One on One with Tim Young of Socialcast

Tim Young is CEO and founder at Socialcast. Prior to that, he spent more than eight years helping develop other companies including Event Robot, a company that developed online communities for consumer-facing brands in the entertainment industry. He regularly speaks about social networking and collaboration at industry conferences and guest teaches at the University of California, Irvine. We asked him about social networking products in the enterprise.

FCM: How can microblogging help an organization share information and collaborate?

TY: Microblogging provides a low-friction way for employees to share and consume information very quickly. It only takes a minute to share with microblogging's short message format, so it makes it easier and faster to contribute information to a company's knowledge base. Employees who don't have time to collaborate on a wiki, or who only need to find information but not post, can use microblogging tools to meet their needs. Because microblogging is a real-time activity, it aggregates the most up to date information available. All together, this makes microblogging the fastest, easiest way to facilitate widespread collaboration across an enterprise.
 
FCM: You are trying to succeed with just a microblogging tool. Do you have plans to add other social networking tool functionality to your product?

TY: Microblogging has proven to be a great way to introduce enterprise users to the value of real-time multi-cast communication. We will continue to evolve Socialcast to help increase knowledge sharing and collaboration between employees. Part of this evolution includes helping companies understand their corporate social graph in order to optimize information flow. Instead of us adding additional functionality to the product, we will focus on helping our clients integrate their legacy systems into Socialcast in order to socialize real-time data that's meaningful to them. We currently have clients using our API to pull sales data, inventory data, and production milestones, making it available for collaboration by employees. To us, facilitating the creation and use of custom activity streams at the company level is our next major step.
 
FCM: Microblogging can generate lots of great information, which your analytics tool can help you find, but to be really useful to me, you have to be able to pass this information to other enterprise applications like the content management system. Can your tool do this?

TY: Yes, currently you can use our API to pass information to other applications and content management systems. In the near future, you can expect to see product innovation around helping employees easily sift through large amounts of information in real-time and simple tools which allow users to interact with Socialcast data from within other enterprise applications.

FCM: If a company has SharePoint or a content management system with social tools, why do they need a stand-alone product like yours?

TY: About half of the companies that come to us use SharePoint or another similar system, and they almost always tell us that it's really only useful as a document repository. There are still silos that prevent rapid information-sharing across boundaries, and these systems can be tough to navigate. Socialcast creates the missing social piece of collaboration in companies that are using SharePoint. We can connect to SharePoint to help socialize the data that it's holding, but we bridge the gap between known information and the data that is trapped in someone's head. Again, there's a low barrier to entry for microblogging tools, making them very useful for rapid information exchange.

FCM: How do you convince people that open communication with tools like yours is good for business?

TY: We don't have to do much convincing anymore--in the past year, we've been flooded with companies who have actually already made that decision themselves. However, even though companies know they need a tool like Socialcast, and that it will be good for business, they need something tangible to show them that it's working. That's why we introduced Social Business Intelligence--it's our analytical suite that measures conversations, connections and important topics in the network. Companies are always looking for the ROI of their initiatives, and SBI is our way of giving them the power to measure the open communication that they've fostered.

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