The Conenza Community Platform integrates the best of social networking functionality to give your company a vibrant online community that drives engagement and interaction with the site. Conenza’s corporate social networking solution provides your company with the technology and resources it needs to deliver a highly rewarding employee and alumni community with minimal impact on your internal resources.

Connections
Your employees and alumni will be able to create networks of trusted personal and professional connections that enable enhanced dialogue and active tracking of people and topics of interest. Connections also drive increased frequency of use—drawing members back to the site to accept invitations to connect with their colleagues, learn what’s new, and stay to explore what’s been added to the site. Connections also serve a powerful role in contributing to the viral growth of your community.

Groups
Your company, employees, and alumni members can gather, compare notes, post resources, and collaborate around shared interests via Groups. Groups can be set up to be open or private, visible or hidden. Groups facilitate deeper connections within the community and create new ways for members to interact, engage, and create value together.

Messaging
Conenza’s social networking platform features an embedded internal messaging system and the ability for members to opt to have messages sent to their personal email address.

Document and Rich Media Sharing
Your company, employees, and alumni can share documents, photos, and video files enhancing the depth of information exchange and collaboration within the community.

Discover additional features of Conenza’s corporate social networking platform and learn how Conenza’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution is the product of more than a decade of experience building and managing the corporate communities of Global 2000 enterprises such as Microsoft. For more information please visit our site at http://www.conenza.com

By David Coursey
Article link

In telling priests to become more web and social network savvy, Pope Benedict XVI is offering valuable advice for businesses, too. And if His Holiness thinks Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are good ways to spread his message, maybe his advice can help your company, too.

If you’re having trouble getting your bosses to adopt a social networking or some other online strategy for your business, the Pope may be your ally. Here’s what he has to say, and with a few word substitutions the advice would be at home in a business magazine:

“The increased availability of the new technologies demands greater responsibility on the part of those called to proclaim the Word, but it also requires them to become more focused, efficient and compelling in their efforts,” wrote the Pope in his message for the 44th World Day of Communications, to be held May 16.

The Vatican already has a multilingual Web site, but has recently launched the “Pope2you” portal, offering a Facebook app, iPhone app, YouTube channel, and Papal videos. But, don’t let the cool “Pope2You” name and URL fool you. Like, like all good CEOs, Pope Benedict warned his managers that they can’t just talk the talk of social networking.

Connect and engage a global workforce and transform corporate alumni into strategic assets with Conenza’s corporate social networking platform. For more information visit http://conenza.com

Conenza’s corporate social networking software, deeply experienced insight and comprehensive consulting services enable you to foster meaningful relationships with your corporate alumni to fully realize the business value they represent.

When alumni can make valuable career and business connections, collaborate and exchange ideas with their peers, find out about exciting events, and enjoy privileged discounts and benefits on things that matter, you can count on them to be enthusiastic champions and brand advocates for your organization. Conenza has more than a decade of hands-on expertise in what it takes to engage and grow alumni communities with a combination of world-class technology and unique benefits and services.

The Conenza Community Platform provides a compelling member experience that keeps your alumni coming back to the site to:

* Make and renew trusted, personal and professional connections with former colleagues and friends

* Uncover hidden career and business development opportunities

* Connect, collaborate and innovate with peers on topics of shared interest

* Contribute to a community effort to create positive change in the world through corporate and collective philanthropy

* Take advantage of cost-effective individual and small business insurances, benefits and services, as well as other privileged-access perks

If you are looking to accelerate the successful launch of a new corporate alumni community, Conenza offers expert professional services to support every phase of the community lifecycle.

For more information please visit our site at http://conenza.com.

In today’s challenging economic environment, companies are looking for ways to increase efficiency and cut costs. A corporate alumni and employee social network can enable companies to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with exiting, retiring, and former employees, and provide a compelling source of competitive advantage for global organizations in strategic outplacement, recruiting/re-recruiting, retained access to domain expertise, business development, and high-value marketing.

“The business case for a private alumni and employee community in normal economic times is one that is extremely compelling; in an economic downturn it becomes a strategic imperative. The Conenza Community Core provides corporations with a simple and affordable way to maintain valuable connections with their people, past and present, in a branded, secure environment,” said Tony Audino, Conenza CEO. “For more than a decade, our technology and support services have enabled some of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies, like Microsoft, to build and grow vibrant online communities that deliver real benefits to the members and positively impact both the top and bottom line.”

The Conenza Community Core 3.0 includes:

* Community Building Blocks: The Conenza Community Core includes the quintessential building blocks of a community: secure member registration and authentication, directories, profiles, news, and administration and reporting.
* Social Computing Features: The Conenza Community Core includes social computing features such as groups, connections, messaging, wikis, blogs, activity feeds, and document sharing.
* Strategic Support Services: Conenza’s Software-as-a-Service solution licensing fee includes expert consulting services to help clients develop their community strategy, provide day-to-day support, and quickly realize the full financial benefits of their initiatives.
* Customization to Meet Business and Brand Requirements: The Conenza Community Core is configurable to comply with corporate brand standards and features content moderation and permissioning capabilities to meet the robust needs of various audiences inside and outside the enterprise.
* Modular Upgrades: Value-enhancing modules can be easily added to the Conenza Community Core to improve the effectiveness of critical human resources, sales and marketing initiatives, and increase the business value derived from a private, branded alumni and employee community. Add-on modules include the Opportunity Center, Events, and Marketplaces.

For more information on Conenza’s corporate social networking solution or getting started with the Conenza Community Core, visit http://conenza.com.

The impact of social media cannot be denied. The 2009 word of the year was “tweet,” and the word of the decade was “google,” according to the American Dialect Society. Social media such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube–which are defined by their user-generated content–have wiggled their way into most people’s working hours, and thus onto many workplace computers.

One of the biggest issues caused by social media during an employee tenure is the simple theft of working time. There are also matters of privacy, nondisclosure, taboo topics and hostile work environment, brand protection, and many more. The good news is, this is the stage when you have the most control over the situation. Most organizations would benefit from a well-researched, clear, and fairly applied social media policy.

Another huge issue is recommendations. Increasingly, people are asking former colleagues to write them recommendations on social media such as LinkedIn. Is that the same as an official post-employment recommendation? Jackson says yes–although it’s difficult to define when people are speaking for themselves, and when they are speaking on behalf of the organization. It’s a good reason to have a solid policy in place.

The warmest and fuzziest scenario is positive relations through social media in the form of corporate alumni networks. In Computer World’s article, “The new word for tech’s ex-employees is ‘alum’” large, successful sites catering to groups of ex-employees are examined. Microsoft’s alumni network, for example, has 10,000 members–what an incredible opportunity for networking and goodwill!

Conenza sees the value in alumni social networks and provides corporate strategic planning and social networking community software. Read the full article here.

For more information please visit our site at http://conenza.com

Conenza agrees with Econsultancy’s article regarding corporate social networking success factors. Conenza provides corporate strategic planning and social networking software.

Most major brands are hip to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. And many have built up an impressive presence on the web’s most popular social hangouts.

But some of the more adventurous brands have also experimented with self-hosted communities of their own. Unfortunately, a large portion of them fail. Amongst the causalities are communities started by some of the world’s biggest brands, such as Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart.

But failure isn’t inevitable for brands looking to build their own communities outside of the Facebook and Twitters of the world. According to BrandWeek, a number of diet firms are finding success with their own online communities. Atkins Nutritionals, for instance, only has 3,714 fans on Facebook but its own online community at Atkins.com has plenty of activity. It reportedly reaches millions of people and appears to have over 400,000 registered members.

While a community dedicated to dieting, for example, has obvious advantages over a community for teenagers run by Wal-Mart, that doesn’t mean that brands can’t develop thriving online communities of their own if they consider the following.

* Focus. Communities develop around subjects that are important to people. That should go without saying. Unfortunately, many brands that launch online communities seem to forget that consumers aren’t interested in interacting around their brands 24/7. Instead, brands should identify how they relate to the lives of their customers. With that, they can focus in on building communities around subjects that are relevant to both their brands and their customers’ lives.

* Branding. Branded communities need to be branded. But the brand can’t be the experience; it has to be integrated into the experience.

* Functionality. Brands looking to reach consumers can’t be lazy and simply throw up a vanilla community with standard social networking functionality. Profiles, photo sharing, forums, etc. are all commoditized. To win, brands have to build functionality relevant to the community’s focus that differentiates the community and gives members a good reason to keep coming back on a regular basis.

* Participation/moderation. Communities don’t run themselves and brands can’t start them successfully with a hands-off approach. Instead, brands should make sure that they’re actively involved in the communities they run. While the level of involvement can vary, at a minimum brands should be prepared to ensure that their communities aren’t overrun with spam and bad behavior.

* Creativity. Brands often have incredible assets that can be used to create compelling community experiences. Contests, exclusive content, special events and rewards programs can all be employed in creative ways to entice consumers to join and participate. Unfortunately, many brands seem downright uninspired when it comes to using their corporate resources with their online communities.

Obviously, branded communities aren’t for every company and there are many advantages to tapping into the existing audiences on popular services like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But that doesn’t mean that brands don’t have the opportunity to build something successful that they own and control. By keeping these five success factors in mind, that opportunity is easier realized.

Get in touch with Conenza to discuss your own employee social networking and business social networking software.

For more information please visit our site at http://conenza.com/

Existing open social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, offer aggregated pools of potential registrants for your official Alumni Network. To the extent that alumni on these sites may not be aware of the official site and the advantages of being members of the official Alumni Network, they are targeted prospects potentially responsive to marketing outreach on these key social networking sites.

LinkedIn

Setup an Alumni Group in LinkedIn

The primary purpose of this low-cost tactic is to link group members to the official Alumni site. The LinkedIn Alumni Group logo will appear in LinkedIn member profiles, attracting other potential members to click on the link and go to the official Alumni Network site.

To make this an especially powerful capture and conversion vehicle, Conenza recommends creating a landing page customized to users coming from LinkedIn, This landing page would incorporate a welcome and encouragement to join the official site from a senior executive, a short bulleted pitch on the features and benefits of joining and a link to the logged-out homepage.  These steps will help provide a clean and compelling transition from the LinkedIn site to your official Alumni Network. If the landing page is hosted on the Conenza servers, traffic and activity analytics can be added to the custom landing page to track effectiveness, click-throughs and conversion to registered members.

Facebook

Explore ways to participate and create links back to the alumni site

There are likely many members in the unofficial Alumni Group for your company if one has been set up on Facebook. As a no-cost tactic to reach these alums, you should consider reaching out to the admin for the unofficial group and provide the admin with the correct link to the official Alumni Network site, as well as provide the admin with a link to a special landing page for Facebook-registered alums (a Facebook version of the landing page described above), welcoming the alums to register as a member of the official Alumni Network, inviting them to partake of all the benefits that are not available on Facebook and connecting them to thousands of additional friends and colleagues.

In the Future

Create lightweight LinkedIn and Facebook applications for the Alumni Network

The idea: using Facebook’s or LinkedIn API to create a lightweight application that resides on the respective sites could deliver breaking info to social network members on official Alumni news, events, job postings, all linking back to the official Alumni Network. An application of this type, available for download at the Facebook, LinkedIn and Alumni Network sites could help drive adoption by requiring registration on the Alumni site. Whether LinkedIn would approve the use of this application on their site remains to be seen.

Over the coming months, Conenza will continue exploring ways to make it easy for LinkedIn and Facebook members to bring appropriate elements of their profiles with them into the Conenza-managed Alumni Networks, helping to enrich the online communities of its customers and fuel additional value creation opportunities for members and sponsors.

By John Soat
InformationWeek Source

Social networking true believers use words like engagement, responsibility, and transparency that smack of the Internet’s hippie days in the late 1990s, yet social networking has proved to be much more than a passing fancy. The exploding numbers associated with the most popular sites like Facebook and Twitter inspire awe in even the most jaded statisticians. Time spent on social networks increased 277% in the United States last year, according to media research firm Nielsen, and Twitter itself grew more than 500%.

Now the social media category is primed to emerge as the most significant business enabler since the Internet itself. Organizations must ask themselves seven important questions about their plans for leveraging social networking over the next 12 months. Their answers may spell the difference between success and failure in the coming decade.

Are my competitors continuing to invest in social networking?

Measuring yourself against your competition isn’t the best way to decide strategy, but it’s a fair question given the flash-in-the-pan potential of social networking. And the answer is yes.

“I’m hiring,” says Christopher Barger, director of social media at General Motors. That’s the good news. The bad news is that, last July, Barger had five people in his social media group at GM; today, there’s only him. Barger says part of that reduction is due to attrition but says some has to do with his “immerse and disperse” strategy for spreading social media awareness and expertise across the automaker. People with whom he worked over the last year are now placed in the company’s communications, design, performance vehicle, and emerging technology groups.

While GM isn’t typical in terms of attrition–the company went through some financial difficulty last year; you might have read about it–it’s typical in its desire to maintain its investment in social networking. According to a Deloitte survey of more than 400 companies, conducted late last year with Beeline Labs and the Society for New Communications Research, 94% of respondents intend to maintain or increase their investment in enterprise social networking tools this year.

For its second annual “Tribalization Of Business” survey, Deloitte polled companies that maintain online communities of 100 members to more than 1 million, created on their own sites or on public social sites such as Facebook and MySpace. About 60% of those communities are less than a year old.

Click here for the full article

Discover why the world’s leading Global 2000 enterprises rely on Conenza’s corporate social networking software and expert community-building services to build and manage their employee and alumni communities.

For more information please visit our site at http://www.conenza.com

Benefits of Creating a Corporate Social Network for Employee
Creating a corporate social network for your employees can enable your organization to bridge geographies and connect cross-functional teams, thereby increasing communication and collaboration and fueling innovation. By breaking down traditional organizational hierarchies, Conenza’s corporate social networking solution enables employees to share knowledge, develop closer connections, and drive significant business impact.

Understand and tap into internal skill sets and talent
A vibrant employee social network enables you to learn more about what your people know and who they know so you can effectively tap into and leverage the talent that exists within your organization.

Fuel connections, collaboration and group communication
Move discussions out of the hallways and email and into a shared and searchable environment online were ideas can grow and cross-pollinate with the input of a global team.

Increase productivity
Provide a robust online resource that your people can tap into to get their jobs done smarter and faster. A corporate social network can enable employees to locate specialized knowledge and expertise more quickly and to create shared forums for rapid problem solving.

Increase retention and accelerate on-boarding
When your people feel connected to your business and to each other they are more committed, more productive, and stay longer. An enterprise social network enables your employees to build a deeper level of trust and teamwork. It can also help facilitate rapid employee on-boarding and career development by connecting new employees with peers and mentors that can help them get quickly acclimated and productive.

Conenza provides a social networking design essential to your corporate alumni community. Visit our site for more information at http://conenza.com

Your former employees are powerful connections that can make a significant and long term contribution to your company. Conenza’s corporate social networking software, deeply experienced insight and comprehensive consulting services enable you to foster meaningful relationships with your corporate alumni to fully realize the business value they represent.

Attracting and retaining top talent amid shifting workforce dynamics is an increasingly difficult endeavor for human capital and talent management leadership. An engaged and active alumni community, leveraging Conenza’s corporate social networking software solution and services, can help you meet recruiting and retention challenges head on and:

•    Lower recruiting costs

•    Retain access to the intellectual capital of retiring, exiting, and      former employees

•    Enhance competitive differentiation

•    Improve diversity recruiting effort

•    Accelerate employee outplacement and lower insurance costs

If you are looking to accelerate the successful launch of a new employee or alumni community or turn an under-performing initiative into a vibrant, growing community of engaged and active members, Conenza offers expert professional services to support every phase of the community lifecycle.

For more information please visit our site at http://conenza.com