demo here.