Today we announced that we have been chosen as a finalist in the MITX Technology awards, which is a coveted competition in New England.  The awards select innovative technologies and companies in the New England area.

The award process was pretty interesting.  We were notified on a Monday afternoon that we had to be downtown on Wednesday at 4:30pm to present to the judges.  I was the presenter for Awareness, and it was fun to see many other notable companies at the competition (I even knew a few judges in another category unrelated to what we do).  The rules were very clear:  You had a handful of minutes to present/demo, and about the same time for the judges to grill you with questions.  And grill they did -- they were very thorough, covering everything from technology to business model to target audience, etc.  They also did a great job of not letting on about how they felt --when I left I couldn't tell if I'd done well or not.   It was all pretty enjoyable.

Anyway, we're thrilled we were selected as a finalist, and now we have to wait to see who actually wins.

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I'm excited by a recent blog post by Bill Ives, a popular blogger who posts on the Fast Forward blog and elsewhere, entitled "Awareness makes a smart move with its Facebook integration."   Needless to say, I'm thrilled that someone in Bill's position with an objective view of the social media landscapes thinks so highly about what we've done with Facebook.

We certainly get lots of positive reactions from people when we talk about our Facebook integration.  The concept is simple and appealing:  we can create a white-labeled Facebook application for a customer that extends their Awareness-powered community's reach into Facebook.  That means the community members can access their Awareness-powered community from directly inside Facebook.  It's convenient for users, and it leverages the viral marketing features of Facebook, which is good for the sponsoring company.

Bill's post does more than just talk about our Facebook integration; he explains the benefits of having your own branded community rather than just creating a group in Facebook (BTW, you can do both, they are not mutually exclusive).   It's certainly worth a read.

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We recently launched a community for MD Funds Management - a division of MD Financial, the financial services provider to all Canadian physicians as part of the nationalized healthcare system - called MD Investment Insight. The purpose of the community is to provide a venue for MD Funds to communicate directly with Canada's doctors about relevant industry news and company information.

One really cool aspect of the community is that Investment Insight is available in both French and English because Canada is a bilingual country. There's also a neat social networking aspect to it where users can build their own profiles to share information and post content.



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I want to echo a post made by another Awareness employee who sang the praises of Groundswell, the recent book from Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, analysts at the Forrester research firm.  For me it has been the best book I've read on social media/Web 2.0, and I recommend it to anyone considering building a community.

I got one of the first copies of the book at the Forrester Marketing Forum, and read most of it on the plane ride home. I wrote one of the first reviews on Amazon.com, and here's what I said:

*********
Groundswell is the best book I've read on social media (and I should
know a few things about social media -- I'm the VP of marketing and
direct sales for a social media company!). What makes it so good? There
are a few simple reasons:

1. It captures the essence of social media. The term "social media"
is foreign and confusing to many people, and this book cuts through the
hype and explains the "core" of what it's about.

2. It's full of customer examples. The book illuminates the power
-- and importance -- of social media by describing real-world customer
examples where social media is being used. In doing so, the book
escapes the trap of dwelling on abstract theory and instead gives you a
down-to-earth understanding of the ways social media is being used and
its benefits.

3. It's easy to read. Josh and Charlene are well-known, experienced
analysts, but the book does not read like some academic dissertation.
It has a nice cadence, with an easy conversational tone. I honestly
don't know how two people could write one book together and maintain
such a consistent, smooth style. I buzzed right through it.

4. It's practical. You'll get direct advice about how to "do it
right." And, as someone in the business, I can attest to the fact that
their advice is worth listening to.

*********************************************
I've made the book mandatory reading for everyone on the sales and marketing team.  We've all enjoyed it.  I'll bet you will, too.

Have you read it?  What did you think about it?

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Today we announced that we recently built and are running a Web 2.0 community for Jet Blue University.  It's an internal-facing community designed to bolster their training efforts.  The basic notion is that people learn on the job as much as their learn during training, and if they can share their experiences and best practices they can help each other.  The focus is on crewmembers helping each other train other crew members.

This is an effort often referred to as building a "corporate memory."  I see this happening in our company and in other companies where we've built internal-facing communities.  When a company "gets it" with how social media works, it changes the way they use email.  They begin to use email for communicaitons that are one-to-one, one-to-few, or transient messages that have no little or no value in being retained (e.g., "Can you make the meeting tomorrow?" or "there's free muffins in the kitchen," or "can everyone please remember to submit their expense reports by Thursday.")  But content that has persistent value is best conveyed in a community where it can be cataloged, searched, and retained for future employees.  And that kind of content is best entered and shared via a Web 2.0 social media community.

Jet Blue also shot a video about their social media efforts -- they did it in their own studio, without any guidance from us.  It's cool and it's only 2 minutes long.  If you want to view it you can see it here.




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Yesterday Awareness announced the deployment of a really cool Web 2.0 community for a company called Earth Knowledge.   You can see the site here.

What's cool about it?   A few things:

• The UI is very innovative.  Earth Knowledge are experts in "all things Earth," and they specialize in providing studies and meaningful content about Earth and environmental issues.  The site revolves around geo-mapping and a mashup with Google maps so that all the postings  are "geto-tagged" to a location. That means you can easily locate postings about a particular location by just clicking on an icon on the map. This is far more than just nice "eye candy" -- it radically improves the usability of the site by allowing you to find content in a format that best suits the business purpose of the community.
  


• The UI organizes content in a meaningful way.  Another cool thing about the community design is that the site presents categories of environmental information -- water, land, etc. -- in a way that makes it easy to find.  The user doesn't select from a list of "categories," they just navigate the site and it automatically filters the information appropriately.  It filters the content shown on the map at the same time. Try it and you'll see what I mean.
  


• It uses permissioning and security to segment users and control who sees what.  Depending on whether you're a visitor or a certain type of customer you have access to different content.  That's an important part of most communities -- segmenting users and controlling who can see or do what.


• It addresses real issues.  Earth Knowledge is all about preserving the environment and being good to our planet.  I love the phrase they use to describe their work:  "responsible science."  It's science applied to a very practical, important, timely issue (as opposed to academic research in some obscure abstract area).

As the announcement explains, this is the second major revision we've done for Earth Knowledge.  It presents a dramatic new look and feel but completely preseves all the content they have been generating and acquiring since their initial deployment.  That highlights two areas:

1. The flexibility of our platform and the benefit of our Uniform Content Architecture.  We're able to access and reuse the content regardless of whether it was generated as a blog, a wiki, or whatever. So the UI and external appearance can completely change, but the content remains untouched.
   


2. Our partnership model.  We work with customers on their intial deployment and then stay close to them to revise their community to match their evolving needs as they learn more about what their customers want.  It's a good general rule that the initial community you deploy won't be the final one -- it will change over time as you learn and you customers become vocal.  That's something we've learned and tell customers about as part of our best practices.  You don't need the perfect communty to start with -- but you do need a way to improve it over time.
   

Congratulations to Earth Knowledge for doing something so important and so cool!


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