Below quote from article from Wall Street and Tech here:

“In the last few years, more banking executives have started joining personal social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. For example, there are over 14,000 Goldman Sachs’ employees who have created an account on LinkedIn. Not all of them are active, but for some it has been a useful way to dust off their Rolodexes and move them online. These sites have worked well for staying in touch with friends and colleagues and keeping them posted on personal and career activities and updates. These online networks, however, are used and accessed by individuals. The bank has no access to the networks of its employees”

Finally, A social networking platform that ensures security, privacy, and reliability.

The Conenza Community Platform is a hosted Software-as-a-Service solution designed to ensure ease of use and peace of mind by combining enterprise-class levels of security, privacy, and reliability. Our best practices approach to technology, privacy, hosting, service and support gives you the confidence to dispense with infrastructure worries and focus instead on optimizing the real benefits of your alumni community.

Your company can provide different constituency groups with access to the information and functionality that they need to create value in the community with the Conenza’s Community Platforms complex permissions capabilities

New Statesman Article
Published 08 February 2010

In four years, social networking services will replace e-mail for about 20 per cent of business users, according to Gartner, the information technology research and advisory firm. By 2012, over 50 per cent of businesses will be using microblogging to share quick updates with consumers and colleagues and to get quick answers to questions.

“However, it will be difficult for microblogging as a stand-alone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter’s scale is one of the reasons for its popularity,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice-president for Gartner.

In five years, 70 per cent of communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after smartphone collaboration applications. Cell phones will replace desk phones, and most collaboration tools will be integrated with them, according to Gartner.

Through 2015, about 25 per cent of businesses will use social network analysis to improve performance and productivity. Such analysis allows companies to study communication patterns and information flow that occurs between staff and customers.

Get in touch with Conenza to discuss their business social network solution and discover the benefits of corporate social networking.

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/

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

By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza

We have been getting a lot of questions lately regarding key things to consider and plan for when launching a new corporate alumni program. Over the last decade, while working with some of the world’s leading companies to build and manage private, branded online alumni communities, Conenza has identified seven significant keys to success. We will be sharing these steps with you as part of this two part series. In this post we will be digging into steps one through three, and next week we will tackle four through seven.

1) Clearly outline your business objectives

Corporate Alumni Programs can deliver compelling business benefits across the enterprise:
• increased recruiting efficiency,
• retained access to valuable knowledge and know-how,
• new and highly-effective channels for business development, marketing and research.

When launching a new initiative it is important to focus on and clearly define the primary business drivers for your community. Doing this at the start will help you build a program that is designed to quickly maximize the impact. As most of our clients have found, the benefits that you realize from your community will evolve and expand over time, and we recommend that when you are getting started you should: focus, prove success quickly, and then expand the impact and value.

2) Establish measurable goals for your alumni community

Once you have outlined what you want to achieve through your corporate alumni initiative, it is critical to define how you are going to measure and report on your community success. In a recent Human Capital Institute webinar, Excelling at Corporate Alumni Relations, Dr. John Sullivan gave some great examples of metrics to consider:

Example of Recruiting and HR Metrics
1. Percentage rate of boomerang rehires (alumni who come back to the business)
2. Average performance rating of boomerangs
3. Diversity rate of boomerangs
4. Time to productivity of boomerangs
5. # of successful hires from alumni referrals

Example of Business Impact Metrics
1. Sales referrals attributed to alumni
2. $ of sales attributed to alumni
3. # of beta products tested
4. Ideas captured

Example of General Program Metrics
1. Program ROI
2. % of targeted alumni that actively participate
3. Manager satisfaction with the program
4. Alumni satisfaction with the program
5. Alumni perception of the firm

At Conenza, we have also found that defining goals and metrics around the health of your online community are equally as important. Metrics like # of active members, # of connections made, and volume of member-contributed content, can help you measure how your community is growing, how engaged are its members, and marketing effectiveness.

3) Build an alumni community infrastructure that helps you quickly and cost-effectively achieve your goals

When building the infrastructure to support and grow a corporate alumni program, there are two critical questions an organization will need to answer and plan for:

1) What technology will we use to help us achieve the goals of the program?
2) How can we effectively integrate the program into our current business processes?

When it comes to technology, there are several different approaches and solutions for building an online corporate alumni community, so many choices in fact that it may be overwhelming. To simplify things it’s helpful to think in terms of whether the technology makes it easier to achieve your community goals. For example, if re-recruitment is a primary goal, does the community solution you are looking at provide an easy way to display open opportunities, target qualified candidates, and track the success of your efforts? Does it allow your community members to effectively display their unique skill sets and experience?

Another leading requirement for our enterprise clients is often around the privacy and security of their community and their data. They want to create a trusted environment where people feel comfortable connecting and collaborating and where they know the privacy of their data will be respected. The recent controversy around the Facebook Terms of Use really put a spotlight on how important it is for people to trust that their data privacy will be respected as they interact within an online social network.

Driving adoption of your community internally is critical to your community’s success. Some of the most successful programs we have seen have put a strong focus on integrating their alumni program with the existing internal business processes. Sales people are programmed to do an alumni search when targeting a new prospect or expand existing business to identify “friendly” contacts. The on-boarding process highlights the lifetime relationships that the company hopes to build with its people as demonstrated by the alumni community. Research efforts tap into alumni resources.

Some of the ways we have seen clients gain rapid internal adoption for their programs are to:
• Enlist and promote C-level support from the program’s onset
• Establish an “Alumni Community Taskforce” with stakeholders from across the enterprise and focused on key impact areas: recruitment, business development, marketing
• Create an internal program information portal and make this highly visible on company Intranet
• Integrate the community platform with internal systems: HR systems, sales & marketing systems
• Add alumni community metrics to standard business reporting

In next week’s post we will take a look at steps 4-7. In the mean time if you would like to take a look at a detailed presentation on the seven steps we are highlighting as part of this series you can register and download it here.

By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza

Workforce reductions are one of the hardest decisions a leader has to make. Unfortunately, in the current economic climate, it is a decision from which few of us are immune.

Leaders want to ease the transition and communicate that they still value their people, including those who are leaving. Creating a secure, private, branded online community where your former employees can stay connected to your company and each other can:

• Send a powerful message about the value you place on your company’s people, current and former
• Provide exiting employees with valuable connections, benefits, resources, and peer support
• Deliver real value back to your business and ensure you don’t lose touch as they are walking out the door

The Microsoft Alumni Network (MSA) recently announced a program that provides a great example about how an alumni community can help support exiting and former employees. In an effort to connect former Microsoft employees with companies looking for top talent, MSA is currently offering free job postings to companies interested in targeting this qualified pool of more than 10,000 validated Microsoft alumni around the globe. Companies with open positions can post their jobs in the Opportunity Center online at: https://www.msanet.org/default.asp?pageID=car_postjob

For over a decade, the Microsoft Alumni Network has been the official organization for Microsoft Alumni worldwide. MSA helps support its members with a wide variety of benefits, including access to the Microsoft Company Store, job opportunities at Microsoft and other leading companies, competitive pricing on individual and small business health insurance and benefits, annual events, and other special privileges. Membership is open to authenticated former FTEs of Microsoft.

Conenza is sponsoring a Human Capital Institute Webinar on March 3, 2009, that is focused on this emerging talent management discipline, Corporate Alumni Relations.

You can find the details below, we hope you will join us:
Excelling at Corporate Alumni Relations
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 / 10:00 AM PT
Featured Speaker: Dr. John Sullivan, CEO, Dr. John Sullivan & Associates
Register Now 

By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza

Gartner recently presented its 10 ‘CIO resolutions for 2009’. There are some great recommendations on this list for CIO’s looking to maintain a competitive edge in a challenging economic environment. I encourage you to check it out.

#1 on the list this year was the advice to build a corporate alumni community to retain access to valuable knowledge and hard to find skills and to help bolster recruiting efforts.

Below are a few highlights that we have pulled from Gartner’s recent announcement that relate to corporate social networking:

“1. Start Building an Alumni Network: To maintain legacy skills and complex experienced pools of labour, Gartner recommends CIOs establish alumni networks. This could include a semi-official company IT alumni association with its own web page, use of web social networking tools and re-establishing bounty schemes, where staff are paid for recruits they bring in.

#5. Start using social systems yourself, visibly: Gartner said that CIOs need to start visibly using social networks themselves to kick-start their participation from other staff - lurking in quiet observation is not enough. Gartner advised CIOs to also encourage the leadership team into using social media more openly to communicate internally and externally to rebuild brand confidence, energise the company culture, develop ideas and refine solutions.”

This Gartner report entitled “CIO New Year’s Resolutions, 2009″ is available at: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=849815&subref=advsearch

By Meighan Berberich, Director of MarCom, Conenza

Today, we announced the launch of the Conenza Community Core 3.0.

The Conenza Community Core, the foundational building block of Conenza’s modular enterprise social software solution, provides global companies with an easy and cost-effective way to get started and quickly create value from a privately-branded online alumni and employee community.

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 employee and alumni community. Add-on modules include the Opportunity Center, Events, and Marketplaces.

You can check out the complete announcement here.

By Tony Audino, Co-Founder & CEO, Conenza

Companies around the globe are dealing with challenging economic times. Corporations are being forced to make difficult decisions about their business and people with imperfect and constantly-changing information.

It’s natural during an economic downturn to scrutinize and prioritize investments. Strategic executives will make the choice to invest in initiatives that make their company more efficient, more productive, and more competitive—positioning them well for future growth. The business case for a private employee and alumni community in normal economic times is one that is extremely compelling; in an economic downturn it becomes a strategic imperative.

Here are five ways a corporate employee and alumni community can uniquely contribute to your business during an economic downturn:

1. Capitalize on highly-effective sales and marketing connections. Your former employees are influencers and decision-makers at companies around the globe. Whether they are working at clients or prospects, these are people with whom it’s smart to cultivate relationships. They are strong brand ambassadors, ready to refer your organization to co-workers and colleagues at their current companies. Re-establishing and leveraging these alumni relationships always makes business sense, but becomes especially important when markets tighten and new opportunities become scarce. Help your sales and marketing people open doors with these friendly contacts. Our clients have witnessed multi-million dollar revenue increases directly traceable to their online alumni communities.
2. Substantially reduce COBRA expenses from former employees. Across the corporate world, the red pen is out. COBRA expenses—which average $2,632 per COBRA continuant according to Ceridian—can be a substantial cash drain and add no value back to your organization.

   For companies that are self-insured and experience layoffs, the cost of COBRA can be staggering. However, even fully-insured companies feel the pain as increased COBRA costs translate into rate hikes in subsequent years. According to the Employee Health Benefit Research Institute, employers and their active employees generally bear the brunt of the higher health care costs because of the high cost of COBRA participants.

   Conenza’s Community Platform provides two unique ways to substantially reduce your COBRA expenses:
   * The Conenza Marketplace module provides alumni with privileged access to cost-effective benefits and insurance. This alternative to COBRA coverage is a win-win solution that enables alumni to avoid the high cost of COBRA premiums and your company to reduce COBRA-related expenses.
   * The Conenza Opportunities module provides a place where transitioning employees can discover comprehensive career resources, and quickly find a new job that is right for them. Your company’s ability to support their next career change creates goodwill and simultaneously reduces your outplacement costs.

3. Build your employment brand. Starting an employee and alumni community during an economic downturn sends a powerful statement regarding the value your organization places on lasting relationships with your people—both current and former employees. It creates a corporate culture that is strongly rooted in relationships and trust. When employees leave and become part of your online alumni community, they are positively reminded of and still feel a part of your culture and your company. If there was ever an important time to stay connected with your alumni, it’s now.
4. Maintain your competitive edge through an extended knowledge network. An employee and alumni community enables an organization to stay connected to key contributors and capture the valuable intellectual capital of departing employees. One of the most lasting downsides of exiting employees is the unnecessary setback of losing the knowledge and ideas they take with them. By shifting a miniscule fraction of your R&D, recruiting or marketing budget to maintaining valuable relationships in a fully-managed private online community, your company retains active access to the smarts and connections of all your people—whether they’re still with the company or not.
5. Find and place exceptional talent from both inside and outside your organization Although hiring may be limited for most organizations during a downturn, it can actually be a great time to identify internal people with the hidden skills to step up to new challenges or cost-effectively acquire top talent with hard to find skill sets who know your business and can really make an impact. A strong, vibrant employee and alumni community enables you to learn more about what your people know, identify new skills and capacity, and stay connected and aware of the career status of top alumni talent so you can rehire or bring them on as contractors when the opportunity arises. From an employee or recruit’s perspective, a company with an active extended talent community is far more of a draw than one without. In uncertain times, companies who view their people as an asset worth cultivating throughout their careers have a distinct advantage in attracting the best and the brightest.

Times like this are extremely difficult, but ripe with opportunity for strategic-thinking executives. Building and maintaining strong, mutually-rewarding relationships with both your current and former employees will help ensure your organization makes the most of its people now and in the future.

By Kate Gilliatt, Conenza’s Director of Strategic Account Services 

With the holidays fast approaching, there is so much to do. Decorating, writing holiday cards, shopping, baking favorite family recipes….and most importantly, focusing on people who mean the most.

December is also a great time to reconnect with your colleagues—both current and former—and enhance the value of your social networking initiatives. Inspired by a post-turkey dinner Scrabble game, I give you the following eight ways to kick member engagement within your employee and alumni community into HIGH GEAR:

H   Holiday Greetings – personalized holiday messages are a great way to let your people know that you are thinking about them. Tell them you value their friendship, support, and keeping in touch. As a business colleague, offer your support in the new year should they have a need. Make phone calls to say hello or use email holiday greetings (which are the norm especially given tight budgets this year).

I   Invitation to Participate – Whatever activities and Web site resources are available for your community, proactively invite members to participate. Make sure they know that what is available and give them reasons to get involved. For example: on ABC Company’s Alumni Web site you can view a list of 200 open jobs, read the December newsletter, and access discounts on up to 6,000 products and services. Tell them what’s there, why it’s exciting, and why it’s worth visiting.

G   Get Updated Profile Information – Rich member profile data is at the heart of any successful employee and alumni community. December is the perfect time to request profile updates via email. Ask members to confirm that their contact information and photo is up-to-date. If they have updates, ask them to edit their profile on the Web site directly or, for convenience, send changes to you for easy updating. You will be amazed at how much information you can gather this way, and how valuable these profiles will be across your organization. Out-of-office emails can also be a good source of contact information.

H   Helping – Social networks thrive when members feel connected and help each other. Find innovative ways to ask how they are doing and what they would like to see more of from their community. Can you make introductions or share information they need for a specific project? If you help them, they will be more likely to help you through positive word of mouth, referrals, and possibly as clients directly. Ultimately, the network value increases as members take ownership and become more involved in the community.

G   Gratitude – Tell your members that they are important to you and to your company. This is something you can do year round. Make sure they hear this often, and occasionally from your CEO. Alumni who are clients should receive an extra special thank you.

E   Encourage Members to Connect with one another and with their former friends and colleagues, whether it be face-to-face at events or online. In Conenza’s platform, there are many ways members can engage and connect via social networking features like blogs, groups, messaging, and connections.

A   Advertise Upcoming Activities and Events for the new year. Get important event dates on their calendar as far in advance as possible. Invite your members to get more involved, possibly leading a group or local chapter, starting a discussion group or blog; or hosting an event in their local city. Focus on business and social networking activities.

R   Relationships and Trust – this is what it’s all about. During December and January, block time on your calendar to follow some of the above tips for maintaining and nurturing the relationships with your contacts, past and present. Creating a trusted community depends on it.

I hope these eight ideas will help jump start your organization’s employee and alumni social network as we head into 2009. If you have questions please contact me at Kate.Gilliatt@conenza.com.