Social Sites™ Professional - Enterprise 2.0 Solutions

Improving Internal Communications Effectiveness

Most corporate communications, marketing and HR professionals have trouble ensuring that information they send out gets read and/or acted upon by their stakeholders. E-mail is an ineffective communication channel due to the volume of information received by most employees. A recent Accenture survey found that 59% of managers reported missing valuable information daily as a result of e-mail overload.

NewsGator Social Sites delivers information to places your stakeholders can actually use it ─ Sharepoint and other portals, mobile devices, their desktops, preset folders in Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. Internal communications such as company announcements, newsletters, clippings, marketing documents, benefit and policy information as well as notifications from enterprise applications can be all sent via our secure enterprise RSS solution. Benefits of NewsGator Social Sites include:

• Higher retention and response rates to internal communications delivered via RSS feed
• Increased productivity as information is brought directly to knowledge workers
• Greater portal utilization through personalized and constantly updated content
• Fewer e-mail interruptions from non-critical or internal "FYI" messages

Aggregating High-value Information

Most knowledge workers spend a significant amount of time looking for relevant information on websites, portals, blogs and premium content provider databases. (An Accenture survey found that workers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than half of what they find isn’t relevant to them).

NewsGator Social Sites utilizes enterprise 2.0 solutions to improve both the efficiency and productivity of the average knowledge worker. Instead of searching for information or visiting multiple Web sites, critical information from multiple sources, including premium content providers, internal communications, Sharepoint and other portals, enterprise business applications and databases, blogs, project wikis, and external news sources, is delivered to the user via secure RSS feeds as it changes and updates are made available. Managers and/or administrators subscribe their employees, or even the entire organization, to relevant RSS feeds via portals, mobile devices, their desktops or preset folders in Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. Benefits of NewsGator Social Sites include:

• Reduced time spent searching for information
• Increased information relevancy
• Immediate knowledge of key information
• Reduced e-mail volume and interruptions

Getting a Bigger Payoff from Enterprise 2.0 Tools

Enterprise 2.0 solutions such as blogs and wikis are designed to improve employee collaboration. Usage of Enterprise 2.0 tools depends greatly on effective notification that content has changed. For example, changes in a wiki can go unnoticed if users are not looking for them, and e-mail notifications are often lost within the forest of the inbox, diluting its overall effectiveness.

NewsGator Social Sites provides the hub for ensuring that high-value collaboration content gets to the right people and automatically delivering important content back to those collaboration platforms. It is especially effective for notifying stakeholders who might not normally visit blogs and wikis but need to stay aware of important updates or changes. Updates can be delivered through RSS Feeds to portals, mobile devices, their desktops or preset folders in Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. Benefits of NewsGator Social Sites include:

• Improved collaboration and awareness through greater usage of blogs and wikis
• Increased productivity from not having to check frequently for updates
• Reduced e-mail volume from moving collaboration to other platforms

Standardizing on a Single RSS Aggregation Solution

As knowledge workers deal with an ever-growing volume of information, they have turned to RSS aggregators to improve productivity. Many of the commercially available individual-use RSS aggregators are brought in outside of the traditional IT purchase process, and they have the potential to cause significant security, support and bandwidth headaches for any organization. Secure RSS management is an ever increasing concern.

NewsGator Social Sites enables an enterprise to capture the benefits of RSS aggregation in accordance with the standards that its IT organization requires. Through feed polling and scrubbing features as well as easy installation and maintenance, NewsGator Social Sites offers several important benefits, including:

• Reduced support burden from working with a single platform
• Up to 85% lower overall bandwidth usage as a result of viral RSS reader adoption
• Mitigation of security risks – prevent malware vectors through an extra layer of security
• Easier access to archived information for future retrieval and compliance