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Society for New Communications Research Announces Call for Submissions for 2009 Excellence in New Communications Awards

Prestigious Awards Honor Excellence in New Media and Communications, Social Media and ICT Developments

The Society for New Communications Research today announced a call for entries for the 2009 Excellence in New Communications Awards.

This prestigious awards program honors the work of corporations, governmental and nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, media outlets and individuals who are innovating the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities and virtual worlds and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, and professional communications, including advertising, marketing, public relations and corporate communications, as well as entertainment, education, politics, and social initiatives.

Awards are granted in six divisions: Corporate, Government, Media, Nonprofit/NGO, Academic and Technology Innovation (for New Communications and Social Media Technology Vendors), and in twelve categories: Online Reputation Management; Behind the Firewall; Influencer Relations; External Communications & Communities; Collaboration & Co-creation; New Media Creation; Online Publishing; Mobile Media; Microblogging; Social CRM; and Measurement Innovation.

Entrants are asked to submit case studies detailing their initiatives and technologies. The winning case studies are published by SNCR and New Communications Review and the winners will be honored at the 2009 Society for New Communications Research Symposium & Awards Gala, which will be held November 5-6 at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Mass. and hosted by SNCR Fellow Paul Gillin.

Entry guidelines and the online entry form can be found at http://www.sncr.org/awards. The deadline for submissions is September 7th, 2009. No extensions will be granted.

Popularity: 58% [?]

2009 Online Journalism Awards Open for Entries

The Online News Association, the world's largest membership organization of digital journalists, and the University of Miami's School of Communication today opened their call for entries for the 2009 Online Journalism Awards (OJAs), emblematic of the best in online journalism.

This year, ONA has introduced changes to acknowledge the important role of emerging technology, the influence of the independent digital journalist and the growth of community reporting efforts. Six awards now come with a total of $30,000 in prize money, courtesy of the Gannett Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the General Excellence in Online Journalism Award has expanded to include "micro sites."

The OJAs are the only comprehensive set of journalism prizes honoring excellence in digital journalism. Past winners have included major media, international and independent sites and individuals producing innovative work in multimedia storytelling. This year's honorees will be announced on the final night of ONA09, the Online News Association Conference and Awards Banquet, Oct. 1-3 in San Francisco.

The OJAs are open to work first published between June 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009. Applicants are invited to enter their submissions at Journalistawards.org, until June 30, in one or more of the following categories:

The Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism: This new category, with a prize of $5,000, honors a person or company, journalistic in focus or not, that has built a digital tool significantly enhancing the practice of online journalism.

The Knight Award for Public Service: Recognizes digital journalism that performs a public service for a geographic community through compelling coverage of a vital community issue or event; one $5,000 award.

General Excellence in Online Journalism: Honors a Web site in each of four size categories, plus two from the non-English speaking community, which successfully fulfill their editorial mission, effectively serve their audience, maximize the use of the Web's characteristics and represent the highest journalistic standards. For the first time, ONA has introduced a micro site category to encourage small-scale efforts. The award is $3,000 for each winner, funded by the Gannett Foundation.

Breaking News: Honors digital coverage over a 72-hour period of a breaking-news event or development.

Specialty Site Journalism: Recognizes niche Web sites that focus on a single topic.

Investigative Journalism: Honors stories that uncover major news based on the reporters' own exclusive investigations or that offer compelling and original analysis and interpretation.

Multimedia Feature Presentation: Awards excellence in telling a story to an online audience using multimedia techniques.

Online Topical Reporting/Blogging: Recognizes beat reporting by an individual or team.

Online Commentary/Blogging: Honors a unique and powerful voice of commentary original to the Web.

Community Collaboration Award: A new award recognizing a news project or Web site that produces outstanding journalism through strong interaction with the community being served.

Outstanding Use of Digital Technologies: Recognizes achievement by a site in the use of digital techniques to tell a story and serve a community.

Online Video Journalism: Awards excellence in online-originated video journalism.

Student Journalism: Honors digital journalism by a student or team reporting on a single story or issue.

The winners are selected through a two-step process. First, a group of more than 100 journalists screen and rank the entries in each category. In August, a panel of industry-leading journalists and new media professionals judge finalists and select winners at the University of Miami under the auspices of the School of Communication.

The Online News Association is the world's largest association of online journalists. ONA's mission is to inspire innovation and excellence among journalists to better serve the public. The membership includes news writers, producers, designers, editors, bloggers, technologists, photographers and others who produce news for the Internet or other digital delivery systems, as well as academic members and others interested in the development of online journalism.

The University of Miami School of Communication prepares analytical and responsible communication professionals for success in a global society. The School offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in journalism, broadcasting, advertising, public relations, visual journalism, communication studies and motion pictures. The School's state of the art, all-digital facilities and resources are among the most advanced in the country. Approximately 1,500 students are enrolled.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation promotes journalism excellence worldwide and invests in the vitality of the U.S. communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Since 1950 the foundation has granted more than $400 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. Knight Foundation focuses on ideas and projects that create transformational change.

The Gannett Foundation is a corporate foundation sponsored by Gannett Co., Inc. whose mission is to invest in the future of the communities in which Gannett does business, and in the future of our industry. It supports projects that take a creative approach to fundamental issues such as education and neighborhood improvement, economic development, youth development, community problem-solving, assistance to disadvantaged people, environmental conservation and cultural enrichment.

For more information, contact:

Jane McDonnell, Executive Director
Online News Association
director@journalists.org

Sherry Skalko
Editor, Journalists.org
sskalko@journalists.org

Popularity: 16% [?]

Network Solutions Wins SNCR Excellence Award for Online Reputation Management

Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Swami at Network Solutions, accepting the 2008 Excellence in New Communications Award given to him and Livingston Communications at the Society for New Communications Research Awards Gala.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Society for New Communications Research Honors Award Winners - Publishes New Award Winning Case Studies

The Society for New Communications Research has announced the winners of the 2008 SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards at the 3rd Annual SNCR Research Symposium & Awards Gala held at the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge Mass. on Friday, November 14th.

The Society’s prestigious awards program honors individuals, corporations, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and media outlets that are pioneering the use of social media, ICT, mobile media, online communities, virtual worlds, and collaborative technologies in the areas of business, media, journalism and professional communications, entertainment, education, social initiatives, government and politics. This year the Society’s Fellows reviewed nearly 100 case study submissions.

Awards were granted in six divisions: Corporate, Government, Media, Nonprofit/NGO, Academic, and Technology Innovation, and in seven categories: Behind the Firewall; Blogger Relations; Collaboration and Co-creation; External Communications and Communities; New Media Creation; Mobile Media and Online Reputation Management. The winners include:

• “Behind the Firewall” (Internal Communications/Corporate Division: Dell, Inc.
• Blogger Relations/Corporate Division: Molson with Hill & Knowlton
• Collaboration & Co-creation/Corporate Division: Dell’s IdeaStorm Team with Salesforce.com
• Collaboration & Co-creation/Academic Division: United Nations University
with the WHO Centre for Health Development
• External Communications & Communities/Government Division: State Bar of Texas
• External Communications & Communities/Nonprofit Division: Couchsurfing, International
• External Communications & Communities/Corporate Division: SAP
• New Media Creation/Social Media Production/Nonprofit Division: Homeless Nation
• New Media Creation/Social Media Production/Academic Division: Lynn University
• New Media Creation/Social Media Production/Corporate Division: The Washington Capitals with Brand Thunder
• New Media Creation/Social Media Production/Media Division: Revision3
• Mobile Media/Corporate Division: Unilever with Edelman Mobile for the Dove campaign
• Online Reputation Management/Academic Division: University of Illinois at Springfield
• Online Reputation Management/Corporate Division: Network Solutions with Livingston Communications
• Technology Innovation: Mobility Public Relations, Vizu, Inc., and Zannel

The Society’s Fellows also honored Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, co-authors of Groundswell as the 2008 SNCR Visionaries of the Year, Twitter as the Innovation of the Year, and Dell, Inc. as the Brand of the Year. SNCR recognized Dell with three awards in all – honoring Dell’s excellence in using social media tools and technologies to improve the company’s internal communications, collaboration initiatives, and brand image.

In addition to the top award winners in each division and category, Commendations of Merit and Commendations of Excellence were presented to more than 35 other organizations that submitted case studies in the awards program.

More than 50 of these winning case studies have been published here:

BEHIND THE FIREWALL (INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS) CASE STUDIES

COLLABORATION & CO-CREATION CASE STUDIES

EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS CASE STUDIES

MOBILE MEDIA CASE STUDIES

NEW MEDIA CREATION/SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCTION -( Corporate Division)

NEW MEDIA CREATION/SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCTION (Academic/Media/Nonprofit Divisions)

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT CASE STUDIES

TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION CASE STUDIES

Popularity: 33% [?]

Laura Fitton Accepts Innovation of the Year Award on Behalf of Twitter

Laura Fitton (@pistachio, Principal of Pistachio Consulting) accepted the SNCR Innovator of the Year Award on behalf of Twitter founders Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams.

Check out all of the winning case studies here.

Popularity: 27% [?]

TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION CASE STUDIES

Winners:
Zannel
Vizu
Mobility Public Relations

Commendation of Merit:
Nanos Research

Division: Technology Innovation
Category: Blogger Relations
Company: Zannel

The use of micro-blogging sites like Twitter and live blogging from events have become increasingly integral for bloggers looking to spread news from anywhere, in real-time. However, bloggers have generally been confined to micro-blogging with short, text-only updates, or have to rush -- drafting their blog posts on the spot and carrying around their laptops. The challenge is to introduce an effective and simple way for bloggers to communicate current happenings with their audience through a variety of mediums, including text, video and images, in real-time. Zannel (www.zannel.com) is offering a new way for bloggers to expand their reach through mobile phones, drive incremental traffic back to their blogs, and get on board with an innovative way to communicate.

Today nearly everyone has a camera phone, and many people also have videophones. According to analyst reports, only 2-3% of the photos people take with their phones end up ever leaving that phone. SMS texting, on the other hand, has become a very popular form of communication in the general population. As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. There is a huge opportunity for people, especially bloggers, to take the capabilities of their phones such as SMS, photos and video, and utilize them to communicate in a more effective manner, rather than simply with words, and reach a large audience in real-time.

Currently, bloggers are utilizing Twitter while out on the road, and at events, etc., which only allows for text updates to their followers. If they wish to live-blog with more details and photos, they need to find a seat somewhere where they can have their laptop running and be ready to start typing. They may be able to add picture or video, but in the time it takes to snap a photo, upload it onto a laptop and feed it onto an online blog (all while typing away), that picture is old news. Of course, there’s always the issue of having a reliable Internet connection. Without one, live-blogging is just not possible.

Cell phones work almost everywhere, and with their ability to send SMS messages and snap photos and video, there is an opportunity to be able to communicate not just with short texts, but with images and video as well. If bloggers had the ability to live blog any content with nothing but a phone, a new mode of communication becomes available.

Zannel users are between the ages of 16-34 and are everyday consumers, as opposed to the highly tech/professional audience of Twitter. Zannel users are interested in politics, celebrities, bands, musicians, local news, brands and a variety of other consumer-oriented topics.

Zannel is targeting visual bloggers, consumers, talent such as bands, artists, entertainers, celebrities and politicians, and brand names. All of these categories are ultimately potential bloggers.

Zannel’s goal is to become the first large-scale mobile media network worldwide. Its roadmap includes expanding platform functionality, increasing US penetration, and deploying internationally. It is Zannel’s mission to make it simple and easy use for people, especially bloggers, to use their mobile phones to create content.

Zannel’s plan is a multi-prong approach. Zannel is currently reaching out to a number of high-profile bloggers to enlist them as “Zannel evangelists.” Zannel is also forming relationships with influential celebrities, organizations and companies to spread the word virally via Zannel livecasting. Verticals included in this group span politics, music, film, entertainment, lifestyle and other pop culture avenues.

To ensure that Zannel is accessible to as wide an audience as possible, the company will continue to unveil new technology partnerships with the most popular devices and services used today by the target demographic.

As with many start-ups, Zannel continues to forge new territory in recognition and awareness. It has had to overcome the challenge of being categorized as a mobile photo sharing and mobile networking solution. Although these are aspects of Zannel, there is much more. Zannel is a multimedia equivalent to Twitter, where users can go to get short updates, or “nano-blogs,” with text, images and videos, from bloggers around the globe.

Zannel’s tools include its mobile and web-based networks, widgets that can be placed on blogs, MySpace and other websites, a Facebook application, and live feeds that push content to Twitter and Flickr.

Zannel launched the mobile industry’s first Instant Media Messaging™ service, which allows users to instantly and visually communicate with their friends across mobile networks and the web, including all major social networks. Founded by the team that built the first large-scale mobile media storefronts in the US, Zannel combines the best of mobile messaging, media sharing, and social networking into an intuitive, compelling user experience. Zannel aims to become known as the multimedia alternative to Twitter, focusing on the consumer audience rather than the technology-focused audience of Twitter. A qualitative measurement of success will be the use of Zannel by musicians, entertainers, politicians and brands to ultimately use Zannel as an advertising channel for their music, message and product.

One example of this occurred at the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC), where thirteen grassroots bloggers broadcasted video, pictures and text updates straight from the floor of the convention using Zannel and their mobile phones. These bloggers represented every region of the United States of America, and are contributing to Zannel’s PoliticsBlue community channel (www.zannel.com/politicsblue) from the convention through Election Day. Representing North, South, East, West, and even registered Democrats living abroad, these bloggers broadcasted their journeys to this historic event, their observations, on-the-fly interviews, interactions with delegates, and authentic captured moments with political figures on the national scene. By leveraging Zannel’s award winning mobile platform, they were able to instantly share their convention coverage with their blog’s readers, the Zannel community, and to the blogging and social networks to which Zannel syndicates content. For instance, one blogger was riding in an elevator with Howard Dean, the chairman of the DNC, and interviewed him on video with his phone. It was sent instantly to Zannel for people to view. That behind-the-scenes view is not presented in any other way at the convention besides via Zannel (http://www.zannel.com/viewupdate.htm?id=BELCC64PP). In addition, the news that bloggers were using Zannel on the floor also became a news story on CNN (http://www.zannel.com/viewupdate.htm?id=X0G2GU7XS6).

The bloggers who used Zannel at the DNC were able to feed their audience real-time photos and video right from the show floor. The ability to get Howard Dean on tape in the elevator with a cell phone, and feed that directly to the Zannel community, is something not even the biggest news conglomerates were able to offer their audience. In addition, those who had the opportunity to see this near live coverage through Zannel were given a direct link back to the blogger’s personal blog, driving incremental traffic back and building visibility for the bloggers themselves. The DNC example shows that Zannel enables a real-time multimedia blogging experience for readers and followers, and benefits the bloggers themselves with the ability to upload meaningful content from anywhere, deliver it to their readers instantly and simultaneously drive traffic back to their site.

Division: Technology Innovation
Category: Mobile Media
Company: Vizu

Internet advertising is exploding. Yet much of the $20+ billion in online advertising is being invested in direct response mechanisms – search and banner promotion. A larger advertising opportunity is in brand advertising. Those advertisers remain skittish about their return-on-investment from the Internet. The challenge is to provide a system that allows marketers to advertise with confidence.

Online advertising remains an enigma – A huge industry with enviable growth expectations that remains small when compared to the Internet’s audience size and active use of the medium. The Internet’s advertising promise has always been simple – the natural feedback mechanism of a two-way communications media makes it possible for advertisers to see immediately how their advertising investment is performing, based on the goals of a direct response campaign.

Maybe the campaign is intended to lead a consumer to a promotional web site. Perhaps the ad is geared toward a direct purchase by the consumer, or maybe the ad is intended to lead a consumer to another portion of the web site. These are all easily measured by clicks, cookies and consumer behavior.

But brand advertising has always been a far larger opportunity. How do you measure the effectiveness of a brand advertisement when the goal is simply to raise the profile of a brand with consumers? How is that feedback mechanism solved on the Internet?

Brand marketers, digital agencies and publishers require a trusted technology system from a third-party to be able to deliver an effective return-on-investment story on brand advertising expenditures. They need to measure common attributes associated with brands that are not collected through just a click – purchase intent, preference and awareness, for example.

These brand advertisers also need a common metric so that they know when a campaign is successful, when an advertising initiative is faltering, and when they need to change course. Given the often short duration of online advertising campaigns, marketers also need a system that provides data everyday, in real-time. In this manner, brand advertising can become a peer to other forms of advertising on the Internet and extend the long-term health and prosperity of the online advertising industry. Vizu (www.vizu.com) is providing solutions to these issues.

The target audience for this everyday brand measurement system – called Vizu Ad Catalyst – is large publishers, digital advertising agencies and brands that want to advertise online with confidence.

These publishers and advertisers are veterans of Internet advertising from a direct response perspective – click on an ad and it takes you to a commerce site for a purchase or a related site to what you were searching for on Google. Brand advertising measurement online is a different challenge for a more sophisticated audience.

Major online publishers and networks typically use Ad Catalyst to drive sales by attracting and retaining brand advertisers at higher rates. Agencies use Ad Catalyst to make their media buying as efficient and effective as possible for their clients and to provide an advertising return-on-investment.

Vizu Ad Catalyst measures the performance of online brand advertising campaigns, using brand lift as the relevant metric rather than click-through rates, which are inappropriate for brand building campaigns. Marketers can measure return-on-investment for online brand advertising campaigns for the first time.

This is significant. Up to now, brand advertisers have been provided few tools to measure the effectiveness of their advertising investments. Through the use of Vizu Ad Catalyst, not only will publishers and advertisers gain new everyday insights into their campaigns, they will be building a powerful set of normative data that can be used to adjust and optimize future campaigns across type, industry, etc.

These best practices empower the target audience – publishers and advertisers – to allocate more of their advertising dollars online. Given the explosion of multimedia content on the Web, a measurement system for brand advertising will only provide this audience with more reason to spend money online.

Vizu Ad Catalyst was built from the ground up to serve the needs of publishers, digital advertising agencies and brand advertisers. Our intention was to build a system that could handle hundreds of campaigns and deliver a rich set of data across a wide variety of brand attributes for customers.

Rather than submit a specific customer case study, we decided to submit our system for consideration for the award. However, our system is currently in use within some of the largest digital agencies, brands and publishers in the world. Our experience with these customers can also be shared as part of consideration for this award. Some of these customers include: Burger King, Vonage, Hilton Hotels, and several brands in the Unilever family.

Having built the system, Vizu’s go-to-market strategy was simple – Prove that brand lift, as a metric for measuring online brand advertising attributes, is a better tool for marketers than simple click-through rates. Since the spring of this year, Vizu has been working with early customers to optimize campaigns and the tools we deliver to our customers.

As we head into the fall of 2008, our early success is indicative of how successful the plan has been – nearly 20 active customers running Ad Catalyst across a wide variety of campaigns, gathering data across a wide set of brand types.

Moving forward, our plan continues to be focused on expanding our feature set technologically and listening to our early customers to fine-tune our approach. In addition, we’re working feverishly to develop additional video and mobile ad measurement services as new options of our system.

Vizu Ad Catalyst uses a standard “test and control” methodology that asks a single question of consumers on a Web site about a campaign – Some have viewed the campaign and others have not. Those responses can measure the effective “lift” for several different marketing attributes from the campaign.

Vizu Ad Catalyst works with publishers and agencies to formulate the right questions and their operations team to build our system into their ad campaign. The resulting data is then presented through our online dashboard for analysis as to the effectiveness of the campaign.

The fundamental challenge of our approach is getting the industry to coalesce around the idea of brand lift as a metric for online brand advertising. Our technology – after months of vigorous beta testing – is ready and deployed across some of the largest sites on the Internet.

Vizu Ad Catalyst is built around a single flyover intercept that asks a single brand question of a respondent. This intercept feeds our database servers with data from a consumer’s response.

Vizu works with our customers, such as a publisher or agency, to deploy our everyday brand measurement system across an ad campaign. We’ve worked with numerous leading brands, such as Hilton Hotels, Unilever brands, and Burger King, just to name a few.

As discussed above, the Vizu Ad Catalyst dashboard provides a wealth of data on the relative success of the primary objective of an online ad campaign. In this manner, Vizu Ad Catalyst is building a set of best practices and normative data that will inform the online advertising industry moving forward.

Vizu Ad Catalyst was built to measure the brand lift of online ad campaigns. Our results with customers such as Hilton Hotels speak volumes as to the promise of the technology and how our results map to the objectives of our brand ad measurement system.

Division: Technology Innovation
Category: External Communications
Company: Mobility Public Relations

Goal: To create an online newsroom tool that would not only better present client newsroom material to editors, bloggers and analysts, but create a mobility industry resource where information from all our clients can be discovered using keywords and simple search features.

Mobility PR (www.mobilitypr.com) is an agency that serves only mobility technology businesses and organizations. As our agency grows, our client roster is filling out with interrelated but non-competitive businesses, where information from one may be relevant to information being sought for another. Yet typically press kits revolve around a single company or single issue and do not lend themselves to share information between kits.

In addition, company websites have brand, look and feel considerations that sometimes run counter to online newsroom best practices, not to mention that a press kit for one company has limited relevance to editors, bloggers and analysts.

The social media press kit portal has two distinct audiences: media/analysts and Mobility Public Relations clients.

The primary audience consists of editors, bloggers and analysts who seek information about our clients, but also seek information more broadly about the industries in which our clients serve.

Clients are faced with branding guidelines dictating the look and feel, layout and navigation of their corporate websites. Sometimes these guidelines run counter to a best practices approach to online press kits and newsrooms, and may also limit the ability for content to be search engine optimized. Some companies, due to resource constraints or internal bureaucracies, may not be able to keep information up-to-date or post new content in a timely fashion. Internal directives may also cause clients to post extraneous or superfluous materials that make the important press kit contents more difficult to locate.

Mobility Public Relations set out to build a press kit resource for editors, bloggers and analysts that would also become a resource for information about the mobility industry. The press kit portal needed to utilize tags to make content easy to find, and had to be easily searchable so that visitors could seek information based on topics and not based on individual clients, thereby allowing relevant results to be returned from multiple clients’ press kits. The portal and all the pages therein needed to be search engine optimized and the content needed to be easy to discover, easy to download and exist in a number of different media formats.

Utilizing the social media press kit template produced by Shift Communications as a starting point, we worked with a web design and search engine optimization company to build the press kit portal. We expanded the template to include more multimedia content and links to other online resources. The press kits have a front page portal where media and analysts can search for content across all clients, rather than look for information one client at a time. Website statistics should let us see the domains coming to the site so we can track when editors from key publications are visiting press kits.

Kosmos Central built a new search engine optimized template with the Drupal backend. We experimented with large content files to see how much we could push the new portal before it “broke.” We then created content standards so ensure that when content is posted, it was always able to properly display. For example, high resolution images (posted in 300 dots per inch) are limited to 1000 by 1000 pixels.

Once we activated the template in a subdirectory from our main site (www.mobilitypr.com/clients) we collected all the info from our clients, and worked with them to craft or update all their press kit materials to fill out the online press kits.

The biggest technical challenge was creating a content management system that was at once robust enough to handle all the various content we wanted to post and update, while at the same time be easy enough for everyone in our agency to use with minimal training. We also wanted to make the page load quickly and therefore needed a thumbnail system for larger high-resolution images. We also wanted to minimize the number of clicks necessary for media and analysts to download the content they wanted to their local hard drives.

The other challenge was that we were in essence building competing press kits to the online newsrooms our clients had on their websites. However, as our clients saw that we were consolidating all the relevant materials from multiple sources, and organizing them in a way that would be familiar to any reporter visiting our portal, they soon began to rely on our press kit portal, linking to it from their corporate websites, and even from their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.

We worked with Portland, Oregon-based Kosmos Central, a marketing, web design and SEO firm to build the portal. Kosmos improved the SEO of the social media press kit template by eliminating the use of frames. They used the open source Drupal CMS as the fundamental underpinning for the portal’s content management., making it super easy for content to posted and updated. Kosmos added additional bells and whistles, such as high resolution “reveal” when thumbnails are clicked by press kit visitors. Once the high res image is displayed, it’s a simple right click to save.

Once an online press kit is built for the client and added to the press kit portal, the team lead for each client account is responsible for updating the press kit in real time with news announcements, new images or photos, new links and any other relevant content. As a group, the agency leads review the content on all client press kits looking for trends that are emerging or being demonstrated through client news and coverage. These trends are then packaged for reporters and offered up as complete stories, leveraging the MoPR clients (and the online press kit resources) as the proof points for the story.

Eight social media press kits have been visited by over 4,000 unique visitors since January 1, 2008, and the press kit portal page has been visited by 1,755 unique visitors during that same period of time. Mobility PR has received positive comments from several key editors and bloggers, and several have noted that we have the only press kit resource like this that they’ve seen – and the only one we at Mobility PR has been able to find online. When entering our client names plus the word “press” into Google, our social media press kit for each client appears in the first ten results, often in the top three results. Mobility PR has received positive comments from several key editors and bloggers, and several have noted that we have the only press kit resource like this that they’ve seen – and the only one we at Mobility PR has been able to find online.

Division: Technology Innovation
Category: External Communications
Company: Nanos Research

There is a need for a better way to engage citizens in municipal government decision-making.

Municipalities deliver a wide range of services that touch upon the daily lives of citizens. Roads, sewers, parks, waste services, and policing are municipal services that have an immediate impact on the welfare of citizens. As the provider of these basic civic services, municipalities are constantly seeking public input into decisions about the delivery and direction of these services.

Traditionally, cities have gathered public input on municipal issues by means of surveys, focus groups and town halls/public consultations. While effective, these tools are open to challenge by opponents of unpopular decisions. While surveys and focus groups offer a defensible methodology, they are open to public criticism for not providing all citizens with the opportunity to voice their concerns. While town halls provide an opportunity for all to voice their opinion, their practice is often characterized by poor attendance and a lack of quantitative reporting and analysis.

The communications issue to be addressed is helping cities inform citizens and engage them in public consultations about multi-faceted issues in a manner that is easy to use, widely accessible and provides demonstrable results to municipal decision-makers.

The second issue to be addressed is the need to improve the effectiveness of municipal government websites at engaging citizens in decision-making. To date, most municipalities have relied on the Internet for information posting and transactional services. The widespread adoption of web 2.0 technologies has allowed cities to extend their online services into the realm of public engagement and help respond to the shortcomings of current municipal approaches to public consultation. Nanos has developed an online solution that allows governments to engage citizens online using web 2.0 methodologies (blogs, content rating, user-generated content, video).

The primary target audience is residents of cities eligible to vote. A secondary target audience is comprised of residents who are disconnected from the political processes at the municipal level.

The goals and objectives of the solution are to:
i) complement and extend existing municipal public consultation and engagement practices;
ii) make it easy for busy citizens to participate in public consultations;
iii) bring a methodological rigor to the analysis and reporting of public consultations;
iv) harness the power of user-generated content to develop responses to local issues and needs; and
v) cost-effectively engage thousands of citizens in municipal decision making.

Nanos (www.nanosresearch.com) is a leading North American public opinion research firm that has extensive experience in structuring and operating public consultations. Given its research focus, Nanos is called upon to bring a methodological structure and approach to public consultations by governments and public bodies. In doing so, Nanos came to notice an increase in respondents’ willingness to participate in online research combined with client requests for online research services. These forces were compounded by Nanos’ public opinion research which showed a growing public disenchantment with current forms of democratic participation and a citizen appetite for a more direct involvement in public decision making.

In response to these emerging trends, Nanos developed an online consultation service – Nanos eConsultation - that would meet the rigorous needs of clients and answer the demands of citizens for more accessible public engagement.

Nanos developed, tested and refined the online consultation application over a nine-month period. A team of developers and researchers was brought together to identify and design a solution that would meet the needs of public-facing organizations. Given the widespread use and familiarity of blogs, the team chose to go with a service that combined blogging with discussion forums, all underpinned by the ability to track and measure activity using established research metrics. The beta version was tested using a control group and changes were made based on participant feedback.

Once a working version was finalized, a marketing plan was developed that focused on securing a public-facing organization seeking to engage stakeholders over a broad geographic area. Over time, Nanos came to realize that the tool was of significant benefit to local and municipal organizations and began to market to municipalities. Nanos eConsultation is offered as a stand-alone software service or as a complete online consultation service (turnkey). The deployment scenario described herein is based on the use of Nanos eConsultation as a complete online consultation service.

The process begins by working with the client to identify the consultation objectives and to learn about the client’s overall consultation strategy. The online consultation is always framed as a complement to the in-person strategy, providing participants with the ability to participate in a manner that meets their needs. The client provides the initial draft of the consultation materials (topics and supporting documents) and then Nanos edits and formats these for posting to the web. The final set-up involves building the eConsultation microsite using client-supplied digital files.

Participants access the eConsultation microsite from the municipality’s website. At the eConsultation, participants are able to read topics, rate topics and post comments in response to topics. Participants are also able to respond to other participant comments, rate the comments, view support materials (maps, links to third party websites, PDF documents, images) and rate support materials (informative, non-informative, influence your opinion or not influence your opinion).

The eConsultation site creates a demographic profile of each participant, tracks all participant activity (topic reading, comment reading, topic rating, comment rating, support material reading and support material rating) in order to tabulate and prepare detailed consultation reports. The reports provide a demographic and geographic profile of participation as well as ratings and readings of user-generated content.

The principle challenge was the need to address initial client concern about inappropriate content being posted to the eConsultation microsite, being run as a municipal service. Nanos developed a user-generated flagging system that provided all participants with the ability to flag comments that they deemed as inappropriate. A notification is sent to the moderator who is able to instantly access the comment and address its context, and take appropriate corrective action (warning to the commentor, editing the comment, suspending the commenter). Nanos also provides a “hands-on” moderation service that involves a daily period of site review. In operating the consultations we have found that the user-generated flagging method has proven to be very effective at addressing inappropriate activity on the consultation sites.

The second challenge involved ensuring that the online consultation experience was able to accommodate unforeseen views or issues. Our experience with consultation has revealed that people often have an issue or concern that they feel is not being addressed by the formal consultation. Failure to address this concern, if shared by a broad enough constituency, will often adversely affect the consultation process. In response to this challenge and the user-generated content ethos of web 2.0, Nanos created a “Share your Ideas” section where participants can post their own thoughts and ideas, respond to other participant comments and rate them. This approach helps identify and quantify hidden/latent issues and concerns and innovative solutions to the issues being considered.
An on-going challenge involves working with the clients to ensure that the consultation sites would be appropriately marketed and promoted on their public website.

Nanos eConsultation is a turnkey online consultation service that uses proprietary software based on public opinion research metrics and web 2.0 methodologies to operate public consultations for municipalities and government departments and agencies. The Nanos eConsultation service is comprised of building a microsite that duplicates the client website, editing and posting the content to the consultation microsite, and operating the public site.

The team is comprised of:
i) a senior researcher who also serves as the project manager;
ii) a consultation moderator;
iii) a research analyst (usually two) responsible for coding and tabulation of the data;
iv) an account representative who manages interaction with the client on matters related to project scope; and
v) a technical lead who manages site set-up and any technical customizations in response to client requests.

Nanos has operated three online public consultations for a Canadian municipality with just over 800,000 residents. Each of these consultations has lasted from 2 to 4 weeks in duration. There have been 128,843 site visits. Eight hundred participants have registered to post 3,458 comments. In total 59,417 user-generated comments have been read and 9,156 comments have been rated.

On a general level, the overall quantitative measures of success are:
* increased public participation in public consultations;
* improved quantitative reporting of consultation participant activity and overall consultation activity (number of participants, comments, comment ratings, comment readings, breakdown of participation by geographic area);
* reduced cost of engaging citizens on a per participant basis.

The qualitative measures of success are:
* improved client understanding of public attitudes and opinions;
* increased public satisfaction with consultation processes;
* increased media satisfaction with consultation processes;
* increase in decision-maker confidence in the consultation process and advice resulting from the consultation process;
* increase in client’s municipal staff confidence in consultation results.

Nanos eConsultation helps its clients achieve the following objectives:
i) complement and extend existing municipal public consultation and engagement practices;
ii) make it easy for busy citizens to participate in public conversations, thereby increasing public satisfaction with the consultation process;
iii) the ability to track and report on data using a quantitative methodology brought a methodological rigor to the analysis and reporting of public consultations;
iv) user-generated responses to local issues and needs were harvested from the consultation inputs and were used to identify unforeseen attitudes and opinions;
v) the ability to participate online significantly increased the participation and thereby cost-effectively engaged thousands of citizens in municipal decision making.

Popularity: 26% [?]

COLLABORATION & CO-CREATION CASE STUDIES

WINNERS:
Academic Division: United Nations University
Corporate Division: Dell for Communities and Conversations

COMMENDATIONS OF EXCELLENCE:
Raytheon and Qumu with B3 Communications
Cisco Systems
IBM Corporation
TradeKing

COMMENDATION OF MERIT:
Wal-Mart

Division: Academic
Category: Collaboration – Co-Creation
Organization: United Nations University

The World Health Organization’s Centre for Health Development (http://www.who.or.jp/) based in Kobe, Japan has been implementing a project called “Healthy Urbanization” from 2006 onwards. The purpose of the project is to promote health as a central component to urbanization by looking at the experience in six locations in Chile, China, India, Kenya, Tunisia and Japan.

The project involves the research activities, capacity building and the publication of technical reports. In 2007, in an effort to strengthen the educational, communication and outreach activities, the WHO approached the United Nations University (http://www.unu.edu/ )Media Studio with a request for collaboration in developing a video documentary and e-case study. The WHO commissioned academics from the local university to undertake a scoping study of health issues in each locality. At the Kobe site, three topics were highlighted. (1) The increases in non-communicable diseases in recent years, (2) a growing ageing trend, and (3) the impact of the Kobe earthquake. Based on this study, the UNU proposed that the e-case study and documentary focus on ageing in Japan with a particular emphasis on experience in Kobe, supported by stories from Tokyo and Kyoto.

The main issue to be addressed is how social ties play a key role in maintaining the health of the elderly. The primary audience for this e-case study and video documentary will be local, provincial, and national policy makers in multiple sectors including health, social welfare, city planning, finance and education. The secondary audience will be academia involved in research in the areas of ageing populations and social determinants of health, educators involved with the training of workers in the health sector, and the students taking graduate programs in health related studies. Third, we anticipate that this e-case study and video documentary will be of interest to the general public, since ageing is something that affects everyone. Having visited the e-case study website or watched the documentary, we anticipate that the audience would:

- Have a much deeper understanding of what is meant by the term ageing society and the different definitions.
- Understand how the social determinants of health relate to ageing and the health of the elderly.
- Relate the concept of healthy urbanization to the need to provide a suitable urban environment for the elderly.
- Appreciate the complex issues involved in ensuring that the elderly remain active post retirement.
- Explore the diverse range of opportunities for care provision for the elderly, and their pros and cons.
- Understand the implications of scientific breakthroughs in the area of regenerative medicine and the implications for society.

The plan for the project can be summarized as follows:
1. November 2007 to January 2008: Research, scouting of characters, stories and locations in Kobe, Tokyo and Kyoto, development of treatment.
2. February 2008: First shoot in Kobe including interviews with representatives from the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health.
3. March 2008: Second shoot in Kobe, Kyoto and Tokyo.
4. March to July 2008: Post production and first screening at the UNU.
5. July to September 2008: E-case study development.
6. September 2008 onwards: marketing, dissemination, outreach, events.

The e-case study is being hosted by the United Nations University at: http://www.wisdom.unu.edu.

One thousand copies of the DVD have been produced. One challenge was for the UNU team members to explain the thinking behind the e-case study to the WHO officials. A second challenge related to the need to development the e-case study in Japanese and English.

We built the e-case study in a blog (Wordpress) and customized it with the use of purpose built plug-ins. One example is a plug-in called multi-lingual that the UNU commissioned and that allows authors to build weblogs using more than one language.

The documentary was filmed using a Canon XL H1 camera. Final Cut was used for post production. The video shorts were uploaded to Vimeo and embedded in the blog. The entire team involved with the project is presented in the About page for the e-case study - http://wisdom.unu.edu/en/about/.

From the UNU, the team included the Executive Producer (Brendan Barrett, Director (Andreina Lairet), two producers (Citt Williams and Kaori Brand), Creative Director (Sean Wood) and a Graphic Designer (David Jimenez). From the WHO, the core team included a project coordinator (Lori Sloate) and a researcher/writer (Frank Grenier).

The UNU was responsible for project coordination and implementation. The WHO provided support as subject matter experts and with research, editing and proofreading. The e-case study and DVD have just been completed. However, already we have been receiving very positive comments from local communities and government officials in Kobe. We will be implementing several events in the next few months to raise awareness about these products in Japan and internationally.

We hope to broadcast the documentary in Japan. The main priority is to present positive experience from Japan to the international community about how to ensure a flourishing ageing society. We believe that this will be possible through the combined efforts of the UNU and the WHO. For instance, the WHO network of websites on ageing in different regions of the world will be encouraged to link to the e-case study. We envisage that it will be used in educational programs at the university level. We also anticipate that the e-case study for Kobe will be shared with the other Healthy Urbanization sites in China, Chile, India, Tunisia and Kenya.

Division: Corporate
Category: Collaboration – Co-Creation
Company: Dell, Communities and Conversations

Dell (www.dell.com) receives feedback from customers through a variety of different channels including letters, e-mails and call center contacts – in all about 2 billion conversations a year. Throughout all the mechanisms, there was no way to systemically combine and prioritize the feedback.

In each of the normal channels for customers to provide input to Dell, the feedback is individualized with private responses from Dell. People desire a single place to publicly provide suggestions and collaborate with others on those ideas. Dell then relies on the community to collectively determine the most important information they want from Dell. Finally, customers want closed-loop feedback from Dell on their ideas and suggestions. The target audience is anyone interested in technology and Dell’s role to provide and support it.

The primary objective was to offer a place for customers and the company to collaborate on ideas, have customers prioritize those ideas, and allow Dell the opportunity to close the loop on action taken.

IdeaStorm (www.ideastorm.com) was created in February 2007. The site allows users to post an idea, comment, collaborate and carry on a dialogue for each idea, and vote ideas up or down. The ideas with the most votes then float to the top. Everyone can see what is happening with the ideas from IdeaStorm by Dell through the Ideas in Action tab which is updated every other week via the status of Implemented Ideas.

The site was deployed on February 17, 2007, and quickly gained popularity with over 2,000 ideas submitted in the first month. The project was supported by Michael Dell and the entire executive leadership team. The primary challenges were the speed with which the site was deployed and managing the barrage of ideas that came flowing in.

IdeaStorm is a website powered by Salesforce.com. Dell’s Communities and Conversations team manages the website including everything from working closely with the vendor on features and functionality, monitoring the ideas and engaging in the conversation where appropriate, and collaborating with the various business groups on engagement and idea implementation. The site has been extraordinarily successful! Almost 10,000 ideas have been submitted with ~10,000 unique visitors a day. Over 670,000 positive votes have been received. More than 77,000 comments have been made. And almost 200 ideas have been implemented as of the date of this submission.

Ideas implemented include:
• The most voted upon idea -- pre-install Linux on select Dell systems; this was done within three months
• Bringing the Windows XP option back to Dell’s consumer PC offering instead of limiting to Vista
• Introducing backlit keyboards to certain product lines
The ratio of ~77 comments per idea meets the objective of collaboration. The Digg-like voting capability helps Dell prioritize the feedback. And the Ideas in Action section allow Dell to provide a closed-loop mechanism on what we are doing with the ideas.

Division: Corporate
Category: Collaboration - Co-Creation
Company: B3 Communications for Raytheon and Qumu

Raytheon, (www.raytheon.com) a large global defense contractor, needed to improve communications and collaboration while simultaneously cutting costs. The impetus came from the top down, as senior leaders identified the need to speak to and connect with all of their employees directly, without having to embark on town hall road shows. Raytheon is aspiring to be the most admired defense and aerospace systems supplier through world-class people and technology. As a part of this, effective communication is an essential ingredient.

However, old methods of corporate communications—like quarterly meetings and cascading—were not effectively reaching its 72,000 worldwide employees. Raytheon realized it would need to take bold moves to unify communications and improve collaboration.

The target audience for the company’s communications project included everyone from the Chairman and CEO, William H. Swanson to 72,000 employees worldwide—from salespeople and engineers and human resources and marketing.

Goals:
1) Unify communications
2) Save costs
3) Enhance collaboration

Across a number of industries, enterprise video is rapidly being adopted as the primary medium for delivery and storage of corporate communications. Driven by a variety of factors—including an increase in globally disparate teams; rising gas prices; environmental concern over carbon emissions; and increasingly mobilized workforces—video is emerging as the next mission-critical application in the enterprise. For these reasons and more, video seemed like an obvious choice to Raytheon. The company set out to leverage video to enhance corporate communications across its global offices.

A combination of content delivery network (CDN) technology and IP multicast—a technology that lets a company efficiently deliver streaming media to thousands of receivers by replicating the packets throughout the network—is essential for delivering video live to Raytheon’s more than 400 sites.

To ensure the most efficient delivery of live video traffic, Raytheon uses IP multicast coupled with a content delivery network from Qumu (www.qumu.com) that includes 32 MediaNet edge servers. Remote users receive high quality video faster because CDN servers positioned nearby receive the stream from the origin server, then multicast it out locally.

While the first experiments were easy to get started by publishing video to a Web site, Raytheon has since had to master the challenges involved in deploying the technology on a much larger scale. On the technology front, Raytheon implemented Qumu’s Video Control Center management software, installed racks of video encoding appliances and tweaked its network for more efficient transmission of video.

Raytheon leverages IP multicast, a technology that lets a company efficiently deliver streaming media to thousands of receivers by replicating the packets throughout the network. Raytheon emphasizes the importance of enabling multicast routing if you are going to do live video broadcasts on your corporate data network. Most routers support this feature, but they don’t have it enabled by default.

Multicast routing eliminates redundancy in the broadcast of an audio or video stream by transmitting a single copy of the stream across the network and feeding it to individual recipients. In the absence of multicast, each user’s computer would open an independent connection with the video server and pull down its own copy of the stream, placing a far greater load on the network. As a large organization, Raytheon also uses content distribution techniques to replicate the stream to video servers in each geography, which then redistribute it to the users in that region. The company has about 32 video servers, most of which are dedicated to the edge server function of redistributing content.

The system is also designed for redundancy at the level of Web servers, video servers and video encoding appliances. The Qumu software ties together all the components of the system and also provides a Web-based program guide and a search tool to help employees find relevant programming.

For further insurance during live broadcasts, they have coupled a CDN with this multicast system to redirect clients closer to publishing points on edge devices across the enterprise.

The company has also begun to dabble in HD videoconferencing. Presently, they allow media groups to shoot in HD and they then transcode it to the standardized 300Kbps rate for streaming. Although work still needs to be done, algorithms such as the ITU-T’s H.264 video compression standard are easing the transition to HD.

Raytheon has been a pioneer in using video to enhance corporate communications across its global offices. The company conducts about 300 live webcasts a year and publishes hundreds of hours of on-demand programming. Led by everyone from the CEO and divisional presidents for leadership communication to internal technology experts sharing cutting edge knowledge, they find online video to be effective, economical and environmentally sound.

The ability to impact the whole social structure of Raytheon’s business with increased speed and efficiency provides tremendous market advantage. Raytheon’s infrastructure can now provide this and it has been very effective. Employees are empowered – the power is in the hands of content creators and communicators to design and deliver the messages.

What’s more, today Raytheon’s enterprise video capabilities are clearly relied upon at the leadership level for communication. It evolved from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘critical business service.’

Unify communications: If you examine ‘time to knowledge’ – the time it takes to gather groups to discuss technology that someone was working on – it might have taken weeks and several different presentations to get the information out to the entire engineering community. Today however, they can reach literally 1,000s of people in one webcast. This provides a critical advantage for Raytheon.

Save costs: Simply put, Raytheon’s solution delivers significant cost savings by eliminating travel expenses. But beyond that, the company’s enterprise video solution has greatly enriched the work environment and employees’ abilities to do their jobs. It allows knowledge transfer that previously didn’t exist, or took weeks or months to achieve. More and more, the engineers leverage video technology to collaborate, and to generate excitement throughout the company about what they’re working on.

Enhance collaboration: Globally disparate teams can get together in one place, at one time and distribute information….everyone has heard the same thing at the same time so there is no misinformation. Even in the cases where an employee can’t join the live meeting, the content is archived so he or she can view the video.

B3 Communications (www.b3communications.com)

Division: Corporate
Category: Collaboration – Co-Creation
Company: Cisco Systems

The Strategic Marketing team for Cisco’s (www.cisco.com) Global Government Solutions Group (GGSG) needed to enhance and update the way they managed collateral and content related to product solutions and government programs. The old interaction and document sharing platform was more like a filing cabinet than a communal workspace. GGSG required a solution that would allow them to share documents and interact in one central location, creating convergence between all systems and individuals. This requirement extended beyond the strategic marketing group, and needed to be launched across all the global government verticals: Space, Defense, and Homeland Security.

Specific Problems:
• No version control on documents, which resulted in confused users not knowing if they were using the most current available
• Hard to track down needed documents from a large virtual team.
• Accessing documents while off-site, or at another Cisco office was difficult.
• Materials were not accessible from anywhere, anytime.
• Employees frustrated by hundreds of emails a day, and huge attachments clogging their email client and bandwidth.
• Prior system did not allow for password protection of various folders.
• The Cisco Intranet was clogged with material that didn’t need to be on it.

In this world of near instant contact we sometimes forget that technology can complicate the actual act of communicating. We assume that with all our infrastructure, cell phones, laptops and systems that efficient interaction can, and will take place. The GGSG strategic marketing team produces a copious amount of documents—whether they are in the form of collateral, presentations, or videos. They have a great need to ensure that everyone has access to all Global Defense Resources at all times, from any location. Relying on email or the old LiveLink solution created bottlenecks and delays during key meetings, and often resulted in version issues, and general access problems. Additionally, when input and changes were needed there was no seamless way to collaborate without being in the same room. To further complicate the issue, many employees travel, work at other Cisco offices or off-site locations across the country. When you are separated by great distance from your peers, the ability to share work becomes increasingly important. The result of this virtual environment and cumbersome collateral management system, was hundreds of unread emails a day (many of which contained huge attachments that clogged both email clients and bandwidth). Another obstacle was creating a universal solution that the team was comfortable using on a daily basis from both a general like/dislike and user-interface perspective. The old system’s archaic and complicated nature made it more useful to not use it. Taking the new corporate objective of Web 2.0 integration across the organization to heart, the GGSG team used SharePoint as their first true implementation. User generated and edited content is a huge technology leap from the prior solution. Together, these issues had reached a point where something needed to be done.

The strategic marketing SharePoint site is an internal resource for the marketing arm of the Global Government Solutions Group, making them the target audience. The scope is much larger than just that subset though, as the marketing team has been tasked with setting up individual SharePoint sites for each vertical within GGSG: Space, Defense, & Homeland Security. The Space SharePoint has already been completed—and the remaining verticals will be launched as needed. The group is a diverse mix of marketing and other professionals, consultants, developers, and contractors from many different backgrounds. A key element of GGSG is that they exist in a very virtual world, with many of the employees working from Georgia, Virginia, North Carolina, Internationally, and at in-home offices. This creates a special need within the audience to keep everyone in the loop, which the SharePoint site fulfills. Key verticals are space, defense, intelligence, homeland security. The target audience works in each of these fields, so SharePoint must be universally applicable to each. The GGSG audience values efficient yet simple solutions; they will not tolerate convoluted architectures. Being able to post and accesses all pertinent information is key, especially when there isn’t time to waste on logistical issues, such as those that existed in the prior collateral management system.

Demographic Characteristics:
• The users of the site range from their early twenties on into middle-age.
• 60% are women, 40% men.
• Locations of users: North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, California, Australia, the UK, and mobile locations around the world.

Goals:
• Create an online resource capable of storing and sharing all needed documents from anywhere, at anytime.
• Reduce email traffic, which overwhelms people and machines especially with large attachments.
• Are you embedding a link in the email? No? Don’t send it!
• Strict version control
• Allows for easy collaboration
• Have the Director drive traffic to the SharePoint site by stocking it with team updates, documents, corporate directives, and anything else that would normally be transferred through email.

• Enact the Fiscal Year 08/09 goal to implement Web 2.0 technologies across the organization.
• Effectively archive collateral so that in the event of an employee leaving or moving within the company, the intellectual property is still readily available.
• Capture meeting notes, minutes, and presentations for review or employees who were unable to attend.
• Dramatically reduce new hire orientation time, as everything can be reviewed from the SharePoint.
• Allow employee interaction through the discussion board.
• Ability to set-up password protected enclaves for sensitive work.
• Work sometimes requires ITAR restrictions, meaning only US citizens are allowed access. SharePoint allows for seamless interaction if individuals meet ITAR requirements.
• Secure area for upper-management

For the GGSG strategic marketing team to effectively launch SharePoint sites across all the verticals to ensure continuity of collateral and data management throughout. It should become a best practice of information management across all of GGSG. In order to accomplish this, the Director first recognized the problems with the current system. The marketing team then sat down and went over what capabilities they wanted, and reviewed all the alternatives from a cost/benefit perspective. This, in collaboration with their Webmaster’s research, pointed them toward the SharePoint Beta being run at Cisco. The director sat down with the corporate team and decided to try it, leveraging her internal resources in combination with corporate to design and customize the site for their specific application. The site went live and made a positive difference, pushing marketing to roll out individual SharePoint’s for each vertical. Marketing first designed and posted the original SharePoint site, supported by a local Cisco server and their webmaster. Once positive feedback began coming from the team and others who viewed the page, they began phasing in additional sites beginning with Space. User behavior and data analysis metrics were used throughout to ensure successful adoption and proper usage. Deployment went very smoothly, especially with the assistance of the corporate SharePoint Beta team.

• Changing user behavior.
People were so used to sending emails for everything, or not using online systems due to the inadequacy of the old solutions. A series of telepresence meetings were held to educate the team and inform them of the new paradigm and its benefits.
• Clearly defining what belongs on SharePoint was necessary.
At first users were not sure what to post, where to post it, and what belonged on the intranet versus the site.
• The Cisco internal IT team developed the template and allocated a specific server for SharePoint. They sanctioned it as a Cisco tool and helped customize it.
• The strategic marketing team’s webmaster manages and worked closely with IT to bring the site live.
• The Microsoft SharePoint platform.

From the start the team was intimately involved in the adoption process. Through meetings and polling features, layout, and all other variables were determined. The Director drove traffic to the site by populating it with team updates, documents and tasking employees to do the same. At any given time anyone could check what the director was being tasked with, and in turn what they had to do. The technology was brought in, and there was a top-down drive to change user-behavior.

Once this template had been established, marketing began evangelizing SharePoint across all of GGSG, allowing each vertical to give input as the process continued. The webmaster was a key component of this program as he helped design and manage the sites. Not only this, but he is the sole resource for all five verticals. Since less content needs to be on the intranet (which required the webmaster to post), as it is on SharePoint, his resources are not spread as thin. Everything can bubble up within the site.

Results:
• 19 Folders off the main SharePoint site.
• 10 documents on front page.
• Over 120 unique documents by multiple sources.
• Positive feedback about ability to access all information, anytime.
• New content is constantly being added.

Two events which show direct quantitative evidence occurred during the marketing FY09 planning meeting, and an executive GGSG event. Each of these required multiple presentations and documents that needed review. So, instead of shuffling around large PowerPoint’s from person to person the Director instructed everyone to post them to the SharePoint, meaning one email was sent out versus over twenty for just two events.

In terms of qualitative measures of success tangible evidence can be found in the real-life changes in user behavior:

• Overall complaints about email traffic have decreased, with people being driven to links on the SharePoint site and posting content.

• All version control and access problems, along with the internal annoyance and strife they could cause have disappeared. When problems go, so do emails about those problems, further reinforcing the first change in behavior.

• Since GGSG is a truly global and virtual group work has become more efficient as less time is spent searching for documents from various sources. Informal polling has indicated a relief in frustration.

Overall, GGSG has embraced this new technology, making SharePoint a daily-use tool. It cut through all the inefficiencies and problems of the old systems, making work and collaboration easier and more productive. The chief qualitative measure of success is the success and use of the system itself.
• Create an online resource capable of storing and sharing all needed documents from anywhere, at anytime.
• SharePoint has accomplished this, as all needed documents are now stored there. It is universally accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
• Reduce email traffic, overwhelms people and machines especially with large attachments.
• Email traffic has been reduced by 20%.
• Strict version control
• The latest documents are always available.
• Have the Director drive traffic to the SharePoint site by stocking it with team updates, documents, corporate directives, and anything else that would normally be transferred through email.

• The team has embraced the site from Director down.

• Enact the Fiscal Year 08/09 goal to implement Web 2.0 technologies across the organization.
• SharePoint has been a great way to bring Web 2.0 into GGSG’s daily operations.

• Effectively archive collateral, so in the event an employee leaving or moving within the company, the intellectual property is still available, and organized.
• Since all of the intellectual property is posted to the central, safe location, it will always be there. Meeting notes, presentations, everything for new hire and current team member education.

Future plans:
• Allow employee interaction through the discussion board.
• This is the one area where the member interaction goal has not been met. There hasn’t been a real push from any levels of the team to communicate using this medium.
• Be able to set-up password protected enclaves for sensitive work.
• SharePoint allows for any number of protected sub, or private sites— both of which have been implemented.

Division: Corporate
Category: Collaboration and Co-Creation
Company: IBM

The problem IBM (www.ibm.com) is trying to solve is how to reach out to our Business Partners to let them know that we want to be more actively engaged with them and listen to their concerns in order to build partner loyalty and our channel.

Over the years, IBM partners have sometimes complained that it’s difficult to find a way to make IBM “listen” to their needs. In a tough economy support and service become extremely important to partners. It’s a great time to lead with the message that IBM is listening and responding to Partners.

The challenge to be addressed was how to get our Partners’ attention and drive them to a single point of interaction to let us know their concerns. We wanted to develop a single point on the web, with an intuitive URL, for Business Partners to access and let us know their concerns/ideas/issues, etc. Towards that end, we developed the “Voice of the Business Partner Campaign.” This is a campaign with a simple message: We’re listening to the voices that matter -- our partners. We developed a collaboration center with questions for our partners to address on www.voicebp.com, and built a campaign using traditional and new social media to bring the partners there.

The communication issue to be addressed was how to get our partners’ attention so we could start this "listening campaign." Keeping in mind that different people prefer different types of communication, we realized that we would need an integrated campaign with a marketing mix of traditional and new media.

External Drive for the survey was composed of an Integrated Media Campaign including Print, e-mail, Web Banners and Viral Marketing tactics.

Print ads have run in VAR Business, Channel Pro & Computer Reseller News (CRN) magazines announcing the survey and inviting BPs to go to the URL and answer some questions to communicate their feedback to IBM.

Web Banners on VAR Business, CRN, Channel Pro, CMP Everything Channel. Viral Marketing promotions are ongoing on Twitter, Facebook, BLOGS on VAR Business, CRN, Channel Pro, CMP Everything Channel, eChannel Insider , ebizQ and IBM DeveloperWorks.

Over 20 IBM Newsletters announced the campaign. We also launched an aggressive press announcement of the campaign and received pick-up in major technology magazine and the Word of Mouth Marketing Organization (WOMMA).

Finally, the campaign & the response URL to www.voicebp.com is featured on IBM partner web pages. IBM Business Partners: ISVs, Resellers and IBM PartnerWorld Members. The individuals at the BP firms we are trying to reach are those that are primarily responsible for the revenue-generating aspect of the organization. This could be the CEO, or other leaders in sales and marketing, strategy and business development. In many of these firms, sales/marketing are the same function, or marketing is non-existent.

OBJECTIVES:

1) Generate excitement and a sense of urgency in the BP community to do more business with IBM by driving awareness and interest in IBM offerings and BP programs

2) Create more active engagement and loyalty so that Business Partners view themselves as an extension of IBM

3) Increase Partner satisfaction by demonstrating that IBM is listening to them and values the relationship. Create a way to “connect” to BP via the voice of the BP website.

END GOAL: Increase Business Partner generated mid-market revenue and share at the expense of the competition

Launch an integrated series of touches kicking off with a press announcement of the program, followed by a series of 3 fold Print Ads in partner magazines.

Continue the "drumbeat" of the Voice of the Business Partner campaign via web banners, blogging, partner e-mails and IBM web page promotions. To get the word of about Voice of the Business Partner, IBM has run three-page, fold-out ads in the front of CRN, VAR Business, and ChannelPro magazines.

Web ads are featured for the Voice of the Business Partner effort throughout the third and fourth quarter on their respective Websites.

Additionally, the Voice of the Business Partner is featured at all IBM’s live partner events and tradeshows via presentations and tradeshow flyers.

The channel-focused marketing blitz continues in e-mails, social networks, and blogs encouraging midmarket partners to take part in an interactive online forum called the Voice of the Business Partner. The campaign will run through December 2008.

Perhaps our biggest challenge over time will be to maintain the "stickiness" of the Voice of the BP site. We have chosen a vendor that allows us the ability to conduct Quick Polls, so we will want to keep refreshing the polls and the survey questions to keep partners returning and sharing their opinions with us on a wide variety of issues.

TEAM:
Creative: Oglivy Mather, New York
Survey: Satmetrix
Mary Hall, IBM SWG Channels Marketing (input messaging, implementation & offers)

IMPLEMENTATION:
Jennifer Cohen, Channels Marketing Manager

Bruno Bagala, Mid-Market Business Solutions and Business Partner IMC Manager , Worldwide Center of Excellence for Integrated Marketing Communications

Helen Hawrylak, IBM Global General Business
Manager, Cross-Unit Advocacy and Leadership

Jeb Harrison, Manager, IMC Center of Excellence, Business Partner Programs
In a 4-week period, there have been over a thousand visits to the VoiceBP.com collaborative site for an overall survey completion rate of 16%. The most impressive thing about these statistics is that those who completed the survey did so without the offer of any “prize” or “incentive”. They participated in the survey because they are highly motivated to share information with IBM. It’s very impressive that they stay online & complete the survey and the “Quick Poll” questions without receiving a gift at the end.

Clearly, this is a motivated audience eager to share their opinions! The results show that we have been successful in driving business partners to our new online partner forum. The comments on the surveys indicate that the partners are very pleased to have the opportunity to share information with IBM. So, the initial results support our campaign objectives. Our challenge will be to continue to build the Voice of the Business Partner site and blogging and more feedback mechanisms to it.

Division: Corporate
Category: Collaboration – Co-Creation
Company: TradeKing

When TradeKing (www.tradeking.com) launched in December of 2005, they saw a retail investing landscape full of confusing, double-speak pricing, commoditized tools and poor customer service. They also saw a sector in which, despite the huge boom among online brokers, no-one had yet found a way to use the Internet to solve some long-standing problems for individual investors: isolation, uncertainty, difficulties in learning and connecting with other traders. Swapping stock picks with the guy next to you on the golf course might be fun, but it doesn’t cut it for reliable information when you’re a serious active investor, already knowledgeable but looking to advance your skills. Also, who knows if that golfing guy ever makes money on his own predictions? In the offline world, it’s not only hard to find like-minded investors, It’s near-to-impossible to get any trustworthy sense of their qualification to advise you.

Enter TradeKing: one low flat fee (no bull and no surprises), “break-out” innovative tools and the first online brokerage with a suite of social media tools “baked-in” in the form of the TradeKing Community.

The TradeKing Community includes giving every account holder his/her own blog, micro-blogging capabilities called Trade Notes, a profile page with various dynamic ways to connect with other like-minded investors, and a first-of-its-kind feature called Certified Trades, which enables account holders (if they wish) to publish their actual trades in their TradeKing account for all to see. This innovation lets everyone in the TradeKing Community compare what a trader blogs about with how he or she is trading, considerably reducing the opportunity for disingenuous bloggers looking to manipulate the market.

In addition, as the Community evolved, TradeKing recognized another opportunity to conduct even deeper education and mentoring by mixing in trading experts in the form of its new “All-Star” trade blog. This blog features a panel of five renowned options and equity trading professionals focused on breaking down Community members’ trades and offering tips to benefit the whole Community of investors. It’s a unique online experience in that it combines real experts, addressing specific and actual trading activity from real investors – all in a regulated brokerage environment.

Target audience: Self-directed investors between the ages of 20-65 who want to network with other like-minded investors within a transparent online environment.

The goals for the TradeKing Community fell into two categories: goals for our clients and goals for our business. And these goals are being advanced and proven every day in the TradeKing Community, convincing TradeKing to grow its investment in its social networking features.

Business Goals
- Increase client loyalty and lower attrition through a better client experience
- Increase client trading activity through unique user-generated content and trader interactivity
- Create a new marketing acquisition channel
- Understand and serve our clients better
- Make our clients smarter and foster longevity

Client Goals
- Obtain trading ideas
- Connect and interact with like-minded traders
- Leverage experience of and learn from other traders
- Access new information and unique content
- Share own ideas and knowledge—and receive feedback
- Join groups to interact and learn
- Establish more disciplined investment approach
- Trade more confidently

Fully integrate the online Community into the client offering and have TradeKing staff actively participate online, including the firm’s CEO. Make the Community a place for clients to learn about trading and help each other take their investing to the next level. In 2005, TradeKing launched as an online broker dealer with the online Community as an integral part of the client offering. Any client may choose to join the TradeKing Community and, as a member, all are given the ability to blog and show their trades to others. Version 2 of the TradeKing Community was released in December of 2007, and added the ability for Community members to write trade notes, create forums, join groups and more. The Community offers numerous opportunities for members to not only connect with others, but also to learn from experts who weigh in on the TradeKing “All-Star” blogs and help publicly mentor traders.

One challenge was to drive the adoption of social media with an audience who has typically not been exposed to social media tools. In addition, trying to encourage transparency within the Community and increase the use of members showing their certified trades took some time. Some members were initially hesitant to share their trades because they thought other investors might steal their trading ideas, but by showing trades after they have been executed, the risk of having someone beat you to a trade is removed.

Our platform was built with a blend of internal resources and Relevance, LLC, a web development company. The platform is built on advanced Ruby on Rails development technology.

The development of the TradeKing Community was really a team effort, with involvement from the CEO and the President, on down to numerous Community developers. The Community is managed currently by the Director of Community Development with help from a team that includes a Community Manager, a Web Designer, TradeKing staff educators, and dedicated TradeKing customer support representatives who help answer our clients’ questions. We also have a team of outside experts who weigh-in with “All-Star” commentary and help to publicly mentor Community members.

Today, the TradeKing Community is 10,000+ members strong and features thriving forums, groups and more than 600 individual investor blogs. More than 1,000 Community members are showing their actual trades, which are certified on the site, leading to better sharing of information and more public mentoring and investors helping each other.

Most important, TradeKing is proving out the concept that Web 2.0 does directly drive customer and business value in financial services.
1) Investors who network, trade more. While active Community members only make up 5% of all TradeKing members, they are responsible for more than 10% of trades and commission revenue.
2) Investors who network, are high-value clients. Active Community members have a significantly higher rate of funding and higher balance.
3) Investors who network, stay longer. Early and growing evidence suggests that the Community features contribute significantly to customer engagement, satisfaction, retention and trading success.

TradeKing is very encouraged by the direct benefits it sees from the Community in the two categories of objectives laid out above.

Business Results
- Created a significant competitive differentiator for TradeKing
- Provided deeper understanding of our clients’ needs and wants
- Increased client retention
- Increased trade activity
- Served as a client acquisition channel and increases brand reach and awareness
- Enabled TradeKing to re-shape the way retail clients invest

Client Results
- Empowered the individual investor with information and tools
- Connected them with other traders in a trusted environment
- Accelerated investment learning curve
- Discovered investment ideas
- Developed valuable relationships
- Enabled them to shaped their own trading experience

“People socially network about investments in the real world. It’s a natural extension to have these conversations amplified and enriched online. It’s relevant and clearly beneficial for people of like-minds and like-purpose to connect to learn from one another. Our social networking tools make this possible in the online trading space – and take things one step further by providing accountability combined with actionable information.” Don Montanaro, Chairman and CEO of TradeKing.

Division: Corporate
Category: Collaboration – Co-Creation
Company: Wal-Mart

Walmart.com is an online shopping resource for millions of Wal-Mart (www.walmart.com) shoppers worldwide, serving as an information source, a research database of products or simply a solution to navigating crowded stores. The site boasts resources such as product reviews, ratings and information that help consumers choose the right product, while several additional Wal-Mart Web sites exist outside of Walmart.com to help consumers find ways to stretch their dollar, including Make Your Dollar Stretch and the Checkout Blog, among others. However, the Walmart.com site was looking for the total package. They wanted to create an online shopping site, with all the tools you need to save money and live better – it needed to build a community.

Walmart.com shoppers needed an opportunity to interact more with the site. Product reviews proved to be a respected addition to the site as Web shoppers increasingly relied on the feature when making purchases online. This interaction with the site showed that consumers were willing and ready to communicate regarding the company’s products and services – the only dilemma was the lack of medium in which to share ideas and collaborate. Rather than seeing their consumers navigate away from the site to gain information on these topics, Wal-Mart sought to facilitate conversations within the Walmart.com site, by welcoming user-generated content and leveraging expert views and ideas.

In an effort to further connect with our customers and find new ways in which we can save them money, Wal-Mart recently formed a team dedicated to developing the company’s presence within emerging media. The team wanted Wal-Mart to be an active participant in the money saving conversations that were already happening online, and through their research also sought to understand the way their audiences interacted with various social media tools.

Tips, stories and videos about saving money were staples on social media forums, and a devoted online subculture existed around sharing ways to live a frugal lifestyle. Leading this money saving community was a group of family-oriented, budget-minded individuals – a group of web-savvy moms. Because this community fit so well with Wal-Mart’s already stated target audience and their “save money, live better” slogan, it was clear that Wal-Mart needed to participate in this popular and ever-growing online discussion.

In order to break into the conversation, the Wal-Mart social media team began exploring and experimenting in social media circles, gaining friends, making connections and fostering relationships with their fellow bargain hunters. The Wal-Mart team soon began to explore the idea of a money-saving community within the Walmart.com site that would invite online shoppers to participate and collaborate with established bloggers who focus their efforts on living a frugal lifestyle while sharing their stories with others.

Through this community collaboration, Wal-Mart wanted to reach out to mothers who manage their families on a budget. Coinciding with other Wal-Mart advertising messages geared towards mothers who manage their homes, the money saving community sought to reach mothers of middle-income families nation-wide who look to find different and innovative ways to be frugal.

The typical Walmart.com community visitor is an American mother who has young children. They usually have had some, if not extensive, experience in online social media. This community would not be a foreign idea to many of them, and they likely subscribe to some form of social media – blogs, networks or book marking sites. Ideally the target audience will be accessing the community from a home computer where they are able to seamlessly access and interact with all components of the community.

The site appeals to all types of home and family managers – mothers and fathers alike, and is evidenced by the participation in submitting user-generated content by both roles. The families who visit this site are typically savings-minded; however, they still aim to live their lives in line with the company’s main slogan and rally cry “save money, live better.”

Most people are familiar with popular social media sites such as YouTube and Twitter. By utilizing these familiar social media platforms and collaborating them all in one cohesive site, Wal-Mart’s objective was to help introduce users of these separate platforms into the Walmart.com online community.

To further establish credibility among this blogger led community, an accepted money-saving expert, Ellie Kay, America’s Family Financial Expert, was asked to participate in the conversation as well. Her experience on the Walmart.com community’s sister site, Make Your Dollar Stretch, was integrated within the community in order to serve as a professional and credible source of money saving tips.

User-submitted tips were highly encouraged on the site. Everyday, the site pulls a random “Tip Of The Day” to be featured on the homepage of the Walmart.com community, and in a pending contest on YouTube, users can win great prizes just for submitting their tips. It was Wal-Mart’s objective that users participate and become engaged in the community, so offering these incentives would help reach the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal of this money-saving community is to invite moms to connect and share on the Walmart.com site.

The plan was to create an online community that would gather tips and ideas from twelve prominent mom bloggers with integration of several other social media platforms including Twitter and YouTube. The twelve un-compensated mom bloggers would be chosen based on the Wal-Mart team’s experiences within other forms of social media, the resulting community would be featured on the Walmart.com Web site and it would be called Elevenmoms.

The site would be integrated with YouTube and Twitter. Video was the method of choice for moms to submit their video blog tips, so a YouTube channel was created that would feature all moms’ videos. Each mom blogger would be outfitted with new Flip Video cameras for easy recording and posting. The highest rated videos would then be pulled into the Walmart.com community page from the YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/walmart.

All twelve moms utilize Twitter as a microblogging platform to promote their blogs, post quick tips and connect with one another, so it seemed fitting for the Wal-Mart community to utilize this medium as well. The community homepage would feature a Twitter feed that pulls in posts from the community’s Twitter account, twitter.com/11moms. This dynamic site feature would allow for site viewers to get tips at a glance as well as connect with the moms using their own Twitter account.

The site would also have a section for visitors to submit their own money saving tips for inclusion within the money saving community. Each day boasts a new user generated tip as the “Tip of the Day.” The plan also called for budgeting calculators on the site as well: one that calculates the amount of savings you can generate by taking your lunch to school or work rather than going out, and the other that would calculate the savings associated with buying a more fuel efficient car.

The site will be rolled out in several phases, some of which are still confidential. However, the first phase includes everything listed in the plan above, including the YouTube channel, Twitter feed, Tip of the Day and user submission section, highest rated videos and calculators.

Future developments to the site include the addition of more financial and budgeting calculators and the implementation of the YouTube video tips contest. On the designated YouTube channel, users who submit a video tip will be entered into a contest where they are eligible to win great prizes from Wal-Mart.

Starting in September, a link to the Elevenmoms community will be included at the bottom of all Wal-Mart receipts printed, and national media has already started covering the project. All of the selected mom bloggers chose to post on their respective blogs regarding their proud involvement with the Elevenmoms community, but were met with mixed emotions by their audiences. Several moms’ stories garnered attention from their readers. Each mom responded with her own stance on the topic, but one thing remained common – the fact that their blog posts were encouraged to continue to remain unbiased towards the retailer and that each mom knew the value of a link to their blog on Walmart.com

Rockfish Interactive: Rockfish Interactive provided all site development and technical support for the Elevenmoms community.

Flip Video: Each mom was supplied with a flip video camera to help them capture their money saving tips. The flip video camera was chosen because of its ease and simplicity to capture and upload to the Internet. This ensured that the moms could easily and quickly upload tips, and that they would all look uniform in quality.

YouTube: A YouTube Channel was built to house all money saving tips. A homepage takeover of YouTube.com promoting the video tip contest is planned to take place in mid-September as well.

Twitter: Mirroring the moms’ efforts on the popular microblogging platform, Twitter, the Elevenmoms community created an account of its own, twitter.com/11moms. The site was designed to mirror the badges created for all the moms’ blogs, and a feed from the account is fed into the Elevenmoms homepage.

Wal-mart: The Elevenmoms community was initiated by Wal-Mart, who contacted all the moms who were involved in providing content to the site.

Rockfish Interactive: Creating the medium in which all the Elevenmoms and all Wal-Mart consumers can communicate was the task assigned to Rockfish Interactive, an interactive marketing firm that had worked with Wal-Mart in previous social media endeavors. Creating sites like the Check Out Blog and Make Your Dollar Stretch provided Rockfish with the experience to produce yet another money saving resource, this time in the form of the Elevenmoms online community.

All Twelve Moms: Although the community is entitled Elevenmoms, there are actually twelve moms participating, all of whom have made their mark in the blogosphere. Many of the moms focus their blogging efforts on budgeting their family life and living a more frugal lifestyle, while some focus on other topics as well. But as one mom blogger said, “I love a great bargain as much as the next gal… So yeah, why not me? Why not you? We’re all trying to make ends meet and make our dollars stretch.” The Elevenmoms community is fueled by the dedicated involvement of the twelve Elevenmoms. The moms provided the video content as well as all the Twitter content.

The creation of the Elevenmoms community led to national media coverage of the project. Many of the moms found themselves being contacted by their respective local media outlets regarding their involvement, and they were all happy to share their experiences. Other media outlets picked up the story and regarded it as a Wal-Mart stride into the realm of social media. The creation of user-generated content is also a mark of success in many types of social media. Walmart.com shoppers have already started submitting their tips to the site.

The main goal of the site is to invite moms to connect and share on the Walmart.com site. Since moms (and dads) have already started submitting their content to the site, you can infer that they were compelled to do so based on the previously stated objectives.

The media involvement further spreads the URL to the Elevenmoms community, sparking curiosity and hopefully encouraging site involvement, which is the ultimate goal of the Elevenmoms community.

Popularity: 28% [?]

EXTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS CASE STUDIES

WINNERS:
Corporate Division: SAP
Government Division: State Bar of Texas
Non-Profit: CouchSurfing International

COMMENDATIONS OF EXCELLENCE:
Corporate Division:
Corel Corporation
Intercontinental Hotels Group and Communispace
Awareness for Sq2
Lexis/Nexis U.S. Legal Markets

COMMENDATIONS OF MERIT:
Academic Division: University of Illinois at Springfield
Corporate Division: Kineto Wireless for UMA Today

Division: Corporate
Category: External Communications
Company: SAP

SAP (www.sap.com) is the world’s leading provider of business software, offering applications and services that enable more than 75,000 customers of all sizes in more than 25 industries and more than 120 countries to become best-run businesses.

In 2006, the SAP Executive Board set a path to double SAP’s addressable market from $US35 billion to $US70 billion by 2010. Three of four distinct paths to reach this goal are:

• Mid Market: Grow customer base from 40,000 to 100,000
• Business User Solutions: Increase the licensed use (non-technical users) of SAP software within its customer companies
• Industry Solutions: Extend business applications leadership through enhanced vertical industry strategy

All organizations throughout SAP were challenged to make adjustments to support the company in reaching these 2010 objectives.

For the SAP Global Communications function, this required an evaluation and reorganization of its entire operation that would allow Global Communications to better forge and sustain external relationships with influencers who impact decision makers at large, medium-sized, and small organizations as well as non-technical business users across all sectors.

The key – and unique – communications issue to be addressed was to not only reach traditional and new types of influencers, including industry analysts, academics, customers, business influencers, and partners who would have an influence on the broader addressable market of $US70 billion, but also to connect these communities of influence for greater market impact. In addition, SAP had to accomplish this in an environment that was:
• More global
• More immediate
• More complex with legal issues and corporate governance
• Changing from deference to reference: more assertive constituencies with less trust – employees, consumers, media
• Changing business model for media outlets – more speed, less thought
• Seeing technology eradicating time and boundaries and in everyone’s hands
• Competing more for share of voice
• Experiencing the multiplication factor: a single e-mail, story, and/or video, goes across the globe without control
• Changing in terms of multiplicity of influencer roles; e.g., industry analysts are blogging, universities are working more with customers and partners, etc.

Consequences included:
• Message consistency is imperative
• Reputation is more important, more fragile, and increasingly difficult to manage
• The network of influencers – including customers and all constituencies – is changing significantly, often away from “professional” sources to more trusted peer groups and word of mouth

Affected, addressable markets in all regions included:
• Global enterprises (2,500+ employees; ~20,000 firms)
• Local enterprises (1,000-2,499 employees; ~64,000 firms)
• Medium-sized enterprises (100-999 employees; 1.2 million firms)
• Small enterprises (1-99 employees; 55.4 million firms)

As a result, SAP had a call to action:
• Rethink the way it communicated, educated, and influenced the small, medium-sized, and large markets
• Create and execute an influencer strategy based on the unique dynamics of influence in each market:
- Identify new influencer types/groups (individuals and communities) and corresponding communication channels that have reach and impact business and IT decision makers within the industry
- Understand the changed nature of how influence works and the power of communities
- Rethink the approach to segmented and tiered relationships
• The programs had to be global in nature
• Program and success had to be measurable
Through the re-organization of SAP Global Communications a new group was created called Industry and Influencer Relations (IIR).

Below are the five teams that make up the Industry and Influencer Relations group and corresponding external audiences addressed:
• IT INFLUENCERS: Industry analysts, consultants, communities (e.g., SAP Developer Network)
• UNIVERSITIES: Leading business and IT universities and institutes (including deans, faculty, and students)
• CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES: User Groups and peer networks, including CEO/CXO level decision makers (executive network)
• BUSINESS INFLUENCERS: High-profile business academics, gurus, bloggers, authors, and social networks
• PARTNERS: Top 20 SAP partners
Overall Goal/Mission:

The mission of the Industry and Influencer Relations team is to support sales execution and accelerated adoption of SAP’s products and solutions by executing programs that generate positive experience of SAP’s brand, products and reputation within strategic business and IT communities of influence that have a $44B influence on business software decisions, annually.

Objectives:
1. Advance the "experience" of SAP's brand, products, and reputation in the industry:
- Promote third-party experts, customers, and partners as advisors and advocates of SAP’s solutions and strategy
- Generate positive word of mouth with customers and partners
- Identify and expand the communities of influence and influencer groups who directly and indirectly affect business software purchase decisions:
IT INFLUENCERS: Top 150 IT industry analysts/influencers (direct) and global 2,000 (indirect) UNIVERSITIES: Top 100 universities (direct) and 2,000 (indirect)
CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES: Top three SAP User Groups (Americas, Germany, Japan) and 28 indirect
BUSINESS INFLUENCERS: Top 30 business influencers (direct) and global 150 (indirect)
PARTNERS: Top 10 strategic SAP partners and partner programs

2. Generate management deliverables that provide continuous insight to support decisions on strategy (corporate and product), market trends, and customer, and partner programs
- The creation of one consolidated influencer communications organization within the SAP Global Communications department: SAP Industry and Influencer Relations (IIR).

IIR unites five previously siloed groups into one centralized influencer organization charged as follows to achieve SAP’s overall communications objectives with corresponding influencer communities.

IT INFLUENCER RELATIONS (formerly Industry Analyst Relations):
• Enable SAP’s success in achieving leadership in business applications (large, medium and small businesses) by influencing the research agendas and opinions of leading IT industry influencers and communities (e.g., SAP Developer Network)

UNIVERSITY ALLIANCES:
• Advance SAP’s influence and value with strategic institutes of higher education, on a global scale to ensure there are more SAP-trained graduates entering the workforce to serve as evangelists for SAP and support accelerated adoption of SAP products

CUSTOMER COMMUNITY RELATIONS:
• Create a worldwide SAP User Group program to increase customer engagement with SAP that supports accelerated adoption of SAP products, thought leadership, education, reference, word of mouth, and influence programs

BUSINESS INFLUENCER RELATIONS:
• Establish and extend relationships with business thought leaders, communities, and social networks that influence the business agenda and purchase decisions of C-suite executives in vertical markets and small and medium-sized companies

INTEGRATED PARTNER COMMUNICATIONS:
• Maximize the communication opportunities with SAP’s most strategic partners and partner programs to advance the reputation and leadership of SAP’s ecosystem and business development opportunities on a global scale

SAP Industry and Influencer Relations was instated on July 1, 2007. The deployment entailed a significant human resources reorganization, the establishment of new engagement models for each team, the alignment of strategies and initiatives across the new organization, and the implementation of tactics and tools (e.g., social media) to support the scale of the programs on a global basis. Below is a list of key programs executed by IIR in 2008:

A. ACROSS INDUSTRY AND INFLUENCER RELATIONS
• TEAM WIKI: (Note – also for consideration for Behind the Firewall/Collaboration & Co-creation categories): Established IIR wiki for internal team collaboration – more details below in Tools and Results sections
• ONLINE SURVEYS: Execution of online surveys to gauge influencers’ opinions, interests, perceptions, and opportunities for SAP – more details below in Tools and Results sections
• SAP INFLUENCER SUMMIT: Attended by 356 of SAP’s most important influencers together with SAP’s senior management (Dec. 3-5, 2007) – more details below in Results section
• BUSINESS OBJECTS (AN SAP COMPANY) INFLUENCER SUMMIT: Attended by 94 of SAP’s most important influencers together with SAP’s senior management (Aug. 11-12, 2008) – more details below in Results section

B. IT INFLUENCER RELATIONS
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: Delivered bi-monthly global newsletters to 900+ industry analysts with feedback mechanism – more information below in the Tools and Results sections
• COMMUNITY PORTAL: An update to SAP’s secure, password-protected IT influencer portal specifically designed as a self-service center for third-tier, community-level analysts and consultants (planned for delivery at the end of 2008) – more information below in the Tools section

C. UNIVERSITY ALLIANCES
• ACADEMIC CONFERENCES: Hosted faculty gatherings in each region focused on new and emerging SAP curriculum – more information below in the Results section
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: Delivered two bi-annual global newsletters to faculty at 900+ universities with feedback mechanism – more information below in the Tools and Results sections
• COMMUNITY PORTAL: Establish community portal for faculty at 900+ member schools, prospects schools, and students (planned for delivery at the end of 2008) – more details below in Tools section

D. CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES
• SAP USER GROUP EXECUTIVE NETWORK (SUGEN) COLLABORATION WORKSPACE: Delivered internal collaboration tool for member use across 15 countries – more information below in the Tools and Results sections

• "INSIGHT" PROGRAMS: More information below in the Tools and Results sections
- "Voice of the Customer"
- "360 Degree View"
- User Group and SAP executive exchanges
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: Delivered quarterly global newsletters to User Group members with feedback mechanism – more information below in the Tools and Results sections

E. BUSINESS INFLUENCERS
• COMMUNITY PORTAL: Developed one of the industry’s first B2B social networking sites for small business owners – more information below in the Tools and Results sections
• Establish accomplishments for each program and the specific measurements for success (against SAP’s overall business objectives)
• Determine the program deliverables and how SAP fosters two-way conversation as a part of deliverables
• Ascertain what IT systems SAP had in place to support relationship management and explore new ones
- Technology and social media tools to manage the programs and communities
• Understand the current state of relations/relationship management with influencers in each group by share of voice, tonality, frequency of contact, and proximity to the purchase decision
• Design and implement new tools, engagement models, and processes to manage the interactions and relationships with influencers and communities
• Establish and strengthen inter-department partnerships within SAP required to execute successful programs
- Customer Reference team, Solution Marketing, SAP Education, Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, Executive Board, regional presidents/managing directors, etc.
• Determine the agency support model and/or requirement
- Develop the right agency relationships
- Understand what SAP needed from an agency
• Explore the staffing requirements and the new team organizational design options and considerations
- Obtain the resource requirement (human resources and budget) to support the new model
- Decide on the profiles for managers and directors
• Learn best practices in managing communities

A. ACROSS INDUSTRY AND INFLUENCER RELATIONS
• TEAM WIKI: (Note to judges: Also for consideration for Behind the Firewall/Collaboration & Co-creation categories): Wiki (vendor: Atlassian’s Confluence Enterprise wiki – http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/) for IIR team collaboration and global execution 24x7 among 66 team members in 13 countries; team members have free reign to develop and update their team pages based on their team/individual business priorities. Resources include:
- Team Operations (infrastructure and technology tools)
- Team events and team calendar
- Team organizational chart with responsibilities/ownership areas
- "How-tos" (e.g., using the wiki, updating team activity tracking dashboard with key business outcomes, etc. for presentation to senior management)
- Team call presentations and meeting minutes
- Internal team and external newsletter archives
- Tiered databases of influencers in each constituent category based on SAP’s business priorities (premier– top 5 percent, priority – next 15 percent, and community – remaining 80 percent)
- Associated SAP-developed collaboration room for viewing and editing of team documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) with check-in/check-out, and view/edit control features; based on a document management system, but transparent to users via URL links (see attached).
• ONLINE SURVEYS: Based on a proprietary solution for quantitative and qualitative online surveys, executed to gauge influencer opinions pre and post major events; including the annual customer event SAPPHIRE (Americas and EMEA), annual Influencer Summits, Industry Summits, University Alliances academic conferences, Analyst Days as well as SAP and industry developments, such as SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects (vendor: Burson-Marsteller – http://www.burson-marsteller.com).

B. IT INFLUENCER RELATIONS
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: HTML-based global newsletters with feedback mechanism – more information below in the Results section (vendor: Burson-Marsteller – http://www.burson-marsteller.com).
• COMMUNITY PORTAL: Established as a secure, password-protected IT Influencer Relations portal specifically designed as a self-service center for third-tier, community-level analysts and consultants. The site’s purpose is to provide analyst-specific Web content and materials under NDA through an automated process; e.g., pre-packaged briefing presentations, video podcasts from events (keynotes, interviews, etc.), and white papers. The video podcasts include event name tags based on SAP-developed technology, which allows for tracking the video being posted on social networking sites (see example in Results section: Business Objects Influencer Summit). The next phase of the rollout is to integrate more Web 2.0 tools for blogs, discussion forums, etc. (next iteration planned in November 2008).

C. UNIVERSITY ALLIANCES
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: HTML-based global newsletters with feedback mechanism – more information below in the Results sections (vendor: Burson-Marsteller – http://www.burson-marsteller.com)
• COMMUNITY PORTAL: With a planned go-live date on November 30, SAP will launch a community portal for faculty at 900+ member schools (sharing of curricula, best practices, online discussion, etc.), prospects schools, and students (with links to external jobs/careers portal and certification resources). With this portal, SAP intends to close the gap of 30-50K of SAP experts needed in the marketplace to accelerate solution adoption (vendor: Plexus Web Creations – http://www.plexusweb.com/ – and linked to the SAP Community Network (SCN) – https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn). The SCN represents 1.3 million members with the top 60 contributors regularly leveraged for their influence on the community. It is 100 percent self managed and user regulated with thousands of posts per day and thousands of unique visitors each week. The SCN is a place for members to share information and seek advice. The average response time to questions and posts is approximately 18 minutes. Because the SCN is a very rich source for information and insight, the University Alliances portal is being modeled after it.

D. CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES
• SAP USER GROUP EXECUTIVE NETWORK (SUGEN) COLLABORATION WORKSPACE (Note – also for consideration in the Collaboration & Co-creation category): SUGEN collaboration workspace (wikis, blogs, etc.) used across more than 15 countries and co-branded with the Americas SAP User Group (ASUG); (vendor: Plexus Web Creations – http://www.plexusweb.com/) – more details in the Results section
• “INSIGHT” PROGRAMS: Executed through the use of SAP-developed tools, including SAP’s Inquisite Survey, Crystal Reports (business intelligence reporting), and Xcelsius (data visualization and dashboards); last two tools from the Business Objects acquisition (see attached)
- “Voice of the Customer:” More details in Results section
- “360 Degrees:” More details in Results section
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: HTML-based global newsletters with feedback mechanism (SAP internal) – more information below in the Results section

E. BUSINESS INFLUENCERS
• COMMUNITY PORTAL: MyVenturePad.com (http://myventurepad.com/), a small and medium-sized business community of influencers sponsored by SAP (vendor: Social Media Today – http://socialmediatoday.com/) – more information below in the Results section
The SAP Industry and Influencer Relations Team –
• SAP employees/contractors: 62
- Located in U.S., Germany, South Africa, Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, Russia, U.K., India, Canada, Brazil
• Agency: 4
• Total: 66
SAP Industry and Influencer Relations Roles –
1 Vice President, SAP Industry and Influencer Relations (IIR)

• 1 Global vice president, IT Influencer Relations
- Directors
- Managers by SAP solution area
• 1 Global vice president, University Alliances
- Directors by region (Americas, EMEA, APJ)
- Managers, individual contributors
• 1 Global vice president, Customer Communities
- User Group liaisons by region/country
- Managers, individual contributors
• 1 Global director, Business Influencer Relations
- Global managers and regional managers/ individual contributors
• 1 Global director, Integrated Partner Communications
- Managers, individual contributors
• 1 Director, IIR Operations
- Managers, individual contributors
SAP Interns (year round)
• Global administrative support, research, and practical application of technology tools for IIR Operations and presentations/tutorials to team on use
Agency (Burson-Marsteller)
• 1 Managing director (across all five components of IIR)
• 1 Director (ITIR corporate, solution ownership areas, and across all five pillars of IIR)
• Individual contributors (ITIR corporate, solution ownership areas, and administrative assistance across all five pillars of IIR)

Components of the Program (Design) –
The SAP Industry and Influencer Relations (IIR) team was created to execute a critical and comprehensive influencer strategy focused on the unique challenges in managing an emerging ecosystem of influencers who have a varied and dynamic impact on the success of SAP’s 2010 strategy.

As outlined in section five, the design of the IIR team represents an important innovation and evolution of the communications profession. By connecting with key influencers and influencer communities, the team delivers greater value to SAP by establishing influencer relations as a new marketing and communications currency for the business:

• As a catalyst to accelerate larger marketing and sales campaigns;
• Through industry collaboration – by connecting senior executives with thought leaders for exchange of insight and SAP’s own need for education; and
• To provide coveted third-party validation and recognition of SAP’s business strategy, products, and overall market leadership.

The design is reflective of the three primary aspects of an effective influencer program:
• Build deeper, lasting relationships between the company and the influencers;
• Find specific ways to help every influencer become a vocal and active champion of the company; and
• Foster a lasting dialogue of mutual benefit.

The SAP IIR team is in constant interaction with its influencers and communities, providing education and working with them as consultants, advisors, and net promoters/evangelists of the business and product strategy. SAP often engages with the intent to exchange valuable insights that ultimately influence each of SAP’s own views.

A. ACROSS INDUSTRY AND INFLUENCER RELATIONS

• TEAM WIKI: More streamlined and integrated collaboration among 66 team members across 13 countries.
• ONLINE SURVEYS: Helped SAP reach and target influencers at a more granular and focused level than before as well as provided the ability to compare and contrast influencer opinions between communities. Provided input to SAP on business strategy and product direction
• SAP INFLUENCER SUMMIT: Fifth-annual event (Boston, Dec. 3-5, 2007) was re-invented by connecting new communities of influence as a result of the new organization. The event brought together for the first time influencers from all five components of the program to foster an informed, closed loop dialogue with constituencies that directly impact market perceptions and ultimately, buy decisions for the company. The synergies between each of these groups were/are extremely high and this event provided a forum to start “connecting the dots” through coordinated meetings, networking activities, and long-term relationship building. This annual summit event represented many new milestones for SAP:
- It was the first official meeting of the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN), an important customer community which represents more than 50 percent of SAP’s global installed base. SUGEN’s attendance showcased SAP’s respect of customers as co-innovators and influencers to SAP.
- For the first time, SAP brought together in this forum the leading faculty members of SAP’s University Alliances program who create standardized curriculum that will be rolled out to all 900+ member universities (globally) as a basis for teaching and building SAP experience with 150,000+ students worldwide each year.
- For the first time, SAP also invited the heads of the SAP practice from its global and regional systems integration partners.
- SAP also invited for the first time some of the industry’s leading business influencers, who provide consulting to SAP and produce research and thought leadership on topics associated with business model innovation. SAP provides these thought leaders with access to its customers, partners, and executives as part of their commitment to the community.
- In addition, industry analysts, customers, and partners participated in video podcast recordings at the event concerning technology implementation and business outcomes, which were repurposed on SAP.com

SAP Influencer Summit Results (based upon post-event online survey tool) –
Industry Analysts: 173
Customers: 26
Partner Influencers: 18
Partner References: 29
Bloggers: 8
Journalists: 19
Faculty: 12 (North America, Europe, and Latin America)
Business Influencers: 20
SUGEN: 17 (SAP User Group Executive Network)
Influencer Total: 322

SAP Employees Total: 200 (event staff, speakers, other)

Total Attendees: 522

• BUSINESS OBJECTS (AN SAP COMPANY) INFLUENCER SUMMIT: This event (Aug. 11-12, 2008), modeled after the SAP Influencer Summit, focused on business intelligence and the non-technical business user. Content included how the combined innovation strengths of Business Objects and SAP are enabling businesses to close the gap between strategy and execution and achieve optimized business performance. Influencers heard customer and partner testimonials, watched demonstrations of the latest solution enhancements, and engaged in in-depth discussions with executives, partners, and customers during group, one-on-one and informal venues. Deliberately designed to foster a dialogue as well as share information, the Summit featured break-out sessions where influencers received details on SAP’s respective achievements and plans to continue market leadership in 2008 and beyond following its acquisition of Business Objects earlier in the year.

Business Objects Summit Results (based upon post-event online survey tool) –
Industry Analysts: 58
User Group Customers: 4
Customers: 3
Partner Influencers: 5
Bloggers: 7
Journalists: 9
Faculty: 3
Business Influencers: 3
Management Consultants: 2
Influencer Total: 94

The event activities (keynotes, interviews, etc.) were captured as video podcasts (MP4) and posted on SAP.com, the ITIR community portal, and with the event name tagging tool, were searchable on 20 different social networking sites such as Starship Enterprisey (sic.). The idea was to make the SAP-branded content more viral while also bringing people on social networking sites back to SAP.com.

B. IT INFLUENCER RELATIONS

• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: Provided 900+ industry analysts around the world bi-monthly updates on SAP strategy and execution (see attached samples)
• COMMUNITY PORTAL (planned for delivery at the end of 2008)
• ITIR METRICS(excerpt from vendor-purchased measurements from Analyst Strategy Group):
o Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP large enterprise) (July07-July08)
• 2007 Net Market Impact for SAP was the highest of all competitors at 39.3 percent, with next closest competitor Oracle at 35.3 percent --> a difference of 4 percent
• 2008 Net Market Impact for SAP was still the highest at 48.4 percent, with next closest competitor Oracle at 32.4 percent --> a difference of 16 percent
• So SAP improved by 9.1 percent year-over-year, while next closest competitor Oracle decreased by -2.9 percent year-over-year.

- Small and Medium Size Enterprise (July07-July08)
• 2007 Net Market Impact for SAP was 27.2 percent, trailing only Microsoft who led at 28 percent. Next closest competitor behind SAP was Oracle at 22.2 percent
• 2008 Net Market Impact for SAP was 33.7 percent (taking over first place), next closest competitor was Oracle in second at 24.3 percent, and Microsoft in third at 23.1 percent
• So SAP improved by 6.5 percent year-over-year; Oracle only improved 2.1 percent year-over-year, and Microsoft declined year-over-year by -4.9 percent

C. UNIVERSITY ALLIANCES
• ACADEMIC CONFERENCES: SAP Curriculum Congress in Atlanta (Feb. 28-Mar. 1, 2008) – an event that brought together leading educators from around the world to explore innovative curricula and the use of SAP technology in the classroom. It was the first time the annual event featured keynote and session presentations from Gartner industry analysts and the Americas SAP User Group (ASUG) chief executive officer representing 2,000+ companies and 60,000+ members in the U.S.

SAP Curriculum Congress Results –
323 attendees
121 institutions of higher education
19 countries represented

Upcoming SAP academic conferences in EMEA (Sept. 11-12, 2008) and APJ (Nov. 5-7, 2008)
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: Provided faculty at 900+ universities worldwide bi-annual updates on SAP strategy, news, new and emerging SAP curriculum, and with a feedback mechanism (see attached sample)
• COMMUNITY PORTAL (planned for go-live on November 30, 2008)

D. CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES
• SAP USER GROUP EXECUTIVE NETWORK (SUGEN) COLLABORATION WORKSPACE: Delivered collaboration workspace based on a social media platform (including wiki, blogs, etc.), connecting executive influencers from more than 15 countries. This is a private community site. Benefits from the use of this site include:
- Active use of wiki platform to collaborate on multiple and extensive joint SAP and SUGEN charter projects
- Repository for presentations, meeting minutes, agendas, calendar of activities

- Active use of discussion threads and blog platform for discussion about SUGEN issues, program updates, SAP executive updates; best practices and peer-to-peer collaboration
• "INSIGHT" PROGRAMS: Using a mix of SAP-developed survey technology, focus groups and executive exchanges, the Customer Communities team is facilitating insight and engagement between SAP User Groups and SAP that help to strengthen the effectiveness of product development, corporate strategy, service and support, marketing, and communication efforts. Below are two programs designed (with User Groups) to gather and channel this information to SAP management using the mix of tools and models above:
- "Voice of the Customer:" Bi-annual survey of customer base through User Groups providing index of customer satisfaction, concerns, and challenges. The results of this survey are used by SAP executive management to improve customer account management (sales, support, and service) and product portfolio investments
- "360 Degrees:" Specialized program designed to provide deep insights on customer experience with specific products, solutions, and corporate programs. Insight is provided to SAP management and adjustments and improvements to programs are reported back to communities to complete the 360 degree loop. Three surveys have been conducted in 2008 and have proven critical to supporting executive management decisions in future development of the SAP product portfolio plan for the next three years.
• ONLINE NEWSLETTERS: Provided 300 User Group community members around the world quarterly updates on SAP strategy and execution with feedback mechanism.

E. BUSINESS INFLUENCERS
• COMMUNITY PORTAL: MyVenturePad.com (http://myventurepad.com/)– one of the industry’s first business-to-business social networking portals for small business owners (less than 1,000 employees). A viral site, it features podcasts and moderated online conversations that address the crucial issues facing small business owners today. In addition to leveraging social media to attract new customers, the site aims to significantly enhance the SAP brand experience and perception in the small business community by creating and managing conversations with key bloggers and potential customers.

SAP is the founding sponsor of the site, which was developed and built by Social Media Today, LLC, a company that creates networked conversations around business topics, including one of the leading sites for social media, SocialMediaToday.com. SAP is working directly with Social Media Today to manage the MyVenturePad.com site and to identify and attract the most informed business influencers to the site to advise on small business issues. Members of the site can get the best available insight about startups, funding and finance, taxes, marketing, and more in one location; but more importantly, they can comment, share and rate posts, connect with bloggers and other members, and even blog themselves. MyVenturePad.com has 900+ members with 70 influencers very active on the site. The site has generated 300+ sales leads for SAP in 2008.

MyVenturePad.com Metrics:
- Amount in dollars of new sales leads through the site is 13+ times the initial investment
- 927 small and medium-sized company members
- Active Bloggers: Averaging 10 new per month; 70 total as of August
- August 2008 visitors: 12,657 visits; 4,051 uniques via 47 sources and mediums (linked tos via Radian6, Feedster, Pubsub, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
- August page views: 88,259; 45.4 percent returning visitors, 11.1 percent add to favorites
- August average time on the site: 4min., 53 seconds
- Top countries: U.S., Germany, Brazil, India, U.K., Canada, Australia, Netherlands
- Webinars in 2008: three completed; three planned

MAPPING OF RESULTS TO STATED MISSION AND OBJECTIVES FROM ABOVE
The mission of the Industry and Influencer Relations team is to support sales execution and accelerated adoption of SAP’s products and solutions by executing programs that generate positive experience of SAP’s brand, products and reputation within strategic business and IT communities of influence that have a $44B influence on business software decisions, annually.

Objectives
1. Advance the “experience” of SAP’s brand, products, and reputation in the industry:
- Promote third-party experts, customers, and partners as advisors and advocates of our solutions and strategy
- Generate positive word of mouth with customers and partners
Result: This result has been achieved through the below programs:
• Identify and expand the communities of influence and influencer groups who directly and indirectly affect business software purchase decisions:

IT INFLUENCERS: Top 150 IT industry analysts/influencers (direct) and global 2,000 (indirect)
Result: Exceeded this objective through engagement of top influencers (analysts, bloggers, and IT consultants) through influencer events, specialized 1:1 engagements, online surveys, and online newsletter
Result: Through engagement with the 60 most prolific contributors and experts in the SAP Developer Network (1.3 million-person online community) SAP helped strengthen its position (indirectly) to this group

UNIVERSITIES: Top 100 universities (direct) and 1,000 (indirect)
Result: Exceeded this objective through active engagement of top SAP University Alliances universities through events and the development of curriculum that is currently being rolled out to university members worldwide
Result: With the launch of the University Alliance portal in November, SAP will reach thousands of additional prospect universities worldwide with access and engagement in a community model

CUSTOMER COMMUNITIES: Top three SAP User Groups (Americas, Germany, Japan) and 28 indirect
Result: SAP has exceeded this objective with active and direct engagement with the following User Groups: United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Middle East and North Africa, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and Japan.
Result: Indirect engagement is supported through local country-driven programs with the remaining 14 User Groups

BUSINESS INFLUENCERS: Top 30 business influencers (direct) and global 150 (indirect)
Result: Exceeded this objective through active and direct engagement with 32 influencers that reach small, medium, and large business audience concerns
Result: Indirectly SAP has reached 70+ small and medium size enterprises influencers through MyVenturePad.com

PARTNERS: Top 10 strategic SAP partners and partner programs
Result: By hosting partners at events, gaining their insights through online surveys and inclusion in post-event analyses, SAP directly reached and engaged partners and connected them with the other influencer groups

2. Generate management deliverables that provide continuous insight to support decisions on strategy (corporate and product), market trends, and customer and partner programs
Result: Delivered against this objective through the Customer Communities “Insight” programs, executive and influencer exchanges, online surveys, and analyses.

Division: Government
Category: External Communications
Entity: State Bar Association of Texas

Members of our association (Texas lawyers) depend on networking to advance their careers. Traditional methods of networking are limited and local in nature. Texas lawyers need a new way to connect and find opportunities. The State Bar of Texas (www.texasbar.com) seeks new ways of facilitating communication among its members, and new avenues for communicating with its members. Our association also wants to be a leader among bar associations regarding social media technologies and opportunities.

Our challenge was to find a way to facilitate communication among our members that offered them real value and that also offered us new ways to communicate with them. While we are a mandatory association, our business is always driven by improving service to our members. Traditional member services include consulting and education on law practice management, continuing education, ethics counseling, our monthly magazine, online tools like free legal research, and discounts on services such as car rentals and hotels. Despite all of these services and with our members practicing over wide and diverse geography of Texas, some feel that their only connection with the State Bar is receiving their annual dues statement in the mail. How could we offer our members a unique service that could potentially reconnect them to our association and at the same time foster relationships and opportunities among them, regardless of their location? What sort of service could be available to our entire membership, regardless of their geographic location? How can we take advantage of and establish a presence on social media services that are exploding in popularity and importance?

The target audience for this project is our membership of more than 80,000 practicing lawyers, who live and work in all corners of the state, country, and the world. About 35 percent of our members are sole practitioners and 20 percent practice in firms with 60 attorneys or more. Lawyers depend on networking to further their careers, whether it offers new career or business opportunities or referrals of legal work. Most networking is done at the local level, through regional and specialty bar associations and community involvement.

Goals:
To provide a new avenue for our members to communicate, network, and find opportunities. To find new ways to communicate with members about our programs and services. To become a leader among bar associations regarding the use and benefits of social media tools and services. Through social conversation in the community, meet members of our association who have special skills and interesting stories to contribute to the association.

From the inception of sites like MySpace and LinkedIn, we had toyed with the idea of a social network for attorneys. What we needed for our members was a “closed” network, accessible only by our members and visible only to our members. We approached Affinity Circles of Mountain View, California, which offered exclusive social networks for Alumni Associations, and asked whether they could build a professional network for our members. Our timing was good, because Affinity Circles had been contemplating an expansion of its business to include networks for professional associations. A volunteer committee of our association, the Web Services Committee oversaw the project and obtained buy-in from our executive and volunteer leadership for the idea. We secured approval and launched our network on June 1, 2007. The network is called Texas Bar Circle (www.texasbarcircle.com), and is the world’s first social and professional network offered by a bar association. Texas Bar Circle is exclusive to Texas lawyers - that is, only licensed Texas attorneys may join. It works much like Facebook or Linked In. Attorneys join Texas Bar Circle, create a profile, and begin building their networks by adding friends. A groups function allows lawyers to join groups of attorneys with similar interests. An “opportunities” platform allows users to post jobs and find jobs, as well as offer and find opportunities such as volunteering and community service.

Our network is hosted by Affinity Circles. Once we agreed that we would use the Affinity Circles platform, we began looking at potential legal and privacy issues that might affect the project. Those included potential regulatory questions regarding how members could use the platform, as well as securing a guarantee that our member data would always be protected and private. We worked internally on branding, developing a logo and the tagline, "Your trusted network of Texas lawyers." The service launched on June 1, 2007.

First, we needed internal buy-in for the idea among our executive team, as well as our volunteer leaders and board of directors. Such an approval process is often slow, but fortunately our leadership recognized the unique opportunity that the social network offered, and its potential value to our members. The organization acted quickly and achieved a “first mover” position for social networks among bar associations. Legal and privacy concerns were significant, but handled by our volunteer committee and general counsel in a way that served to support and not delay our launch of the service.

Our social and professional networking platform is provided by Affinity Circles (www.affinitycircles.com) of Mountain View, California.

Our team consists of our three-person website department of the State Bar, which handled the launch and fields all customer support requests from Texas Bar Circle members. Our IT department provides technical assistance with member data uploads and synchronization. Launch support came from our Web Services Committee, executive and volunteer leadership teams, and our communications division at the State Bar of Texas.

Results:
On a qualitative level, the best examples of success we can point to are the result of groups formed within Texas Bar Circle. Any Texas Bar Circle can form a group, on any topic. We've seen dozens of groups form by geographic regions (e.g. Austin attorneys, Houston attorneys), practice area interests (intellectual property law), business interests (rainmaking), and hobbies (art and photography, motorcycle riding). Through these groups we have seen many examples of attorneys making new connections using Texas Bar Circle and even taking these offline. For example, Austin attorneys created a group within Texas Bar Circle and have held several in-person meet-ups for business networking. These are real connections that might not have happened if it were not for Texas Bar Circle and the unique value it offers our members. Quantitatively, at the end of June 2007 we had about 300 users. Today there are more than 5,300. Our Web Services Committee has a near-term goal of signing up 10,000 lawyers for the service. We have used Texas Bar Circle to post messages about the State Bar of Texas, including our recent annual meeting, where we created a group for discussion and questions about the meeting.

We have created a platform which allows State Bar of Texas members a new platform for communication which they did not have before. Active users of Texas Bar Circle have made new connections and found new opportunities. Texas Bar Circle also offers the State Bar a new avenue for communicating with members, by posting information within the community. We have also found Texas Bar Circle to be a great tool for identifying members who have unique talents that they might lend to our organization, or that might be good to feature in our publications.

Division: Nonprofit
Category: External Communications
Organization: CouchSurfing International

As an Internet-based community which seeks to network people and places throughout the world thereby bridging cultural differences and creating understanding, the challenge or problem we seek to address is: how can we get the diverse people of very different cultures, lifestyles, and ideologies to communicate their differences and explore them in a way that feels safe and fun. More, how can we help people to want to do that?

Travel can be a fulfilling, rewarding experience, but it can also be an empty one. We’ve all stayed at hotels where we got little more than clean sheets daily and a bill at the end of our stay. As an organization, CouchSurfing International (www.couchsurfing.com) seeks to address the communications challenge of helping travelers attain intimate knowledge about the places and cultures they visit that can only come from a local living in that place: that out-of-the-way rakomelo bar without a name at the base of the Acropolis; the hidden ecological wonderland just a couple of miles off the well-worn path in Costa Rica; the daily challenges a small business owner in Amsterdam faces, and the meals she serves her family at the end of a long day. This is the kind of information that will never show up in a guide book or in a travel documentary, which are easily the most common communication vehicles for travelers, but it’s also the kind of information that makes for an unforgettable vacation—even a life-changing and mind-expanding experience.

We also seek to address the communications challenge of developing the necessary tools so a traveler can find a local to speak with and quickly establish the rapport needed for the local to feel comfortable sharing that information without judgment. We strive to make travel immersive and an incredible learning experience for anyone brave enough to be willing to expose themselves to the raw realities of life—wherever they roam on this planet. Our hope is that CouchSurfing International community members get much more than a hotel bill at the end of their stay; that they develop meaningful relationships with fellow CouchSurfers and their circles of friends, and that new understanding grows as a result of the CouchSurfing cultural exchange that takes place.

By the very definition of our mission, we have a commutation solution that is 100% inclusive. We invite everyone everywhere into the community: old, young, conservative, liberal, east, west, black, white, gregarious, introverted, rich or poor. The beauty of addressing a communications challenge of this nature—bridging cultural differences and building understanding between people around the world—is that the more diverse our membership base is, the more fully we will achieve our communications goals. Currently, our organization appeals to individuals who are either eager for a cultural immersion experience, or eager to offer such an experience to a visitor and in exchange learn from them; those interested in the goodwill efforts and volunteer activities of CouchSurfing; those looking for a world experience (either welcoming the world to their home, exploring it themselves, or both) that is more authentic and pure; and even budget-minded travelers who are looking for a safe, exciting way to explore cultural differences.

As a not-for-profit organization (we are in the application process to become a non-profit 501 (c)(3) organization), membership is free and no money is ever exchanged between host and traveler--ensuring that anyone, regardless of the economic resources available to them, can be a part of the community.

As of today (our numbers change rapidly and are updated minute-to-minute at http://www.couchsurfing.com/statistics.html), we have 722,476 members representing more than 200 countries, 47,822 cities, and 1,208 unique languages. Our members range in age from 18-89, with the average age of a CouchSurfer at 27. The CouchSurfing community has had more than 1,200,000 positive CouchSurfing experiences since its inception in 2004. More than 783,000 friendships have been formed as a result of the CouchSurfing project.

Looking forward, our communications challenge is to ensure that these numbers are reflective of our mission and representative of our inclusiveness as an organization. As a result, we must strive to continue to find ways to strategically build our membership base in countries where the CouchSurfing community needs greater representation, particularly developing nations, South America and Asia.

Our vision is a world where everyone appreciates the differences between people. Our goal is to offer people a forum where they have the ability to forge such connections that facilitate cultural understanding. We are developing a defined system based on measurable results that takes people on a fast path from prejudice to appreciation.

Our plan is to find people who want to travel or to meet travelers, and provide an online social network that allows them to create profiles and allows for the traveler to meet locals in person. We have worked, and continue to work to create a system that allows both parties to feel safe and at ease, that fosters a deep and meaningful connection between the two, and that provides incentive for face-to-face interaction.

This is done by encouraging locals to host travelers for free in their homes, which saves the traveler money, and gives the travelers a place where they can feel at home in a foreign culture. It gives the host the ability to bring the world at the doorstep. We give both parties total control to find and choose (or reject) which other members they want to meet. A number of safety measures are in place to help host and traveler feel comfortable with the online arrangement; we have several tools which members use to this end: a referencing system, a verification process which verifies the member’s name and address, and a vouching option (members can only be vouched for by another member who has been vouched for at least three times, creating a circle of trust). We have found that because of the type of people who are drawn to the community, members take safety very seriously and work to ensure the community is tight-knit and safe, yet welcoming to newcomers.

The intimate home environment, the feeling of comfort, the generosity of shared hospitality, and the implicit trust of both parties when guest visits host creates an environment that has the unique ability to quickly allow both parties to look past their superficial differences, learn from one another, form friendships and appreciate each other’s cultures.

The deployment is an online social network. Member profiles are designed in such a way that allows both parties to really understand each other (e.g. “my mission”). Robust search functionality allows the traveler to specify a location, and exactly the type of person a CouchSurfing member feels comfortable meeting. We've developed safety systems that allow traveler and host to trust one another: references, friend links, vouching and verification.

Messaging tools are developed to allow a safe environment for member communication, before traveler or host gives out personal contact information. We've instituted the ability to track and quantify member activity to improve our systems over time and carefully understand what makes this process work, and what can be done to improve upon it.

Because of our commitment to making this service 100% free to everyone and not to display banner advertisements, we operate on a shoestring budget. This has required us to become experts in distributing our workload to a large, often remote, volunteer work force. We currently only have four paid staff members.

We have two approaches to make this happen: sophisticated online volunteering tools that allow hundreds of members to easily perform needed tasks such as individually greeting every new member, and responding to every member inquiry, despite the dozens of languages our worldwide membership base uses.

The second is what we call "collectives". We can't afford to pay 20 full-time salaries. But we can afford to provide 20 people with a house to live in, food to eat, a personal and professional growth opportunity and an amazing experience in an incredible location with other brilliant volunteers from around the world. This strategy has proven successful, and has allowed us to stay financially solvent while maintaining a Web site for a community that is growing exponentially and meeting the associated communications needs of our membership.

The Web site is running on servers at GNAZ data center.

We use proprietary social networking software and online volunteer tools developed by our volunteers and paid staff.

Developers & System Administrators create and maintain our Web site.

The Contact Us Team answers member inquiries.

The Member Disputes & Safety Team resolves member disputes and encourages members to leave honest references.

The Volunteer Coordination team coordinates our hundreds of remote international volunteers.

Our Design and Member Communications team helps members understand our vision and encourages them to join their local community.

Our Research team improves member features and works to understand how we can better realize our vision.
Our Events & Outreach team helps members create small local events and organize large events that create communities of hospitality around the world.

Our Marketing & Public Relations team helps us understand why travelers and locals are drawn to our service, how to better serve their needs, how to communicate effectively with the large amount of media interested in covering our community, how to achieve strategic growth and how to reach out to potential new members.

Our site tracks these numbers in real time and can be viewed at: http://www.couchsurfing.com/statistics.html

Here are the current statistics, as of this application submission:
General Statistics
CouchSurfers 722,476
Successful Surfings (approx) 641,893
Friendships Created (approx) 783,362
Positive Experiences (approx) 1,281,057
Unique Countries Represented 231
Unique States/Provinces Represented 2,490
Unique Cities Represented 47,822
Unique Languages Represented 1,208

CouchSurfers by World Region (surfers)
Europe 360,590 49.9%
North America 222,457 30.8%
Central Asia 34,068 4.7%
South America 33,028 4.6%
Oceania 27,019 3.7%
Africa 12,346 1.7%
Southeast Asia 11,359 1.6%
Middle East 8,990 1.2%
Central America and the Caribbean 3,406 0.5%
Antarctic Region 46 0.0%

Other Facts
Surfers with Photos 433,301 60.0%
Messages sent through system 24,352,941
Requests to CouchSurf 1,901,657

We are able to quantify how many members we have, the percentage of those who make or receive hosting requests, the percentage of those who get to host or stay with a host, the percentage of those who have a positive (99.8%), neutral, or negative experience, and the percentage of those who form friendships links.

Every new positive experience registered after a traveler meets a host proves communication between people of diverse cultures and backgrounds has led to those people being able to appreciate each other’s differences, which is our vision.

This interaction is not limited to members of our site, because they take this experience to their family, friends, and neighbors and help them realize the value that people of other cultures. Often our members become avid ambassadors of our program, taking on exciting goodwill projects of their own related to our mission.

Division: Corporate
Category: External Communications
Company: Corel

The CorelDRAW (www.coreldraw.com) family of products enjoys a passionate and active base of users around the world. The CorelDRAW team wanted them to have a platform for sharing information and building relationships. In addition, team members also wanted direct access to more users so they could engage in candid conversations and glean insights that are critical to product development.

Ultimately, the CorelDRAW team wanted to enable customers, prospects, employees and partners to communicate, share their knowledge and artwork in an open and collaborative environment. Moreover, the team wanted to prove that they could build a successful community with limited resources and budget.

Corel has always talked with its customers and their feedback is critical to our products’ success. However, we wanted to expand the reach of these conversations and felt an online community was the best way to exponentially grow the number of conversations we could participate in. The CorelDRAW team continues to reach out to customers one on one, but now with this community we are able to keep our finger on the pulse of a much larger group of users.

The team wanted a community that would enable them to both listen and discuss, essentially delivering a feedback loop with customers. Product development without a real understanding the needs of your users is pointless.

Target Audience:
Anyone using one of the CorelDRAW family of products (CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, Corel DESIGNER Technical Suite, etc.) as well as anyone interested in learning more about these products or graphics in general.

With limited budget and resources, the team built www.coreldraw.com with a number of goals including:
• The creation of a useful, comfortable and supportive community that helps users around the world build relationships with us and each other;
• An environment that provides direct feedback regarding product development;
• To be ranked high on page 1 of Google and Yahoo! searches for “CorelDRAW”;
• To quickly overtake other graphics industry communities in terms of active members;
• To transform users into evangelists.

The CorelDRAW.com team set out to build a community that would foster the exchange of independent, user-generated content and give community members around the world a single place where they can share information, learn from others, and discover each other’s work and businesses.

Designed to fuel inspiration, http://CorelDRAW.com combines forums, blogs and galleries for design professionals and graphic hobbyists alike. Forums are available in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Japanese serving an international audience.

From the outset, this project was created with a distinct set of criteria and rules:
• The site was to be a forum for real conversations. No advertisements. No marketing speak. No store.
• The site was to enable users to show off their spectacular work and share information about their businesses. The gallery section has been hugely popular and now features more than 200 galleries.
• The site was to give the CorelDRAW team members a real face and voice within the community. Team members blog regularly and are active within the forums.
• The site was to provide users a single place to share graphics, knowledge and information.
• The team wanted to challenge the assertion that successful communities require big budget and big technology.

The community needed to appeal to all kinds of CorelDRAW users – graphic hobbyists and professionals alike. It also facilitates other forms of social media for the community by offering links to other CorelDRAW groups including Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Plaxo, LinkedIn and FriendFeed.

During the creation and deployment of CorelDRAW.com, the team quickly proved its assertion that it did not need big resources or expense to create a successful community. CorelDRAW.com was launched by a small group of individuals with minimal resources on a hosted server, using an off-the-shelf solution.

The first version of the community was based on the standard template. However, within a few months, the team used community feedback to launch a second revision that featured a high level of customization and offered more tools and functionality. Most recently, the team has added real-time chat and is now hosting monthly sessions where community members can have live conversations with team members. The site has also been used to launch a public beta of an upcoming product to community members.

Since this was the first time the company had endeavored to create a community, there were a number of challenges to overcome. Which platform should we use? How should it be managed? Everything was new. And as with many other forms of social media, it was a challenge to determine how to prove ROI or measure results.

CorelDRAW.com was built using Telligent Community Server. This platform has enabled us to grow to meet user demand.

CorelDRAW.com is managed by Gérard Métrailler, Senior Director of Product Management for the CorelDRAW family of products. In addition, members of the development, product management and PR teams also participate and support the community. As adoption grows, more and more Corel employees are joining in the conversation.

Results:
• Launched in May 2007, CorelDRAW.com has recently surpassed 15,000 members. The community had more than 10,000 members in the first year and added another 5,000 in the first three months of its second year. CorelDRAW.com is poised to overtake other long-standing, graphics-centric communities by the end of the year.
• Community feedback was used to prioritize the updates added to the latest CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 service pack (SP1).
• When searching the term “CorelDRAW,” the community is #3 on Google and #1 on Yahoo!
• More than 15,000 Members – With Deloitte, Beeline and SNCR reporting that only 9% of corporate online communities have more than 10,000 members, the popularity of this community is a tremendous success. Coming from more than 190 countries, these passionate users are extremely active.
• SP1 – The team monitored and engaged in conversations with community members to prioritize which fixes they wanted to see in the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite Service Pack 1. This feedback was directly applied during development and as a result, the update has been extremely well received.
• #3 on Google and #1 on Yahoo! – The site is easily found by anyone searching for information about the product. This success clearly demonstrates that communities can be grown organically, even without advertising spend.
• Perhaps most importantly, CorelDRAW.com is a vibrant, self-sustaining community. The forums are self policing and users are providing each other with support, rather than depending solely on CorelDRAW team members to answer questions. The community is an exciting place driven by passionate evangelists and advocates.

Division: Corporate
Category: External Communications
Company: Greenough Communications for InterContinental Hotels Group

The social media revolution has dramatically changed the travel industry. User-generated content is highly influential in this market, and InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) (http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/), the world’s largest hotel chain, realized that capturing and harnessing customer feedback was critical to its future growth. IHG wanted to connect with its customers on a more contextual level in order to improve the overall travel experience. In addition, with the largest rewards community in the world, IHG also wanted to enhance the value of “loyalty” to its most frequent customers. IHG’s Priority Club Rewards (PCR) program members have recorded more than115 million nights at its properties since 2004 and have redeemed more than 50 billion points. By leveraging its customer base for both strategic and tactical decision-making, IHG hoped to improve the overall customer experience while increasing customer loyalty and advocacy.

IHG needed a proven way to connect with its customers on a meaningful level; they knew that merely monitoring blogs and social media would really only uncover isolated compliments and complaints. IHG wanted to have long-term, two-way dialogues with its customers, and to meet that goal they evaluated a number of so-called Web 2.0 solutions. Ultimately, IHG decided that a private online community would allow them to truly listen to a dedicated group of customers and incorporate their learnings into larger programs. In addition, IHG knew that its customers—busy, high-volume travelers—would be better served in a private forum where they could engage with travelers with similar objectives and values. A cluttered online forum/suggestions box simply would create a useful dynamic. Ultimately, IHG selected Communispace to launch its new private online community because of its experience in building, managing and facilitating private communities that enable businesses to generate continuous insights.

The first group of customers IHG sought to engage through its private online community was a group of 300 of its most loyal customers, U.S.-based members of the Priority Club Rewards (PCR) program. The PCR program is the largest and most flexible rewards program in the hotel industry where members can earn unlimited points at any of IHG’s 4,000 properties. Communispace recruited members for the online community using strict behavioral and demographic guidelines to create a representative sample across all seven hotel brands within the PCR family. IHG’s customer base is approaching 40 million customers, and Communispace expertly selected customers to create a microcosm of society to help shape opinions.

Based on the quality of insights garnered from their first community, after six months IHG launched a second Communispace community for its Ambassador-level members, defined as high-volume international travelers with a slant towards staying at InterContinental hotels. IHG is currently in the process of launching a third Communispace community devoted specifically to PCR members in the United Kingdom.

IHG's company motto is to provide great hotels that guests love. By engaging with customers on an ongoing basis, IHG wanted to determine exactly what "love" means for its customers. One of IHG's goals was to get inside the heads of its customers to determine why they travel and what their needs are. By getting more information about these foundational issues through customer feedback, IHG hoped to make service more consistent and relevant and improve the overall traveling experience.

After evaluating a number of options, IHG selected Communispace to create a private, online community of 300 loyalty program customers. IHG and Communispace worked closely to define the community’s learning objectives and to outline what questions they should ask first and how the insights should be leveraged.

In expanding their overall social media strategy, IHG had been working with Digitas, its advertising agency. Digitas saw the community as a natural extension of their programs because they could tap members for feedback on creative campaigns, so they were a natural choice to help shape it. When deploying the community, Communispace, IHG and Digitas worked in tandem to define the goals and objectives for the community; it took about eight weeks to get the community up and running. Communispace and IHG collaborated to determine the members of the community; IHG defined the demographic of customers they wanted to hear from, and Communispace used its social science expertise to create a collaborative community. All three organizations worked together to ensure the community mapped to IHG’s larger business goals.

Once IHG determined that having direct communications with the customer was an integral part of their social media strategy, implementing a Communispace community was an easy process.

In launching its first Communispace community, IHG worked with both Communispace and Digitas. The three companies worked closely in the beginning to think through who would be the best potential participants and how they could engage them in dialogue. Once the members were recruited from IHG’s customer base, Digitas, IHG and Communispace shared the responsibility of maintaining the community. Communispace facilitated weekly activities, such as surveys and discussion questions, while Digitas and IHG mined the member-generated conversations for insights and ideas for ad campaigns. After realizing the incredible quantity of insights that were coming out of the community, IHG created a new position, head of social media, who was responsible for daily monitoring of the community.

To date, the community has been used by more than 12 internal IHG departments and has influenced decisions about brands of soap, technology in hotel rooms and the kinds of companies IHG should seek as partners.

IHG has been astounded by the results of its communities and has credited them with a 400% ROI. Traditional one-time focus groups or surveys are no longer necessary because the feedback from a consistent group of customers is much more valuable. In addition, members are now 20% more likely to recommend a stay at an IHG property than before, meaning that they are brand advocates as well as community members.

IHG has made tangible changes to both its hotel properties and its advertising and marketing campaigns as a direct result of community feedback. Some examples include:
• Redesigned membership cards to include room for other travel related membership numbers (e.g., airline or car rental membership) because members voiced frustration about carrying multiple cards.
• Improved the online booking engine to make it easier for members to see where they can stay and maximize points earned.
• Changed the number and placement of electrical outlets in hotel rooms as a result of member feedback.
• Members validated the idea of a “Backyard Barbecue” for the Staybridge extended stay chain and also proactively exposed regional differences in the definition of a barbeque that enabled IHG to more effectively market the event.
• Community members steered IHG and Digitas away from a more costly creative advertising campaign for a recent Holiday Inn loyalty program campaign.

In addition, one promotion IHG issued through the community required expenditure and generated $250,000 in incremental revenue in six weeks. IHG introduced a viral marketing promotion where members received email offers, offering triple points for each three-night stay in an IHG Hotel within set dates. Members were given three codes to pass along to friends and family. IHG found that community members really are brand advocates; each participant forwarded it to an average of 17 people. The campaign spread to more than 30 countries and resulted in the booking of 4,200 room nights, with members earning 7.2 million points in total.

While IHG has implemented a number of changes directly from community feedback, what it truly values is the diffuse effect of talking to a lot of customers on a consistent basis. By leveraging customers from 40 different countries for strategic and tactical decision making, IHG has entered a new realm of market research. Because the community members connect and share experience with a global network of like-minded travelers, they feel more connected to the IHG brand and are more likely to serve as brand ambassadors.

The community gives IHG a sounding board for new ideas and marketing initiatives, and the community helps them benchmark how their hotels can add value for customers. While brands can’t be all things to all people, through harnessing the voice of the customer IHG is getting making changes that are most important to some of its most important customers.

Greenough Communications (www.greenoughcom.com)

Division: Corporate
Category: External Communications
Company: Launch Squad for Sg2

With health-care professionals around the world dealing with the same or similar problems on a day to day basis, the need for an online community that would not just support, but encourage widespread participation from stakeholders around the world was clear.

Aside from the inherent challenges of uniting a worldwide diaspora of health-care professionals, Sg2 was faced with the additional complication of the inherent sensitivity of the information to be shared.

Sg2 needed to create an open and interactive Web 2.0 community that was secure enough and offered robust permissioning capabilities to facilitate the sharing of oftentimes highly sensitive health-care related information. The balance between the freedom of Web 2.0 and the necessary security of a health-care related enterprise is a fine one. With its robust Specialty Forums, Sg2 has attained that balance by approaching the concept of tiered permissioning with unprecedented granularity.

Sg2 can ensure that different levels of membership are allowed different levels of access to ensure that all participants have access to the appropriate information.

The Sg2 Specialty Forums is meant to provide a virtual meeting place for health care industry professionals from a wide variety of backgrounds, including strategic, operational, clinical, academic, technological and financial.

The goals of the Sg2 Online Community were as follows:
1) Provide a forum for Sg2 members and other professionals in the health care industry to come together and exchange information.
2) Create a one-stop shop where members can access all of their membership tools and connect virtually with Sg2 experts.
3) Provide a platform for prospects to learn more about Sg2 and our members to help grow our business.
4) Build the largest and most influential online Community specific to health care.

The Sg2 online community provides an interactive forum for professionals to network and share leading practices with each other, as well as access the latest in health care research. The Sg2 community has a full range of social networking features, providing thousands of members and contributing health care experts with personal and customizable profiles. The community enables members to interact with one another, submit questions to experts, and search through Sg2’s vast library of research and resources based on specific areas of interest.

Using specialized security and permissioning capabilities, Sg2 can also determine what kind of content members can see, creating a customized view for each member and providing Sg2 with the necessary technology to engage their entire membership base.

Sg2's online community is powered by Awareness, Inc.’s enterprise social media platform. Sg2 and Awareness, Inc. collaborated closely to design the online community and Sg2 provided constant feedback to Awareness throughout the development process. The two organizations continue to draw ideas for innovation and improvement of the community from the community itself and work closely to implement them in order to maximize member satisfaction and community participation and value. The deployment began to yield results immediately.

Within 6 months of the launch of the site (launch date: March 10, 2008), almost 10,000 health care professionals are registered members of the Community, representing over 1,100 hospitals and health care organizations. Nearly 700 of the site users are non-Sg2 clients, which underscores the online community’s broad appeal and tremendous value to stakeholders throughout the health care community. The Sg2 Community has members representing 12 countries. The site averages 100 new posts each month, which include expert perspectives, member questions, leading practices and new Sg2 resources. Objectives 1, 2 and 3 have been accomplished and Sg2 is well on its way to accomplishing number 4!

Division: Corporate
Category: External Communications
Company: Lexis/Nexis U.S. Legal Markets

Online social and professional networks, such as the familiar sites of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, have quickly become an easy and hugely popular way for individuals to communicate, interact and share content on both a personal and professional level. Online social networking is a trend that was once largely ignored by the legal profession, but now it is starting to gain traction within the legal community. However, there remains a lack of perceived business value in online networks for specific groups of legal professionals, such as in-house counsel and law firm attorneys – leaving a sense of skepticism and hesitation with getting involved in the online networking trend.

LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell (http://www.lexisnexis.com/) recently conducted a survey, the 2008 Networks for Counsel Survey, which revealed that almost 50 percent of lawyers are members of online social networks and that over 40 percent believe professional networking has the potential to change the business and practice of law over the next five years. However, the survey also revealed that 43 percent of corporate counsel and 53 percent of private practice lawyers claim that current versions of online social networks and communities do not help them work more efficiently and cost effectively. Therefore, the challenge is to create a solution to help leverage online technology to meet needs for lawyer networking:

• Legal professionals need an online network with trusted sources, so they can rely on credible sources when seeking to hire outside counsel or find colleagues who can recommend the right lawyer for the right matter. Lawyers look for trusted professional networks to avoid exposure to people only looking to troll for new business. Networks full of qualified, verified and experienced contacts help legal professionals grow their own personal networks and thereby increase their go-to referral sources. According to the 2008 Networks for Counsel Survey, 54 percent of corporate counsel and 41 percent of private practice lawyers view linking to other attorneys or expanding ones’ network as the most important feature an online professional network could provide.

• Corporate counsel often report that they are isolated from other in-house counsel on a day-to-day basis. Frequently they are faced with legal and business challenges that counsel from other companies must have encountered. The challenge has always been how to find these colleagues and benefit from their experience. In-person conferences and events are one option, but they’re infrequent, expensive and take time away from the office. Online networking helps break isolation by providing a trusted environment in which they can find colleagues, collaborate and solve pressing problems. The Networks for Counsel Survey found that more than 60 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that it is hard to connect at conferences.

• Professional networking provides lawyers with a secure forum to share ideas, solicit feedback, and communicate with peers. Receiving tips and background information on different legal topics advances education among legal professionals and expands the scope of valuable information passed along from peer-to-peer. The exchange of tips in turn enhances partnership and collaboration, which builds on the facilitation of legal information and reinforces the network of trusted sources.

• A quality online network can help legal professionals become more informed when making key decisions. The online nature of the network helps legal professionals tap into trusted resources quickly – assisting the lawyers to reach conclusions in a fast and more efficient manner. Additionally, the more trusted information gathered and feedback received on outside counsel for example, the easier in-house counsel can make better decisions about hiring a firm or lawyer.

Leveraging its global database of attorneys and legal content, LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell is responding to this challenge with the development and launch of its own global online professional network for legal professionals: Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Currently in beta, the network is custom designed for the legal community, and enables lawyers and other legal professionals to connect, communicate and collaborate with trusted contacts to solve legal and business issues.

Using Martindale-Hubbell Connected, attorneys are able to expand their professional network to uncover relationships and trusted references. Legal professionals are able to share information and insights, collaborate and interact in a virtual community on legal issues with fellow practitioners. Martindale-Hubbell Connected also provides access to compelling content, benchmarking statistics, counsel-created research, as well as online events exclusively for legal professionals.

The legal community will witness an improvement in the quality of their decision making process when buying legal services and increase recruitment efficiency for hiring in-house staff. Through this closed network, legal professionals can also enhance partnership and collaboration, as well as improve recruiting activities by enabling outside counsel to share referrals, experience, reviews and analyze competitors’ profiles and marketing trends.

For corporate counsel, Martindale-Hubbell Connected breaks the isolation felt by so many of them when seeking trusted references for outside counsel or input on legal issues from fellow practitioners. This new network community enables them to engage in private online discussions about key issues of interest to counsel worldwide, empower members to raise their profile and stature among colleagues, and provide access to special in-person and online events.

For outside counsel, Martindale-Hubbell Connected offers them the ability to connect with corporate counsel to demonstrate thought-leadership, find information act as connectors and grow their network of potential clients. Outside counsel can identify potential clients and actively network for new business, grow alumni network and exchange critical/useful information within affinity groups, blogs and other network communities.

The targeted audience is comprised of legal professionals – primarily corporate counsel and private practice lawyers who are looking for online communities that enable them to connect, communicate and collaborate with trusted contacts to solve legal and business issues.

These legal professionals share a high level of interest and demand for a lawyers-specific network in a trusted environment from a trusted vendor. They are seeking ways to connect with one another, demonstrate thought-leadership, grow their network of potential clients, and gather hard to find information about corporate counsel and to enhance their status as “connecters” in the industry.

The goal is to leverage the unique assets of LexisNexis and Martindale-Hubbell to resolve challenges associated with networking in today’s legal market by offering attorneys a comprehensive, interactive and secure online destination where they can build a legal network to get trusted information from trusted contacts for better decision making on everything from hiring legal to perspectives on legal issues. Martindale-Hubbell is leading the way in meeting the needs outlined with the creation of Martindale-Hubbell Connected - a premier online destination for collaboration between legal professionals. This online professional network built specifically for lawyers is a secure peer-to-peer global network for lawyers only, enabling them and firms from across the world to connect and collaborate quickly and effectively to help meet business needs.

For example, the network will include new tools, content and other resources to help legal professionals uncover relationships, collaborate and interact in a virtual community, expand their professional network, share information and insights and access compelling content for their practice.

The new site is currently in beta, with full rollout anticipated in the U.S. in early 2009.

Challenges:

The need to overcome legacy directory heritage and internal culture and re-position Martindale-Hubbell as leading edge Web 2.0 company.

Mining our historical database and court docket information to identify potential relationships between the 1 million lawyers in our database. The proprietary relationship matching algorithm allowed us to uncover 45 million “suggested relationships” between lawyers globally that create value to members immediately upon joining, regardless of the size of the growing network. This overcomes the chicken/egg syndrome of professional networks, that don’t provide much value to members when their network of connections are still limited.

To build a trusted network, we needed to implement a robust authentication process whereby we validate the identity and role of the members (e.g. corporate counsel vs. law firm lawyer). This process needed to balance strength of security without being too burdensome for the user. In addition, we wanted an automatic process to approve as many users as possible and only manually review exception cases.

Challenges integrating Connected with legacy data and content systems. Value of the integration is the vast content and data respositories that Martindale-Hubbell and LexisNexis have that feed the professional network.

The legal industry has traditionally been slow adopter of new technologies, so awareness and usage of web 2.0 tools, including online social or professional networking, is still relatively low. This is especially true among senior corporate counsel and law firm partners. As a result, marketing and building membership for Connected has required educating the market not only about the value of Martindale-Hubbell Connected, but also about the value of online networking in general.

Online social and professional networking sites are generally free for it users to try to maximize the value of network effects. However, unlike many online networking startups, Martindale-Hubbell has a substantial revenue and profit stream with thousands of paying subscribers. In order to monetize Martindale-Hubbell Connected, we needed to provide enough value to these subscribers so that they continue to remain subscribers, but still provide enough value to non-subscribers so that they have a good experience and continue to participate in the community.

The networking functionality of Martindale-Hubbell Connected was built internally due to the need to get to market quickly and to integrate tightly with the existing martindale.com site and lawyer database. We worked closely with Endeca, our search engine vendor, to extend the capabilities of their platform to allow our users to search our lawyer database and receive results filtered by the relationship information gleaned from the connections formed between members as well as the historical relationship information described above,

For upcoming releases, we licensed Community Server by Telligent to power the community and user-generated content functionality for Connected. These will include discussion forums, blogging functionality for Connected members, as well as groups functionality to allow members to form smaller sub-communities within the larger Connected community.

The team that developed and launched Martindale-Hubbell Connected consisted of business unit leadership, technology development, marketing and communications and a dedicated community manager.

Roles

Business unit leadership – Identified the opportunity and potential benefits of creating an online network for lawyers, conducted market research to verify those opportunities and focus on lawyer needs for networking, set up business plan for creating and launching the network

Technology development – Took the direction from leadership and developed the offering.

Marketing and communication – Marketing led the way in terms of naming the offering, as well as soliciting beta testers from the legal community via direct-to-client communication. Communications and PR helped get the word out about Martindale-Hubbell Connected and establishing its leaders as experts in the area of online professional networking via interviews, authored articles and media coverage of Martindale-Hubbell Connected.

Community management - Helps members and moderates discussions. While Martindale-Hubbell believes communities come together naturally, especially with professional networks, a community manager is necessary to help busy professionals achieve their visibility goals as richly as possible.

Components of program

Research – 2007 and 2008. Determining needs and demands for lawyer networking and if or how an online network specifically for lawyers would be useful or of interest.

Development – Late 2007 and into 2008. The technology team at Martindale-Hubbell created Martindale-Hubbell Connected platform, built features and functionality, overcame integration challenges (see above section) and launched beta site on time and with planned functionality.

Beta launch – Late May 2008. The Martindale-Hubbell Connected beta site launched in May. The project is still in this phase as of September 2008 as Martindale-Hubbell continues to grow participation in the network and add functionalities leading up to full launch.

Communication – January 2008 to present. Prior to beta launch, Marketing named and branded Martindale-Hubbell Connected, then helped solicit the initial small set of beta tester clients for the network. Since beta launch, Marketing has ramped this effort to grown network participation though direct e-mail campaigns and other tactics. Communications and PR has been active in this component by soliciting and earning positive media and blog coverage of Martindale-Hubbell’s use of Web 2.0 technology and previewing the launch of the network. ABA Journal, American Lawyer and Law.com are among the dozens of media that have covered the site and the Martindale-Hubbell networking initiative so far in 2008.

Site management/growth - May 2008 to present. Technology team continues to develop the network platform with new updates and functionality added every three weeks leading up to formal launch in January 2009. Additionally, a dedicated community manager observes the site, moderates when needed and helps members.

Full launch – Q1 2009. Martindale-Hubbell Connected plans to formally launch Martindale-Hubbell Connected in the first quarter of 2009 with January as the target. At that time, the site will be fully marketed and will be fully open for lawyers to join.

Benefits

For users of Martindale-Hubbell Connected:
• Saves lawyers time and money on networking by reducing travel.
• Breaks the isolation felt by many corporate counsel lawyers when seeking a trusted recommendation or opinion from other counsel.
• Changes the way lawyers find and communicate with each other.
• Provides more robust information about peers and perspectives for better decision making when it comes to hiring counsel or addressing an issue.
• Provides a focused venue for users to demonstrate thought leadership to potential employers or clients.
• Helps users grow their network of potential clients or vendors.

Each of the measures of success accrue to the stated goal of Martindale-Hubbell Connected of creating a trusted online community specifically for attorneys to help them address or solve business challenges associated with networking and communication in today’s legal industry.

Division: Academic
Category: External Communications
University of Illinois at Springfield

In the early days of the Internet, print media and public appearances were the primary tools of the University of Illinois’ (www.uis.edu) university news and information operations. As our university Web presence grew in size and importance, we created a succession of Web pages for news and information content. Many of these Web pages were modeled directly from our print publications. By 2008, we had many disparate news Web pages. We realized that our users were having a difficult time; they were not sure which of our many news-related Web pages to view to find specific content. Often, they did not even know that certain news pages existed. We realized the need to streamline our entire news-on-the-Web operation, taking full advantage of the Internet. We needed to create a new primary news and information website that would organize our content and allow for the inclusion of new media. We needed to address the fact that today’s Web users and news outlets expect instant access to information and cutting-edge methods for delivery of that information.

We needed to convert our news-on-the-Web operation from a print-based structure to a true electronic media model. We needed to take full advantage of the unique elements of the Internet (hyperactivity, searchability, dynamic content), the cost effectiveness of the Internet (use of full color, ease and speed of multiple distribution), and the power of Web 2.0 and Social Media tools (sharing, tagging, video and audio). Further, we needed to address these specific issues:

1. Brand – Our campus is currently in the process of developing new identity standards. We are the third, the smallest, and the least-known campus of the University of Illinois. Prior to 2008, each campus had used its initials for its Web URL and other identifiers: UIUC, UIC, and UIS. We knew that in the summer of 2008, the UIUC campus would be switching its URL and primary identifier to Illinois. We knew that other schools and the public used the term Illinois to identify the university. We also knew that a degree from the University of Illinois is one of the main draws for students who enroll at our campus. We decided on a new approach to identifying our campus: we would begin to use the term UIS for local references, i.e. within our campus and the local community. For external audiences more than 50 miles away, we would begin to use the term Illinois Springfield. To this day, various campus committees are working on our brand adjustment, and a full rollout will still take time to complete. But rather than change the name of our new website later when the brand adjustment is complete – and possibly confuse our audience - we decided to go ahead with the use of the term Illinois Springfield on the new site.

2. Campus Inclusion – We know that the power of our own people is critical in the dissemination of news and information about our campus. We need to be sure that faculty, staff and students understand how our news content is organized, and that they can quickly alert us to their activities, so we can tell those stories to the public. By streamlining our news-on-the-Web operation, and by providing an online form for campus news submissions, we can elicit the participation of the campus community in dissemination of our content.

3. Multimedia and Multiple Distribution – We know that in the 21st century, media is everywhere. Print is not enough. Video, audio, photographs, graphics and animation enhance communication, adding richness and reality that print media can never achieve. In this project, we needed to standardize the use of multimedia on our news Web pages, making it easy to include. We needed to fully realize the notion that content is the center of a wheel with many spokes: when you have a story, you need to tell that story via all possible forms (print, video, audio, imagery) and via all possible distribution methods (Web pages, email, snail mail, publications, telephone, appearances, blogs, and other new media).

We are targeting several audiences with our news and information content:

The UIS Community – As noted above, we must reach our own faculty, staff and students, and encourage their participation in the gathering and dissemination of news and information content.

The Media – In today’s economy - and amidst the media transformation from print to digital, from mass to niche audiences, and from established to new media – we know that media outlets are struggling. We hear about staff cuts, use of stock rather than in-house photography, and subscriptions to syndicated features instead of original interviews. Using our website to provide downloads of our own photographs, multimedia, and other resources, we can become a reliable and efficient source for media outlets.

The Local Community – Here in central Illinois, local media reach a radius of 50-miles surrounding our campus. Many residents in that area live in rural communities and increasingly rely on the Internet as well as traditional media for news and information.

The State of Illinois – The majority of our students come from the state of Illinois. More and more of our students come from the Chicago area. Our research shows that most students get their basic information about what school to attend from the school’s website. We know that the availability on our website of up-to-date news and information is critical to attracting prospective students.

The Midwest – In the US News & World Report’s 2009 Edition of America’s Best Colleges, the University of Illinois at Springfield is ranked the number one public university - master’s level - in Illinois, and the fourth best in that category in the entire Midwest. We want to be number one in the Midwest. Our ability to disseminate news and information about the university helps us spread the word about our campus, enroll more students, attract high-quality faculty and staff, and provide an interesting and enlightening academic environment. Among other factors, this visibility is crucial in our quest to be Number One.

Specific Audiences – In addition to the entire 3-campus University of Illinois system, our news and information is critical to the work of three particular UIS units: the Office of Community Relations, the Alumni Association, and the Office of Development. Each of these departments makes extensive use of campus news and information in communicating with their many constituencies. In Question 8: Results, we include the responses from these units in regard to the usefulness of our new primary news website.

In the fall of 2007, we had completed a major redesign of our campus home page. We then turned our attention to issues and challenges we had identified regarding our news-on-the-Web operation. During the fall and winter months we made inquiries and observations, considered the technical abilities of our content-creation staff, and tested various methods for redesign of our news website. In April 2008, we created a new committee called the Story Team with a charge to meet weekly and discuss current initiatives and dissemination of news to multiple audiences. Shortly after convening that group we introduced our “Plan for redevelopment of UIS news and story websites” that took into account our strengths and our limitations. The Story Team discussed the plan, agreed on specific changes and revised the plan accordingly by May 1. We agreed to wait to implement the plan until the end of the semester after commencement ceremonies. We then proceeded to implement the plan having defined these specific goals and objectives:

1. Consolidate our many disparate news and information Web pages into one central hub, to be called Newsroom @ Illinois Springfield.
a. Create four major news and information sections, titled News, People, Events, and In The News (see the planning document in Supporting Documentation for more about these categories);
b. Create a special section specifically for use by the media and include the following:
i. A section for Media Advisories – notices to the media of imminent events they may wish to cover;
ii. A Downloads section where high-resolution photographs, logos, audio, video and other source material can be easily obtained;
iii. An Experts and Speakers list, organized by topic, where media can quickly find a resource for issues-of-the day.
iv. A list of RSS Feeds from UIS that media can subscribe to for up-to-the minute news and information.
v. A Style Guide that includes grammar and usage specific to academia and UIS.
c. Create special topic pages that collect links to existing news items, multimedia, and other Web pages. These special topic pages are efficient in that they do not require new content; they consolidate existing content in a way that spotlights or focuses on particular Big Stories.
d. Include lists of links to specific Web pages featuring information of interest to general users, especially those seeking background information about us.

2. Retrain our content creation staff to categorize content in line with our newly created news and information sections.
a. Previously, much of our news content consisted of announcements of upcoming events; we needed to retrain staff to move those items into our new Events section. We also needed to move some of our items previously referred to as feature stories into the News section by altering the writing style and story approach.

3. Retrain our content creation staff to use new technologies in order to integrate multimedia and to address specific search optimization strategies.
a. Train content creation staff to add downloadable photos, audio and/or video to all major stories.
b. Train content creation staff in the use of boldface type for key words and phrases, and hyperlinks within the body of stories in order to enhance our search optimization.

4. Include social media elements on our news pages by incorporating Share icons and using Labels (Tags) for every news and information item.
a. Train content creation staff (as well as the entire campus community and the general public) to use the share links to post our stories to Digg, Facebook, MySpace, etc.
b. Train content creation staff to use Labels (Tags) for every story. The Story Team agreed on a list of 35 labels divided into 3 categories. Our goal is to use one label from each category for every story.

5. Develop the technologies and website structure necessary to support our goals and objectives.
a. Evaluate existing technologies;
b. Create new news and information Web pages to match our new structure;
c. Use CSS and RSS to design coordinated dynamic Web pages;
d. Eliminate our previous structure where we posted short news paragraphs on one page and then linked to full page stories;
e. Create story tools and social media icons and links for every news page:
f. Create a simple-to-use structure for use by the content creators when adding downloadable photos, audio and video to major stories;
g. Evaluate and develop search optimization strategies;
h. Develop JavaScript “includes” for the RSS feeds from the news pages to automatically populate the primary Newsroom Web page;
i. Develop JavaScript “includes” for the display of rotating photographs and graphics on the primary Newsroom Web page;
j. Develop a Search technology to allow users to transparently search – via a single search field - all of our previous and newly created news Web pages and directories. Our original “plan” is included with our submission in Question 9: Supporting Documentation. Highlights of the plan are included below:

We began by creating and modifying technologies to support the project. We had already been using Google’s (free) blog technology for our news and information Web pages, primarily because of its automatic archiving and indexing capability. Our Web Services department has always been limited in staff and resources and we have not had the funding, time and capability to create a complex news database system of our own. We considered this project as an opportunity to change to an in-house system. But considering time and resources, we ultimately chose to continue with Google’s technology for our main news section pages.

We designed the new pages using CSS with updated colors and graphics that reflect the look and style of our new campus home page. We added Send Email, Print, and RSS icons to every page. We included the “Add This” Share drop-down menu on every page. We set up the technology for the use of Labels on every story.

We eliminated five existing news Web directories and consolidated that content into our new major news sections. We redirected those legacy URLs to the new pages.

We trained staff in the use of the new sections and technologies, including search optimization, addition of multimedia, and use of labels. We created an ideal sample page for the content creators to view to give them an idea of what we were looking for on our new news pages.

We created an interim page called News Headlines and Searches where we experimented with RSS technology to dynamically bring in news headlines. That page included multiple search boxes for all of our disparate news directories. During testing of that page with users, we realized the need to spend time and resources refining our search technology.

Finally, we created our new Newsroom @ Illinois Springfield landing page and included dynamic RSS feeds with headlines and links from each of our main news sections. We added pages specifically designed for use by the media, and included sets of general interest links.

Because we deliberately chose to deploy the new Web pages after the end of the spring semester, we had a period of time with limited news activity in which to implement the plan. We created new pages on a staging server and tested extensively before finally deploying the new sites on May 22, 2008. There were a few technical bugs and we needed to work closely with content creation staff in the beginning to make sure the change went smoothly. But as our results in Question 8: Results indicate, our Newsroom @ Illinois Springfield website has met our objectives and proved successful. We knew we were making a huge improvement in the presentation of news and information on our website and that the changes would be generally well received. Our biggest obstacles were time, technology and training.

In order to complete the project in a short amount of time (less than one month from final approval of the plan to completion) our technical staff of three worked almost full time on the project. Because of this, many other demands were unmet during that time and the staff spent the following month trying to “catch up” on regular duties.

We encountered several technical challenges with our search technology, CSS, and our RSS feeds, but were able to work these out fairly quickly.

We not only had to train the content creation staff on procedural techniques, but we had to change their “mindset” to a certain extent. Previously, their news stories consisted mostly of notices of upcoming events. We had to change their definition of news to become reports of events that already happened or other newsworthy material. Many items previously posted as feature stories now have to be written differently and reported as news. In our new major categories – News, Events, People, and In The News – there is still some ambiguity, and sometimes it is difficult to place a particular item.

We are also still training the campus to use the Newsroom as the central hub for all of our news and information. Further, we are still helping the campus community understand the usefulness and importance of the social media we’ve integrated into our news pages. We are using Google blog, archive and label technology as the basis for our pages in each of the major news sections. We use “Add This” for our social media links. We use CSS, RSS, JavaScript and XHTML for Web page construction. The leader of the project team is the Associate Chancellor for Constituent Relations. This effort was conceived and developed by the Office of Web Services; the office consists of a director, associate director/designer, and a programmer; a student worker assists with some multimedia projects. The Campus Relations department contains the news content creation staff, a director and two writers; one of the writers also creates video news stories. Assisting with the project was the campus Creative Director who supplied photographs and assisted with design and brand elements.
We’ve had only three (summer) months to evaluate results and obtain user feedback, and that time period is typically a “downtime” on our campus, but so far we are pleased with the results.

Using AW Stats and Google Analytics, we’ve observed positive results over the past three months. Prior to the launch of the Newsroom @ Illinois Springfield Web page, our many disparate news pages were consistently below the top 50 hit pages of our website. Since the launch, the Newsroom page now consistently appears among the top 50 hit pages. All of our news pages use XML technology and can be pushed to users as RSS feeds. We’ve found that those feeds are consistently among our top 10 hit pages.

In our supporting documentation you will find anecdotal evidence of success. Below are some samples of responses:

1. Recently we sent a campus-wide email encouraging our faculty, staff, and students to use the social media tools to spread the word about a positive news story. We received a reply from a Development Office staff member who had posted to Facebook and was rewarded with an email response from an alum/donor: “cool! that is great to see! thx for linking it.”

2. The Alumni Association had this to say, “For me, the biggest improvements include the ability to link easily and directly from the day’s headlines to the archived stories, to search from more than one “angle,” and to access events, colleges and people within the university community through Newsroom.”

3. From the Office of Development: “It’s much easier to browse. I like the search feature.”

4. From the Director of Community Relations: “Before the website re-do, I had a hard time finding information on the website. It seems like there were so many places to find things and I never knew where to go and I didn't have the time to search all the sites I need too. But the new format puts everything right there together and I can browse everything to find tidbits to talk about and share with our many constituencies.” We hoped to streamline our content and make it easier to find news and information on our website. The anecdotal evidence suggests that we were successful. The quantitative evidence suggests that more users are finding our news pages. Part of this may be due to the streamlined content and part may be due to search optimization.

We wanted to add clarity to the content creation staff’s process for posting news, events and information to our Web pages. Our own review of story content posted in our four major news categories – News, People, Events, and In The News – suggests that we have alleviated some of the previous difficulties.

We wanted to introduce social media tools to the campus and evidence suggests that this might be taking hold.

We were particularly concerned with meeting the needs of our Community Relations, Alumni Association and Development offices. Anecdotal evidence suggests that we have been successful.

No website is ever “done.” We will continue to refine our presentation of news and information, and we will continue to take advantage of new media as it develops. But we are confident that our Newsroom @ Illinois Springfield project has laid the groundwork for future success. Visit the Newsroom @ Illinois Springfield at this URL: http://www.uis.edu/newsroom/

Division: Corporate
Category: External Communications
Company: Engage PR for UMA Today

Kineto Wireless is the key innovator and leading supplier of Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicensed_Mobile_Access) technology, a global 3GPP standard which enables mobile operators to deliver new, revenue generating fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) services over the Internet.

As a new innovation in the telecom industry, further education about the flexibility of UMA’s technology and service capabilities needed to be made to help validate the market need and global adoption from mobile operators worldwide.

For Kineto’s industry leading UMA products to be successful, broad industry adoption of UMA as a technology by service providers, telecom equipment and handset manufacturers was required. As part of its marketing efforts, Kineto needed to develop the UMA Today brand, build a community amongst industry experts in the wireless industry, and drive its audience to better understand how UMA serves as an access technology for multiple forms of fixed mobile convergence solutions in the market—including dual-mode Wi-Fi/mobile handsets (http://umatoday.com/mobileHandsets.php), femtocells (http://umatoday.com/femtocells.php), terminal adaptors (http://umatoday.com/terminalAdaptors.php), and softmobiles (http://umatoday.com/softmobile.php).

The audience for the UMA message is global, consisting of mobile operators that offer or plan to offer UMA-based services, as well as telecom equipment and handset vendors that incorporate UMA software into their products.

Kineto’s overarching goal was to bring word of UMA to a global audience and gain industry support for UMA as the leading long-term solution for fixed-mobile convergence.

Within this framework, the company had a number of objectives:
- Amplify the market demand for UMA technology
- Communicate the flexibility of UMA technology as the market for FMC continues to evolve
- Show that UMA were available from more than one vendor
- Demonstrate wide industry support for UMA by associating the technology with larger companies such as T-Mobile, RIM, Google, HP, Samsung, Orange, etc.

Kineto partnered with its PR agency, Engage PR (www.engagepr.com), to develop a marketing campaign that integrates strategic and creative New Media tactics designed to further develop UMA as a brand, associating UMA with key benefits of mobile convergence that are of interest to Kineto’s target markets, mobile operators and handset manufacturers.

In the spring of 2006, Kineto launched an online forum, www.UMAToday.com, as a vehicle to provide multiple forms of new media resources (blogs, podcasts, live webinars, etc.) to their target audiences. Leveraging new media communications enables Kineto, via UMA Today, to drive more web traffic to the website, and thereby generate vendor-neutral discussions around FMC and UMA topics within the broader wireless community.

As a resource of information, readers can easily access the latest news and information about UMA and FMC services directly on UMAToday.com. Visitors to the site can sign up for more information which is provided through frequent direct email blasts on the latest news and information on the industry. In addition, visitors can sign up for the UMA Today RSS feed.

By keeping readers updated on major industry developments, Engage PR and Kineto are able to highlight the broader success of UMA in the market, wile simultaneously addressing questions frequently asked in the industry:
- How does UMA make mobile phones work better and cost less?
- Which operators are deploying UMA services?
- What new UMA-enabled mobile handsets are available?

For example, in July 2007, Engage took advantage of T-Mobile’s announcement of its UMA service to reach out to media and analysts, and built momentum from the T-Mobile story to reflect greater industry trends in association with UMA Today. The new media resources available on UMA Today have also helped complement key trends Kineto has driven in their own company news and developments.

In September 2007, Kineto announced a new UMA software release that enables the deployment of femtocells—access points that improve coverage and performance of mobile services in subscriber’s homes. During the press and analyst tour for this announcement, Engage PR utilized UMAToday.com as a resource to the press and analyst communities interested in learning more about UMA’s role in the femtocells market, and why it was important.

UMAToday.com is also the home of the UMA Today blog where Steve Shaw, an evangelist for UMA technology and AVP of marketing at Kineto, leverages the opportunity to discuss UMA and its evolution as a solution for delivering secure access to mobile services over the public Internet.

As the site is updated on a frequent basis, UMAToday.com also hosts a library of third-party resources including whitepapers and industry reports written by lead analyst firms.

The development and promotion of UMA technology is a benefit to Kineto as well as competitors developing UMA-based products. For UMA Today to be successful, the market needed to be assured that the program was not simply a shell for Kineto activities, but was truly vendor neutral and focused on global market development. Therefore great care was taken to create a new identity totally separate from Kineto. A new site with a totally different look and feel, along with a unique color scheme was developed for UMA Today. Content and materials on the site, while primarily developed by Kineto, were careful to be vendor neutral.

Kineto went a step farther, recruiting partners and competitors to become paid sponsors of the site and other UMA Today activities. Kineto was able to secure 12 paid sponsorships on the site over the past 2 years.

The UMA Today site is viewed within the market as a credible, unbiased clearing-house for all news, products and services supporting UMA technology.

The UMA Today program itself contains a number of new-media components, including the website, blog, and webinars, as well as online videos from major industry events, such as the UMA Innovation Awards ceremony that took place Mobile World Congress 2008, a major industry tradeshow.

The PR program to promote UMA Today takes advantage of these new media components to help promote the success of UMA on a global scale to the media, analysts, as well as Kineto and their partners’ prospective customers.

Kineto Wireless creates and drives all components of the UMA awareness program, while its PR agency, Engage PR, continuously offers Kineto recommendations on how to creatively make UMA Today strategic to Kineto’s marketing and business objectives as well. Additionally, several of Kineto’s partners sponsor the UMAToday.com that, in turn, also associates UMA technology with larger company names, one of the key objectives outlined when first launching the site in 2006. The following outlines a list of the current new media components in the integrated marketing program for UMA Today:

• www.UMAToday.com (http://www.umatoday.com/) – Engage PR promotes the web site to media and analysts as a valuable resource for information about the global adoption of UMA and about general market dynamics that impact operators, vendors, and suppliers.

• UMA Today Blog (http://umatoday.blogspot.com/) – To enhance readership and expand UMA Today’s web presence, Engage PR provides Kineto with recommendations for blog topics and opportunities to respond to topical industry news and developments. The agency also helps ensure the blog includes trackbacks to other industry blogs, another tactic that helps increase the number of visitors.

• UMA Today Webinars – Through proactive outreach to the press and media about new UMA-related webinars that can be accessed in UMAToday.com, Engage PR has helped elevate both Kineto and UMA thought leadership.

• UMA Today Magazine (http://www.umatoday.com/pdf/uma_mag_hz2_wint_08_lo.pdf) – The third edition, Spring ’08, was distributed at major mobile industry events Mobile World Congress and CTIA.

• UMA Innovation Awards – The first annual UMA Today award was presented at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February 2008. Engage PR announced the creation of the awards in late 2007 and promoted them to the media.

Kineto’s tactical PR campaign for UMA Today has helped more than double the number of unique visitors to UMAToday.com. PR activities at the time of the T-Mobile announcement resulted in a spike of 454 visitors to UMAToday.com on 27 June 2007. Another major spike occurred on 20 July 2007, to 670 visits when news hit that Google invested in a Kineto UMA partner, as well as a spike on 4 June 2008, to 673 visits, when the Kineto announced support for its femtocell solution.

Thanks to a highly tactical and creative approach to promoting UMA Today, the organization’s web site consistently attracts more than 300 unique visitors a day and over 6,000 unique visitors a month.

New media communications on UMAToday.com have evolved since the site first launched in 2006, and now draws in a large variety of visitors on a daily basis. More than 25 number of UMA-enabled handsets have become available since the site launched in 2006, and more than 12 operators have deployed UMA services.

Over the past two years, “UMA” has become a well-known term in the wireless and telecommunications industries. UMA and FMC have become common topics on the editorial calendars in wireless trade publications, validating UMA as a noteworthy technology. Moreover, several reporters and third-party analysts have become advocates for the benefits and capabilities UMA technology provides. UMA has garnered a lot more industry attention in the past two years; having UMA associated with large company names including RIM, Motorola, NEC, and Google, UMA is indeed seen as a long-term solution for fixed mobile convergence.

– “Ubiquisys along with UMA has been gaining more attention in the last year. NEC, Motorola, Netgear and UMA developer Kineto have all joined the UMA femtocell camp, and Ubiquisys has attracted several partners and investors in recent months, including Nokia Siemens Networks and Google.” – Telephony Magazine

– "UMA, which was believed to have short legs just a year ago, is the predominant technology deployed today to implement seamless FMC between wireless LAN and 2G cellular networks. For those who still believe UMA will be short lived, it can now support 3G, is backed by the 3GPP, has a clear migration roadmap to IMS, and is becoming the default case for femtocells,” - Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics Research.

– “AT&T Mobility, which has exclusive rights to the iPhone in the United States, has said 40% of its iPhone subscribers are new customers. Orange France, which has also launched Wi-Fi/UMA technology, reported that those customers churn at a rate three times less than its other subscribers…” – RCR Wireless News

– “The iPhone may be getting one hundred times the press coverage of the Wi-Fi/UMA rollout by T-Mobile USA and Orange France, but the Wi-Fi/UMA success rate is in many ways about equal to the iPhone.” – ThinkPanmure, financial analyst firm

– “I think the UMA industry has done pretty well. It’s created a coherent job description for itself: an enabler for cellular operators to offer, “home zone” services over IP connections…With more than a dozen UMA phones announced, device development has been admirable…if not spectacular…And, while a focus on femtocell integrations argues for the flexibility of the technology, the real advantage UMA can claim as an FMC technology today is its customer base; a million or so subscribers may not be impressive, but it beats out most anything else out there” – Peter Jarich, senior analyst at Current Analysis

UMA Today continues to evolve with additional forms of new media communications Kineto plans to drive in the near future, including guest contributors to the blog and reader polls/surveys as a form of user-generated content.

Division: Corporate
Category: Collaboration and Co-Creation
Company: IBM

The problem IBM (www.ibm.com) is trying to solve is how to reach out to our Business Partners to let them know that we want to be more actively engaged with them and listen to their concerns in order to build partner loyalty and our channel.

Over the years, IBM partners have sometimes complained that it’s difficult to find a way to make IBM “listen” to their needs. In a tough economy support and service become extremely important to partners. It’s a great time to lead with the message that IBM is listening and responding to Partners.

The challenge to be addressed was how to get our Partners’ attention and drive them to a single point of interaction to let us know their concerns. We wanted to develop a single point on the web, with an intuitive URL, for Business Partners to access and let us know their concerns/ideas/issues, etc. Towards that end, we developed the “Voice of the Business Partner Campaign.” This is a campaign with a simple message: We’re listening to the voices that matter -- our partners. We developed a collaboration center with questions for our partners to address on www.voicebp.com, and built a campaign using traditional and new social media to bring the partners there.

The communication issue to be addressed was how to get our partners’ attention so we could start this "listening campaign." Keeping in mind that different people prefer different types of communication, we realized that we would need an integrated campaign with a marketing mix of traditional and new media.

External Drive for the survey was composed of an Integrated Media Campaign including Print, e-mail, Web Banners and Viral Marketing tactics.

Print ads have run in VAR Business, Channel Pro & Computer Reseller News (CRN) magazines announcing the survey and inviting BPs to go to the URL and answer some questions to communicate their feedback to IBM.

Web Banners on VAR Business, CRN, Channel Pro, CMP Everything Channel. Viral Marketing promotions are ongoing on Twitter, Facebook, BLOGS on VAR Business, CRN, Channel Pro, CMP Everything Channel, eChannel Insider , ebizQ and IBM DeveloperWorks.

Over 20 IBM Newsletters announced the campaign. We also launched an aggressive press announcement of the campaign and received pick-up in major technology magazine and the Word of Mouth Marketing Organization (WOMMA).

Finally, the campaign & the response URL to www.voicebp.com is featured on IBM partner web pages. IBM Business Partners: ISVs, Resellers and IBM PartnerWorld Members. The individuals at the BP firms we are trying to reach are those that are primarily responsible for the revenue-generating aspect of the organization. This could be the CEO, or other leaders in sales and marketing, strategy and business development. In many of these firms, sales/marketing are the same function, or marketing is non-existent.

OBJECTIVES:

1) Generate excitement and a sense of urgency in the BP community to do more business with IBM by driving awareness and interest in IBM offerings and BP programs

2) Create more active engagement and loyalty so that Business Partners view themselves as an extension of IBM

3) Increase Partner satisfaction by demonstrating that IBM is listening to them and values the relationship. Create a way to “connect” to BP via the voice of the BP website.

END GOAL: Increase Business Partner generated mid-market revenue and share at the expense of the competition

Launch an integrated series of touches kicking off with a press announcement of the program, followed by a series of 3 fold Print Ads in partner magazines.

Continue the "drumbeat" of the Voice of the Business Partner campaign via web banners, blogging, partner e-mails and IBM web page promotions. To get the word of about Voice of the Business Partner, IBM has run three-page, fold-out ads in the front of CRN, VAR Business, and ChannelPro magazines.

Web ads are featured for the Voice of the Business Partner effort throughout the third and fourth quarter on their respective Websites.

Additionally, the Voice of the Business Partner is featured at all IBM’s live partner events and tradeshows via presentations and tradeshow flyers.

The channel-focused marketing blitz continues in e-mails, social networks, and blogs encouraging midmarket partners to take part in an interactive online forum called the Voice of the Business Partner. The campaign will run through December 2008.

Perhaps our biggest challenge over time will be to maintain the "stickiness" of the Voice of the BP site. We have chosen a vendor that allows us the ability to conduct Quick Polls, so we will want to keep refreshing the polls and the survey questions to keep partners returning and sharing their opinions with us on a wide variety of issues.

Creative: Oglivy Mather, (www.ogilvy.com) New York

Survey: Satmetrix (http://www.satmetrix.com/)
Mary Hall, IBM SWG Channels Marketing (input messaging, implementation & offers)

IMPLEMENTATION:
Jennifer Cohen, Channels Marketing Manager

Bruno Bagala, Mid-Market Business Solutions and Business Partner IMC Manager , Worldwide Center of Excellence for Integrated Marketing Communications

Helen Hawrylak, IBM Global General Business
Manager, Cross-Unit Advocacy and Leadership

Jeb Harrison, Manager, IMC Center of Excellence, Business Partner Programs In a 4 week period, there have been over a thousand visits to the VoiceBP.com collaborative site for an overall survey completion rate of 16%. The most impressive thing about these statistics is that those who completed the survey did so without the offer of any “prize” or “incentive”. They participated in the survey because they are highly motivated to share information with IBM. Its very impressive that they stay online & complete the survey and the “Quick Poll” questions without receiving a gift at the end.

Clearly, this is a motivated audience eager to share their opinions! The results show that we have been successful in driving business partners to our new online partner forum. The comments on the surveys indicate that the partners are very pleased to have the opportunity to share information with IBM. So, the initial results support our campaign objectives. Our challenge will be to continue to build the Voice of the Business Partner site and blogging and more feedback mechanisms to it.

Popularity: 30% [?]

ONLINE REPUTATION MANAGEMENT CASE STUDIES

WINNERS:
Academic Division, University of Illinois at Springfield
Corporate Division, Network Solutions

Division: Academic
Category: Online Reputation Management
University of Illinois at Springfield

In 1998, the University of Illinois at Springfield, a small Midwest liberal arts university, sought to find a new student base through online education. The ultimate goal was to create a successful online program with a national reputation for quality and access that would bring new students to the university and allow our faculty to teach by using the new online formats. Our challenges were many, but perhaps the most difficult was how to distinguish UIS in a highly competitive field.

In the beginning, online education was perceived as sub par, or less than “real” campus-based education. This was as true nationally and at other institutions as it was at UIS. The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C) played a prominent role in establishing Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) as a legitimate educational delivery method. UIS was fortunate to be on the ground floor of the Sloan Consortium initiative and build our program based upon the quality pillars established by Sloan-C. The pillars, not represented in any particular order, are cost effectiveness, student satisfaction, faculty satisfaction, access, and learning effectiveness. Centering on these values has elevated the reputation of online learning on a national level and, at the same time, at UIS.

However, as online learning grew and became more accepted by institutions of higher learning and the public, the number of those offering online classes and programs has grown at a staggering rate. As stated in the first paragraph above, distinguishing our program in this vast field has become one of our greatest communication challenges. We continually find that new programs and initiatives have entered the field. We are sought out by others to share our best practices, which, of course, adds value to our program: yet, we realize this increases the competition and fragments our potential gains.

Non-traditional students were the target market for enrollment in online education at UIS. However, the audience we needed to reach to building a national reputation goes far beyond that of just the students who might enroll in classes or online programs. These other audiences included the university community, accrediting agencies, system administrators, online learning peer institutions, and the public.

As online courses became more popular, two critical audiences became internal ones: students and faculty: students because they needed high quality and faculty because they needed reassurances that teaching online or blended courses can be as effective for students as on-campus courses in some cases.

1. Build the UIS brand in online learning on a national level.
2. Tie the reputation of online learning at UIS to quality and access.
3. Distinguish our online initiative in a sea of competition.
4. Increase student enrollment without robbing our campus classrooms

The size of our school, the importance of faculty, and the value of our educational dollar as a public institution set us apart from most. We are small with a dedicated faculty and staff who have always centered the educational mission of UIS on student learning. We have a long history of being a leader in offering high-quality yet affordable education to our geographic region – central Illinois. We needed to represent these features over and over in as many avenues as possible.

We started by offering a few online courses. Then we created eight online degree programs. With that successfully done, we received a grant to create additional online degree programs, for the total of 17 we now have.

A strategic decision was to have our full-time faculty teaching most of the courses, so that we could tell students whether you are online or on-ground, you will have the best teachers we can offer.

At first we could only build our national reputation by traditional means. In the beginning, we distributed flyers to feeder community colleges in order to build awareness of our program. We then moved to web promotion. We developed an international following by creating two highly successful blogs sites, described in detail below, which could be syndicated by universities and publications world-wide. We chose a platform for e-learning which could quickly be adopted and had easy appeal. We developed “e-tuition,” which meant that online degree-seeking students could enroll without paying the normal out-of-state tuition rates and without paying all of the customary fees that on-campus students are assessed. With each new tool, we tracked the trends in educational technology and higher education and sought out intersections where technology and public awareness could break down resistance and compel the story of online learning access and reach. Because of our size and through careful monitoring and listening, we would work to consistently be first in adopting technologies which would break down geographic barriers that inhibit higher education.

Also, we created the Office of Technology-Enhanced Learning (OTEL) and a well-trained staff to support both faculty and students in the deployment of online courses. OTEL’s director, Ray Schroeder, made a strategic move to create a blog about online learning and attend national conferences. He also became very active in the Sloan Consortium, giving UIS considerable national exposure. Eventually, Schroeder himself become widely sought out as a speaker and national expert in online education.

First and most importantly, our message has always been and will always be one of quality and access. We centered our efforts on making sure this single message was represented in every publication, press lease, presentation, website, grant application, announcement, and document. The value of having a single well-represented message cannot be overstated especially as competition continues to enter the field.

Second, we promoted our own numbers and growth. We have been intentional in our approach to getting our word out. From the beginning, we have focused our efforts both internally and externally. This does not have to be extensive or pricy. Many times, a simple chart of our growth represented what was happening in our online programs. The numbers are dramatic, with 25 to 30 percent growth every semester for the last 20 semesters. They are so dramatic; they tend to speak for themselves.

In higher education, in order to build a national reputation of worth and value, national leaders in the field must recognize your efforts. To that end, we have promoted the online programs at the University of Illinois at Springfield through the established avenues of presentations to local, state, and national conferences, writing papers for local, state, and national journals, and working on local, state, and national committees. Our OTEL staff travels extensively to present at conferences in the United States and Canada on online education issues. We average 30 presentations a year at conferences. In doing our presentations, we always have a consistent message of access and quality.

We also accepted outreach projects, such as working with the Illinois Department of Public Health, which needed ways to train ambassadors for its BASUAH (Brothers and Sisters United Against HIV Aids) program. These programs helped us reach local, state and even national press.

Through “collaborative classrooms” at different universities, we also knew we could foster human exchange beyond the traditional on-campus methods most often experienced by today’s student. Students thirst for this type of exchange. Online learning is a natural sell in a global world. We looked for ways to emphasize the good that naturally occurs in online learning at UIS to our many audience strands. One of our more successful programs is a teaching partnership with Chicago State University (CSU), located about 200 miles north of our UIS campus. CSU has a minority enrollment of nearly 94 percent while UIS had a minority enrollment of around 11 percent. To bridge the gaps and bring more diverse discourse to our classrooms, the two institutions applied for and received grant dollars to support teaching partnerships between our two institutions This initiative gathered a lot of regional press, including recognition as a best practice by the Illinois Board of Higher Education. It has led us to form a new, geographically diverse consortium of seven higher education institutions focused on improving online learning around the country. Each institution looks to the partnership opportunities to strengthen their online enrollment success. As our online reputation has grown, so too, have the opportunities. Online faculty members have formed a Community of Practice in online learning. They have published and presented in their specific disciplines related to online learning to such an extent that UIS is now in the process of creating a Center for Online Learning, Research and Services. In the summer of 2008, we hosted seven other universities from various parts of the U.S. that wanted to learn how to implement a successful online education model.

In order to build our academic reputation, we have also applied for and have received numerous grants and awards, which put a spotlight on the activities of our institution at a state and national level. For example, in 2007, UIS earned the Sloan Consortium’s award for “Excellence in Institution-Wide Online Teaching & Learning Programming.” This is one way of saying that Sloan-C considers UIS the best in the U.S.

Most unusually and perhaps most important of all, Schroeder publishes two daily blogs. One focuses on online learning, the other on educational technologies. The impact of these blogs is important. There are more than 3,000 RSS subscribers to the online learning update and education technologies blogs. If you type the phrase “online learning” into Google, the blog comes up with a rank of 3. If you type the phrase “educational technology,” it comes up as the second listing on most days. The ranks change occasionally but have remained consistently at or near this level for several years.

This clearly enhances UIS’s reputation as a leader in online learning. Online education is frequently misunderstood, even today. Educators, legislators, and the public often confuse online education with non-interactive correspondences courses. As technologies and techniques change, the field as a whole must continue to publicize the story of online education; how it is done, what is involved. Also, some students believed that online courses meant an “easier course,” as if not as much work needed to be done.

Finally, faculty learned quickly that teaching online can involve more one-on-one time with each student than occurs in a classroom, because much of the interaction and communication with students is one-on-one electronically.

We employed a number of tools. Due to the nature of what we are promoting many of them are web-based. They include: blogs, listservs, websites, social networks and portals, Blogger.com, Blackboard, and Elluminate. It might sound too good to be true, but it is here: The entire faculty, staff and administration of the university have been involved in promoting our online efforts to the public and to the students. We have enjoyed outside influence and support from the University of Illinois, the Sloan Foundation, the Sloan Consortium, Ameritech and others.

Several paragraphs about our online prowess are in the Chancellor’s “stump speech,” and our chancellor, provost and other senior administrators nearly always mention our 16 online degree programs and their popularity when giving speeches.

As mentioned earlier, we also created OTEL to provide faculty and student support. We created “online coordinator” positions in the colleges to assist students and faculty with particular courses and various kinds of technical support. And on the UIS web site, online education is regularly featured as one of our strengths. Also, the president of the University of Illinois system, B. Joseph White, spreads the word. In a major address, he mentioned a UIS student who was deployed to Iraq and still managed to continue his online studies from the war zone.

Goals:
Distinguish our online initiative in a sea of competition.
Increase student enrollment without robbing our campus classrooms.

In ten years, online education at UIS has grown from a single class offering in 1998 to 17 fully online degree programs. Over that time we have received more than $3 million dollars in grants to build our online programs. Online students at UIS are now a substantial part of our enrollment. Twenty-four percent of students registered in the most recent year were online majors; 28.8% at the master’s level. Thirty-six percent of credits generated were online; 45.6% at the master’s level.

More than 200 of our faculty members (including full-time and adjuncts) have taught online. Online faculty have traveled to many conferences based upon their research into online learning and are finding new funding sources through online teaching and training partnerships with outside agencies. And this spring, we received our first endowed faculty position in online learning.

Though we are growing, the students are not coming from our previous campus body. Online majors report mailing addresses in 47 states (not AK, ME, RI) and three Canadian provinces, 77 Illinois counties (out of 102), and 11 foreign countries. Fully 37% of online students at the University of Illinois at Springfield are from outside of Illinois.

Goal: Build the UIS brand in online learning on a national level.
Goal: Tie the reputation of online learning at UIS to quality and access.

It the last three years, we have achieved national prominence in the field of online learning. It began with Ray Schroeder, faculty and administrator at UIS, and Burks Oakley, faculty at UIS and administrator at the time at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schroeder and Oakley played a large role in shaping the “Sloan Semester,” which offered online classes to Katrina and Rita disaster victims after those hurricanes had displaced many students. This gave access to free education to those most in need. The purpose of the Sloan Semester was not to enroll students into our own programs, but to allow students disadvantaged and put in jeopardy of losing their educational motivation to continue.

In November of 2007, the UIS online programs were featured in NPR’s Morning Edition after a reporter learned about UIS through the Sloan Consortium and traveled to Springfield to check it out for himself. As a result of that broadcast, our online programs were featured in a number of news venues around the country. The publicity of that news event has focused attention on us in many ways. Chiefly, we are seeing many more visits and many more requests for information from institutions around the country.

Also, it is worth noting that in a major collaborative visioning process involving the campus community, alumni and local community – called the National Commission on the Future of UIS – the final report in 2003 identified online learning as an important component that would shape the university’s future.

Finally, it is also worth noting that to address the critical shortage of math teachers in Illinois, UIS received a special federal grant to expand its math teacher certification program via an online degree completion program. This has allowed people with limited access to college to become math teachers in Illinois by completing their degrees online at UIS.

Goal: Tie the reputation of online learning at UIS to quality and access.

Also, in November of 2007, we received national recognition in our field in receiving the Sloan-C Award for Excellence in Online Teaching and Learning Programs. See article http://www.uis.edu/online/awards.html As a final testament of our online programs success, an endowed professorship in online learning has been established at UIS. The position will allow us to add a national leader in online and blended learning, Karen Swan, to our faculty in December 2008.

A phrase we use at UIS is “local excellence, global impact.” This is how we operate, and this was our intention with online education.

By creating OTEL and 17 online degree programs, and by establishing our OTEL staff as national leaders in online education, UIS attracted thousands of students, the attention of thousands of blog readers around the world, and the national media and important regional media such as the Chicago Tribune. And we have won awards from the Sloan Consortium, which garners additional national recognition and publicity. All of this is implemented strategically and enhances our reputation as a leader in online education.

By providing excellent online out of a small Illinois university, we are having a national and global impact.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS:
http://www.uis.edu/newsreleases/2007/10/22-UISwinsmajornationalawardforonlineteachinglearnin.html
http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/onlinelearning/blogger.html
http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/blogger.html
http://www.uis.edu/pressreleases/june02PR/06_14_02.htm
http://www.uis.edu/newsbureau/2005/09/national-initiative-to-keep-students.html
http://www.uis.edu/pressreleases/mar04PR/03_08_04.html

Division: Corporate
Category: Online Reputation Management
Network Solutions

Network Solutions once was the sole provider of domain names on the Internet; however, it now competes in a crowded marketplace. While Network Solutions still manages more than 7 million domain names, it also manages over 1.5 million e-mailboxes, and more than 350,000 Web sites - in addition to providing a wide variety of additional services for small businesses. Still, many people think of Network Solutions as a monopolistic domain provider and are not aware of the many new and value-added services available. Many of online conversations about the company are based on outdated information. In fact, the company has excellent customer service, for three consecutive years our Hazleton, Penn., customer support center has been named a J.D. Power and Associates® Certified Call Center, providing “An Outstanding Customer Service Experience.” (For J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Certified Call Center ProgramSM information, visit jdpower.com.) In 2008, Roy Dunbar took the helm as CEO of Network Solutions and put a premium on communicating more clearly and openly with stakeholders. The social media outreach program was a natural outcrop of Network Solution’s focus on this customer service philosophy.

Network Solutions finds itself in an era where the voice of the individual, with his or her opinions and grievances, has been empowered by such technology as blogs, podcasts, online video and other online publishing platforms. Designers and developers are natural potential partners for the services offered by Network Solutions. However, this stakeholder community has a lingering negative perception of Network Solutions. Building a bridge with this net-savvy audience is an important goal. As a result, the social media team at Network Solutions was given this important task.

The target audience for this outreach program is web-savvy developers and designers who serve primarily small businesses, which is also an important demographic for Network Solutions. Developers and designers help companies and individuals shape their web presence. Web developers and designers are oftentimes small businesses too. They also happen to be the most vocal critics of Network Solutions. They tend to form into tight-knit online communities that share information, praise and criticism freely. This community, which is highly web savvy, could also ultimately be good evangelists for the company. We feel that success with this community should be the lynchpin of our online development goals and will lead to better relationships with the small business community as well.

Goals and objectives: Network Solutions had several objectives in their social communication program:
Address and improve Network Solutions negative online reputation
Improving and building lasting relationships with the developer and design communities
Better serve unhappy customers that choose to vent online with the goal of retaining them as customers when possible, and if not, leaving them with a positive impression
Enhancing and developing the new Network Solutions brand in online communities

Network Solutions’ initial plan was to address the communication disconnect in three areas:
Crisis PR Engagement: Though monitoring and quick response techniques the team quickly addresses issues about the company and provides technical assistance when needed through a customer service SWAT team.
Solutions Are Power Blog(solutionsarepower.com): Issues that came up over and over again, or major crisis situations, are addressed in the official Network Solutions blog to lend credibility and provide critical information.
Community Participation: Network Solutions team members actively extended their participation in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.

Crisis PR Engagement: The social media team put together a process to find and intelligently respond to mentions of Network Solutions throughout the web on a daily basis. The team also came up with a process to elevate posts that were urgent and communicate in a timely and orderly manner.
Solutions Are Power Blog: When the team saw that an issue kept coming up in forums, Twitter, or blogs, the team would write more comprehensive articles to explain the situation.
Community Participation: @NetSolcares has become a staple on Twitter, where the team, which is identified in the profile, quickly respond (in a personal manner) to concerns about Network Solutions.

How to adequately address the estimated 1,000 or so comments and mentions per month of Network Solutions in a cost effective and efficient manner was a challenge. Also, deciding who to engage and who not to engage was yet another concern. To address these issues, the team decided that Network Solutions customers having problems always receive a response, but sometimes behind the scenes. For non-customer complaints and comments, it is taken on a case by case basis. Sometimes we also choose not to respond based on criteria developed by the team.

Radian6 is used as the monitoring tool to gather information and respond appropriately.An internal system called “Voice of the Customer” is used to log both problems and praises. This is part of a more overall effort at the company and is not just aimed at social media interaction.We store shared documents on BaseCamp so that all team members have access. Use Google alerts to quickly identify trouble areasUse Search.Twitter.com, formerly Summize, to keep on top of Twitter replies and tweets in real time, Google Docs for team collaboration.

Livingston Communication, a PR and social media firm, provides a team of five to support the social media team at Network Solutions. The Livingston team makes recommendations and aids with strategy. The Network Solutions Social Media team is headed up by Shashi Bellamkonda, Social Media Swami. He reports to the head of Public Relations at Network Solutions, and has a part-time contractor to assist with the blog and the brand’s online presence. There is also a Customer Service SWAT Team of four to deal with consumer complaints and problems.

Results:
Tonality: The main quantitative measure so far has been tonality. Livingston Communication, using Radian6, analyzed Network Solutions presence on the web from January 2008 to June 2008 and found that off all mentions of Network in social media 58 percent were negative, 10 percent positive and 32 percent neutral. After stating the PR outreach in June, we analyzed June and July, 48 percent were negative, 32 percent were positive and 20 percent were neutral. There was a 10 percent drop in negative comments and posts and maybe more importantly, a 22 percent increase in positive mentions.
Address and improve Network Solutions negative online reputation: Clearly the overall perception of Network Solutions is improving and we expect it to continue to improve as we institute an already approved Phase II of our outreach campaign.
Improving and building lasting relationships with the developer and design communities: Currently we have 20 influencers ready to help us with content creation that we have reached out to over this time period. The results for this objective should continue to bear fruit in Phase II.
Better serving unhappy customers that choose to vent online with the goal of retaining them as customers when possible, and if not, leaving them with a positive impression: We have a number of exchanges with customers that have led to happy outcomes, overall we have entered nearly 250 Voice of the Customer comments since the inception of the program.
Enhancing and developing the new Network Solutions brand in online communities: Again, we have a recognizable face in the Twitter network and overall, positive comments have increased by 22 percent while negative comments have decreased by 10 percent.

Popularity: 28% [?]

NEW MEDIA CREATION/SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCTION - ACADEMIC/MEDIA/NONPROFIT DIVISIONS - CASE STUDIES

WINNERS:
Academic Division: Lynn University
Media Division: Revision3
Nonprofit Division: Homeless Nation

COMMENDATION OF EXCELLENCE:
Media Division: National Film Board of Canada for CitizenShift

COMMENDATIONS OF MERIT:
Nonprofit Division:
Canadian Centre for Architecture
Intercultural Development Research Association
PRX
Terra-1530

Division: Academic
Category: Media Creation
Institution: Lynn University

It is extremely difficult, whatever your industry, to communicate persuasively with young people (14-18 year-olds) that are inherently skeptical of polished messages, distrustful of sales “spin,” predisposed to embracing only well-known brands (even when shopping for universities), and highly capable social networkers, bloggers and online researchers. Compounding the problem for Lynn University (http://www.lynn.edu/), a nonprofit institution in Boca Raton, Florida, is its age (46-years-old) and lack of name recognition. If we want to attract a better caliber student - and more students in general - we need to stand apart in a crowded field of more than 3,000 institutions offering four-year college degrees.

Whether in the higher ed or retail business, a major challenge is communicating with the 14-18 year-old demographic. For Lynn University, that challenge is compounded by the fact that most students have never even heard of the institution. As a result, our goal was to build a communication program that was unique in its dedication to speaking to that group candidly and clearly, and often, without an institutional filter. We sought to enhance our image by building an institutional presence on the web that was notable for the lack of the “institution.” We wanted potential students to know us as a place that strives to be the most “innovative, international, and individualized small universities in the country.”

Yet we didn't want to actually say that, just show it. And allow our students, very often, to be the messengers. By letting potential students see us, warts and all (potentially), we were hoping to stand out as a real college possessed of real possibilities.

Target audience: Young people between the ages of 15-19 that are interested in a private, liberal arts education at a four-year university.

Goal: Differentiate Lynn University from competitors by consistently providing smart, stylish and authentic:
1. multimedia web content (lynn.edu, on Facebook and via the university’s YouTube channel)
2. student stories (via blogs)
3. online student content (videos)
4. social media exchanges

Universities and colleges are increasingly front-and-center in the struggle to create meaningful content to attract attention and differentiate offerings among a group of 14 to 18-year-old college bound students. These consumers want content that is delivered quickly and unobtrusively where they live - online. And most importantly, in the You Tube age, they want that information to be authentic.

As an institution with little brand or name recognition, we decided that to reach these students, we needed to marshal our existing student forces and turn them into brand champions. They, after all, speak the language, are themselves allergic to institutional spin, and know best what potential students are looking for, where they’re looking, and why.

With a very small budget behind us, our office set out to recruit six student bloggers during the summer of 2007; build a blogging platform (using Wordpress); create a student video competition (to entice students to provide content); start mapping out and building a network of Facebook pages; and finally, create a graduate assistant position within our office so that a student would be largely in charge of, and driving, our new communications initiatives.

To begin, we set out to recruit a handful of university students to become our first-ever online bloggers. Offering only to build the blog platform (http://blogs.lynn.edu) and cheer them on from the sidelines, we managed to recruit six students as bloggers over the summer of 2007. The students were asked only to watch their language and adhere to the university’s existing policies regarding personal conduct and communication. After a quiet launch and only a dozen or so early readers for each blog, the audience and usefulness has steadily grown. Today, each blog averages more than a 1,000 unique visitors. And our student bloggers have effectively become tour guides - answering questions from parents and students alike about everything from the cafeteria food to the institution’s academic reputation.

Around the same time our office launched its own student video competition. Built on the marketing department’s existing “I’m Lynn” theme, the competition offered a $500 top prize for a student shot video. In the end, the office received a half dozen usable video content - shot for and by students - for use on the university’s Web site, Facebook pages and You Tube channel (which was set up formally in the summer of 2008 and houses student work and university-produced content).

Even while we were building this competition, we were shooting our own video for use on the university’s main Web site (www.lynn.edu). On the first of October, our team re-launched the main landing page to include five stories in a so-called "fishtank" window. These stories, which each contain photos and either audio or video content, feature student stories, document on campus news, highlight alumni successes and celebrate the university’s best features in living color. The stories have been so popular that local media visit the site to uncover interesting news stories during quiet cycles.

In the fall of last year the university also set up its network of six university Facebook pages. The main page and profile (Lynn University) has more than 500 members. And other pages have been created for the admissions office, international student admissions, alumni, student involvement and study abroad. The pages have been invaluable as the office has worked with admissions and others to answer questions, post videos, stay in touch with alumni and have authentic conversations with those young people considering enrolling.

The main obstacle faced in this endeavor was convincing ourselves and our peers on campus that while risky, and oftentimes less polished, this new approach was worthwhile.

Additionally, our media relations team had enough to do before taking on this new role, as did our Web and marketing employees. We had to convince - and be convinced - that the substantial effort and minimal monies were going to be worth it. Shortly after seeing our blogs and bloggers begin to blossom, however, most members of the office were convinced. Our editorial content on the web almost tripled almost as we posted the blogs and began writing stories, and posting videos, exclusively for our most visible marketing tools - our Web site and our Facebook pages.

Tools: We used the free applications on Wordpress to build the blogs. Our accounts on You Tube and Facebook are all free.

Team:
Jason Hughes, Director of Media Relations
Anthony Bosio, Web Designer
Laura Vann, Media Relations Specialist
Ashlea Evans, Graduate Assistant (Jan. 2008-present) and Blogger
Jena Zakany, Graduate Assistant (June 2007-Jan. 2008)

Our bloggers: Morgan Anderson, Joey McNamara, Gene Proulitzer, Jana Fuson, Ashlea Evans, and Allan Jogiel.

Results:
This new expansion of our communication activities immediately opened up new lines of communications for the marketing and communication office at Lynn (and, by extension, the whole university). These social media activities, video competitions, increased editorial output - all served to raise this office’s profile on campus and greatly enhance the university’s ability to tell its own story online.

Most striking was the way in which these tools - our insistence on using these tools as ways to communicate candidly - opened up conversations between past, present and potential students. Even now there are discussion threads on our main Facebook page where two mothers are discussing the institution’s value. At the same time, an incoming student used the site to ask a question many other students had with regards to whether our IT department supported a certain computer software. These are conversations no one was having except by phone. Now they’re occurring publicly - and, by virtue of that fact, Lynn is showcasing one of its main selling points: the individualized nature of our institution and education.

Another measure of success could well be the university’s media placements. Since scaling back on our media relations output in favor of more online writing and social media activities, our impressions have actually increased. Our opinion is that this is largely a result of the enhanced stories we’re telling. The media can be forgiven for thinking of Lynn as a quiet campus. We have 2,500 students while our counterpart across the street, Florida Atlantic University, has 28,000. But our Web site and other activities show something different - we are a place that is exciting and vibrant. And, to boot, honest about our challenges and our opportunities.

We have successfully differentiated our institution from competitors by pulling student stories forward, and letting our students talk about their experiences themselves. Our team members consistently return from conferences with a shared message: we’re ahead of the curve. Others want to create the dialogue we've created, mind their student experiences like we have, and show the broader world that life exists on their campus. Only by letting go of the reigns in some areas have we achieved this.

Division: Media
Category: Media creation
Company: Revision3

While mainstream television programs speak to the masses, the need to appeal to vast audiences and conform to industry standards homogenizes content and leads many consumers turned off and disinterested. The Internet, which requires far fewer resources to create viable, interesting and top-tier content, offers an alternative. Programming can be targeted to reach niche audiences. As computers become a central component of an entertainment system, more TV viewers are turning to the Internet for content. However, this is not without its challenges and unique circumstances. With Internet TV still young, there are many questions to be answered: How is original content created? How would viewers access and consume it? How would networks attract and retain an audience? How would networks monetize their product? Make money? Create the best content for the largest audience?

When technology visionaries Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson and David Prager realized the challenge of the broadcast industry – including that they couldn’t find anything they wanted to watch on traditional television – they set out to form Revision3 (http://revision3.com/) in 2005, now led by Internet TV pioneer Jim Louderback.

The founders knew this would be the new wave – and that Internet television would allow viewers to choose the show they want to watch from a library of shows and have instant access to live programs from anywhere in the world.

Their mission was clear: to be the first media company that would actually “get it” and, unlike aggregators, mash-ups, and user-generated video sites, Revision3 set out to become an actual TV network for the web, creating and producing its own original, broadcast quality shows that would change the face of “television” as we know it.

The content on Revision3 is designed for a new target audience: passionate, committed fans who want to watch shows that entertain, educate and help expand their overall life experiences. The audience expects professionally produced programming but wants it to be unexpected, edgy, smart and real. In addition, the audience expects to watch shows whenever they want, wherever they are, and on whatever device they choose, including everything from a 70-inch HDTV to an iPod or cell phone. Anticipating the ability to watch shows on all topics, Revision3’s audience wants to see technology, comedy, modern culture, music and much more.

Revision3’s audience includes technology enthusiasts, avid gamers, movie enthusiasts, and more. Specifically, the elusive audience includes the following demographics:

- 93.9% of the audience is male;
- 53.9% of the audience is in the 12-24 age range;
- 75.6% of the audience is in the 18-34 age range;
- 71.7% of the audience is 21 years of age and above;
- 73.58% of the audience has some college or higher education;
- 87.31% of the audience spends more time with Internet/Digital content than TV content.

Goals:
• Create an actual TV network for the web while also producing original, broadcast quality shows that offer an alternative to traditional television;
• Attract a wide range of fans and followers who tune in to Revision3’s shows on a daily and weekly basis;
• Generate interest in the online community by bringing in new shows and hosts to add to Revision3’s weekly lineup of programs;
• Partner with multiple distribution platforms to extend the reach of Revision3 shows as well as its advertisers. Revision3 is born from the Internet, on-demand generation. As an actual TV network for the web, Revision3 creates and produces its own original, broadcast quality shows, including hits “Diggnation,” “Scam School,” “Tekzilla,” “popSiren” and more.

CONTENT: Revision3 covers technology, comedy, modern culture, music and more. Revision3 hosts don’t come from Hollywood. Instead, they come from the same passionate fan base as the audience. They are engaging, personal, smart and connected - experts with the insight and acceptance that naturally puts them at the center of the community. The content is designed for passionate committed fans who want to watch shows that entertain, educate and help expand their life experiences. The audience expects professionally produced programming but wants it to be unexpected, edgy, smart and real. They also want to watch shows whenever they want, wherever they are, and on whatever device they choose, including everything from a 70” HDTV to an iPod or Cell phone.

DISTRIBUTION: Revision3’s shows can be found on Revision3.com and additional platforms, including iTunes, YouTube, TIVO, and more. Revision3 will work with almost any distribution platform, using every video encoding format available, including flash, H.264 and others. The company wants content accessible to the greatest possible audience, on as many devices and networks as possible.

Revision3 has attracted a wide-range of top advertisers including Sony, Netflix, Dolby, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Southern Comfort, Virgin America, Verizon and FX Networks. Advertisers enjoy a unique bond with the audience via customized message integration and host mentions that deliver phenomenal results. The clutter-free environment is perfect for everything from direct response to branding.

Revision3 partners with a wide range of traditional and new media platforms to deliver each of their Internet TV programs. In addition, Revision3 enabled their network to work with almost any distribution platform, using every video encoding format available, including flash, H.264 and WMV. Revision3 works to make content accessible to the greatest possible audience, on as many devices and networks as possible. It was very important for Revision3 to allow their shows to reach the audience and deliver meaningful messages and engagement. As a result, Revision3 uses Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms to expand their presence and increase audience numbers. Revision3’s shows can be found everywhere from Revision3.com to a wide range of traditional and new media platforms. Revision3 has distribution deals with Blinkx, Zvue, Vuze, Break, Revver, DaveTV, Joost, Hulu, TiVo, Miro, Blip and Transpera. This has multiplied the reach of Revision3 content exponentially.

Advertisers include Anheuser-Busch, Dolby, Bank of America, Dr. Pepper and the National Highway Safety Association.

The Revision3 team combines the best and brightest in the world of television and the Internet. The management side includes: Internet TV pioneer Jim Louderback; Damon Berger, who runs the company’s distribution and promotion strategies as Director of Programming & Business Development; Sarah Lane, Director of Production; Brad Murphy, who leads advertising efforts as Vice President of Sales; David Prager, co-founder and Vice President of Special Projects; Ron Richards, Director or Marketing & Product Management.

Each member of the management team takes a critical role in developing, maintaining and promoting the Revision3 lineup of shows. In 2007, Revision3 delivered a total of 11 million shows and over 46 million clips in the fourth-quarter reflecting a 440% percent increase from the first-quarter of the year. For the full year Revision3 delivered a total of more than 25 million shows, and over 103 million clips. The popular show Diggnation has more than 160 episodes available online, garners 200,000 viewers per episode (more than Fox Business News, which spent millions of dollars to launch their operation), and consistently ranks among the top Internet videos available from the Apple iTunes Store.

In June 2008, Revision3 was honored with two Webby Awards in the People’s Voice category for the hit shows “Diggnation” and “The Totally Rad Show.” The People’s Voice category allowed Web enthusiasts to vote for their favorite nominees. “Diggnation” and “The Totally Rad Show” won People’s Voice awards for Technology and Variety in the Online Film and Video Genre. Revision3 was also named an Official Honoree in the technology category for “Tekzilla.” In addition, Revision3.com has been named a winner of the Interactive Media Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Entertainment and the company has been named to CNET’s 2007 Webware 100 Award in the Entertainment category. Revision3 also was named to the AlwaysOn Global 250 List in 2008 and Red Herring 100 in Spring 2007. Most recently, Revision3 was selected by TVWeek readers in a poll to be the web-video studio poised to launch the next Internet mega-hit.

With the combination of a strategic internal team, focus on the company goal at hand and ability to attract and retain hit Internet superstars, Revision3 has propelled each of its programs to be a success.

Revision3 continues to add new programming regularly, such as Hak5, a home-grown hit series fusing underground culture and mainstream IT which launches on Revision3.com on September 8th, and they have a hot new music program on the horizon. These efforts bring in new fans and followers – from a hardcore hacking audience to more – and continue to build Revision3’s strong presence in Internet TV.

Finally, as advertisers recognize the reach of Revision3’s programs, top companies continue to partner and support the Revision3 platform in an effort to boost the network even further.

Division: Nonprofit
Category: Media Creation
Organiztion: Homeless Nation

New media technologies have been developed to enhance people’s lives by facilitating open and direct communication, easy access to information and resources, and the creation and dissemination of art and self-expression. The benefits of new media remain out of reach for many Canadians who neither have the necessary equipment or requisite skills to access the technologies.

WWW.HOMELESSNATION.ORG was originally conceived as a forum of expression for individuals who otherwise have no voice and no influence in mainstream society.

Canada’s homeless have a right to be heard, a right to community, and a right to be acknowledged. Too often, the street community is ignored or looked down upon by everyday citizens. Homeless Nation was developed to help change that. We want to provide the crucial tools and the digital skills to a population eager to be heard.

Our lives are becoming more and more dependent on technologies. The Internet, with all the information that it stores and transports, is the lynchpin of our digital age. If you need to know something, if you need to contact someone, if you need to find something – the Internet is the first place that we look. This powerful tool, however, is not restricted to acting as a simple instrument; it is also a forum for culture, expression, and creativity. Through social networking sites we maintain and form friendships, through blogs people articulate their fears and frustrations, their hopes and desires; through news sites people stay current with both local and global events.

The people who need many of these services the most do not have adequate access. The homeless, for the most part, have been silenced in our cultural discussion – they do not have the knowledge or the requisite technologies and resources to properly participate. There is a disconnect – a digital divide – that is emerging between the haves and have-nots.

Homeless Nation aims to provide individuals on the street with the tools that they need to express and educate themselves. Self-expression is an important first step towards gaining control over one’s life and exerting positive influence on future decisions. The communication that happens through the website is central to the creation of community and a feeling of social acceptance.

Homeless Nation (HN) is an online community open to anyone. By facilitating an online discussion, we hope to bring about understanding and acceptance. For members, HN currently has thousands of homeless individuals, dozens of community groups, and many ordinary citizens who want to learn more and who want to help. First and foremost, however, www.homelessnation.org is created by – and for – Canadians who are homeless.

Homeless Nation directs the majority of its efforts at those who are still living on the streets. Everyone has a story to tell and we hope that they share it. HN outreach teams visit shelters, missions, drop-in centers, squats, and alleys in order to reach as many people as possible. Outreach is adaptable to every interest and skill level: we conduct interviews with those who are willing to speak, we teach others how to blog, while others graduate onto video-blogging where they go through workshops ranging from the most elementary editing skills to advanced mini-courses on film production.

Along with providing a means for self-expression, Homeless Nation is also used to organize events, distribute petitions, find housing and employment, breakdown negative stereotypes, display art, share stories, find missing persons and develop meaningful friendships.

It is a website aimed at those who have nothing - and need nothing - except the chance to be heard.

If nothing else, Homeless Nation wants to be an archive for all of the thousands of voices that otherwise would not be heard. By giving the homeless population a chance to speak, we hope, however, that Homeless Nation will be much more than that.

We want to give the homeless a chance to develop community and through that instilled social acceptance, strive to better their lives and the lives of others. We want to provide the knowledge that helps a person survive for another night on the street, so that the next day they can wake up to fight for their future.

Homeless Nation hopes to spread to cities all across Canada, all the while developing a self-sustaining network of outreach workers. While focused on the needs and rights of those still on the streets, we also want to educate the average Canadian who needs to know more about the issues, the causes, and the lives of the homeless. Until voters break-free from the negative stereotypes that persistently define the homeless, policy will remain in a quagmire of ineffectiveness. Changing perceptions will change lives.

Through a user-driven approach, Homeless Nation is trying to change individual attitudes, public perceptions, and the process of making government policy. Human rights and social equity are often taken for granted in the developed world, but many members of our society have to battle injustice everyday. Poverty and homelessness are dire issues affecting millions of people in our increasingly urbanized world. Homeless Nation is trying to provide new tools to assist in the empowerment of homeless individuals so that they themselves can become agents of change.

The current website users, the individuals who are taking part in outreach programs, the ones still sleeping on the streets – those are our outreach workers of tomorrow, our future means to fight against injustice and promote social and economic equality. The future lies with them.

We want to continue to develop our website, adapt it to the needs and wants of those who use – and rely on it – most. The site needs to be more interactive, more informative, and more user-friendly. We must always push the existing technologies to see how much we can get back from them.

There is also a pressing need to expand outreach into a larger number of cities and to increase the visibility of the project in the greater community. Homeless Nation can be used to educate ordinary citizens and policy makers about homeless individuals and the issues that affect them.

By adding to our already 30+ community partners, we hope to create a National Shelter Network that will be able to better serve homeless Canadians. Comprehensive and updated information on our site may mean the difference between being able to sleep in a warm bed for the night or having to make due in a doorway.

We must continue empowering individuals through learning how to use the Internet to look for survival-based information, such as available shelter, food, health care and other social services.
We want be able to continue to use digital communication to create dialogue in Canada about this social justice issue, and to create hope and opportunities in our society for those who are most vulnerable and marginalized.

In supporting and providing these essential tools and skills, we will ultimately enable homeless Canadians to change the conditions of their lives and to build stronger, healthier communities across Canada.

Homeless Nation uses pre-existing structures to effectively distribute its services. Outreach workers use contacts in shelters, drop-in centers, re-hab clinics, Native friendship centers, and other community organizations in order to meet a wide group of homeless individuals. By doing this, we cut down on administrative costs and direct more money to equipment and training for the homeless.

We provide interested partners with computers and other equipment (like video cameras) and hold workshops that introduce the basics of the site. As time goes on, the workshops become more technical and the attendees exert more control over the content. Often, groups will choose to meet outside of HN activities in order to continue working on projects or sometimes hold their own workshops: recently a group in Vancouver held a workshop on conflict resolution.

The hub for all of our services is our website - www.homelessnation.org There are always challenges when working with a highly marginalized, and very desperate, population. Often people show more priority to finding food and shelter than in sitting and writing a blog or filming a video. The homeless are grateful to have the opportunity to be heard, but hunger can be overwhelming.

Many homeless individuals are also highly transient and after having some initial success with them, they may suddenly disappear. With an extended network, we would be able to reach new people and keep existing members participating.

Homeless Nation also has difficulties meeting expectations from mainstream society. Finding sources of funding or deploying in new communities can be challenging because many people don’t understand that homeless people need to be able to speak their minds and feel a basic level of social acceptance. Many people think that giving a blanket or a can of food is enough.

We say it isn't, and the homeless say it isn't.

Everyone needs friends, community and personal acknowledgment. Having faith in others - and in yourself - is crucial to living a safe, healthy, and productive life.

www.homelessnation.org runs on Drupal open-source software - a content management system. We use donated computers and cameras, use free space from community organizations, and are motivated by fierce sense of social justice.

In participating communities, we have outreach workers who spend their days on the streets and their nights editing footage in front of a computer screen. Each city also has volunteers who help promote the site or lend a hand during filming.

HN has minimal administrative personnel who also double as tech support for web site problems and answer user’s FAQ.

Homeless Nation has a proven outreach program that uses the success of the past to ensure a bright and sustainable future. The vast majority of our staff have experienced homelessness firsthand and, at some point, were on the other side of HN outreach programs. Eager to learn and to help, these inspiring individuals have shown great courage and determination in their fight to promote civil liberties, social justice, basic human rights, and are determined to give back to the street community.

We want to help improve individual lives as well as the homeless community in its entirety. We gave individuals access to a camera and a computer and from that they began to take control of their lives and give back to their communities.

Their stories are online for the entire world to see and to learn from.

Our online membership grows everyday. We are doing what we set out to do - we just want to do more of it.

Division: Media
Category: Media Creation
Company: National Film Board of Canada for CitizenShift

CitizenShift (http://citizen.nfb.ca/) and our French language sister site, Parole citoyenne (http://citoyen.onf.ca/), are National Film Board of Canada Web sites dedicated to citizen engagement and social change.

These two sites combine the power of images and words to bring together active citizens, independent filmmakers and multimedia artists around the key social issues of our times. Our ever-growing networks engage people from all backgrounds to explore and debate contemporary issues, to contribute their own material – and to use media to make a difference.

CitizenShift and Parole citoyenne are seamlessly merged production and distribution platforms with a huge and ever-growing bank of content including videos, photos, articles, podcasts and blogs….but we’re so much more than the sum of our parts. The power of these social media platforms is how they contextualizes the media and frame the issues.

The challenge for us over the past year has been to migrate our site from a static, magazine-type format to a more dynamic, user generated platform. During our four years of existence, we have always been guided by our users, and the notion of community has been our underlying force. However, in the age of YouTube and other video sharing platforms, we knew that we needed to open things up and reach new standards in order to stay fresh and current. Also, as the two sites were gaining popularity, we simply couldn’t keep up with content submissions manually anymore, which was a great problem to have.

So, about a year ago this fall, we embarked on our revamp project. Moving through the revamp was a major challenge as we had to keep the old site up to date, as well as put an enormous amount of time and energy into building the new site, a daunting load for our small teams! However, the online world is unforgiving; if users don’t like your site within the first ten seconds of visiting, they’re gone and it’s difficult to get them to return. How to keep your audience on board during the change over and then to stick with you through the Beta period of the new site?

Of course, an ongoing goal for us is to get more people active on the sites. With this comes the challenge of outreach and social marketing, which is also linked to our continued existence! Sustainability is indeed a question for community driven Web projects and we are not the only social network facing the question: How does a citizen media project continue to thrive at a time when ‘the next new thing’ is king and long-term financial support for grass-roots projects is elusive?

CitizenShift and Parole citoyenne were clearly ahead of their time when we first went live in the fall of 2004. Our initial goals were to pick-up on the mandate of the Challenge for Change program of the 1960’s: to democratize the filmmaking process and create a vehicle for citizen voices.

It is fascinating to note that the spirit of the Challenge for Change program of over 30 years ago is now the rallying cry of the tidal wave of Web sites and ICT initiatives designed to give voice to the ordinary Citizen. In fact the now hyper trendy Web 2.0 notions of Citizen Media, User Generated Content, Participatory Media, Human Collective Intelligence (Crowd Sourcing), Social Networking and so on, were the founding concepts underlying our project. CitizenShift and Parole citoyenne came before YouTube, before MySpace and Facebook and were amongst the earliest pioneering Websites that aggregate independent social issue media.

However, true community does not simply appear just because one builds a Web site to house it. Over the past four years we have been working hard to connect with people through a wide variety of networks created around the issues that we feature on the site. Real engagement and community building takes work, dedication, demonstrated integrity and commitment to the causes. We have spent a considerable amount of time and energy connecting with people, listening to their stories and supporting their efforts to portray social issues through media.

While at the time of our launch in 2004 we were on the pioneering leading edge of the citizen media trend, after over three years in the same skin it was absolutely essential to freshen up the site and make it more interactive. Now, with our revamped site we are striving to maintain our lead within the growing pack of participatory media sites invading the Web. Fortunately, we have an important advantage: our strong existing community and well known and applauded National Film Board branding. Both of these crucial elements have helped us to leverage our new technical platform in order to boost the project to a new level. But we must not rest on our laurels and keeping ourselves up there requires constant effort and innovation.

Also, there are still issues with the new site, which has been online for over six months now, and in listening to our users, we have found that we have to go back to the design table and re-tweak a few important elements in order to improve usability. The decision to change certain things on the new site have brought other, internal challenges as we have had to find new money and support for continued Web development. We have needed a strong communication strategy in order to educate our executive producers and studio administrators on the necessity of approaching Web development as an ongoing process inherent in every Web-based project, and in convincing them to put forth the funds to support this approach.

As a social-issue, multiple-media based site, our target audience is clear: anyone who is moved by the current state of our world and who wants to put forth specific problems, critiques as well as celebrations of the issues that we face. Therefore, we aim to reach filmmakers, writers, photographers, activists, teachers, learners, researchers and ordinary citizens. Since we operate out of the National Film Board of Canada, our target is primarily Canadian, but certainly not exclusively and we have collaborators and materials coming from the US, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and other parts of the world. We also network with other like-minded Web initiatives and form part of a global network of social-media aggregators.

In Canada, we have team members in 4 cities across the country and an important audience to reach is a local one, and we do this both via our Web presence and through local screenings and events. It is part of our core mandate to privilege people whose stories might not otherwise be heard; to give voice to the voiceless and to offer an opened host and a contextualized setting in order to highlight the issues.

Our strength in this Web 2.0 world is the force of collectivity and true community building. In stark contrast to the sweeping cult of the individual—the MYspace, MYfriends, MYvideos and YOUTube—CitizenShift and Parole citoyenne prefer to offer the notion of WE, together, exploring the issues that touch us all. The media found on our sites serve as catalysts for discussion, networking and collective action so that we can make a difference in our world. And the works aggregated on these two platforms fully embrace that spirit.

Our first and foremost objective is to stay alive. In spite of the fact that the sites are flourishing, stats are up and the community is growing, we still have to prove the necessity of our existence internally within the National Film Board of Canada in order to reinstate our mandate and our funding.

We also need to grow the community and get more people and content flowing through the site. This is also an ongoing objective, but this year we have given ourselves the lofty objective of trying to double our current stats.

Again, as mentioned, we still need to improve the site for usability and to make the content ‘jump to the top’ as users have mentioned that they find it difficult to locate all of the content currently within a dossier.

Finally, we need to find some viable supplementary funding sources. Although the National Film Board is currently supporting our project at 100% of our budgeting needs, it is now essential for us to find additional funding to offset our costs. We currently operate on a fairly modest budget and with a small team; this makes it difficult to attain all of our goals as we tend to spread ourselves out a bit thin! External funding would certainly help us reach our goals and sustain these worthy initiatives.

In terms of our continued existence, we are currently undergoing an internal information campaign. This includes meetings and presentations to high level management and decision makers, as well as to host screenings and events for rank and file employees. It is essential that our colleagues are familiar with our work and consider this project as absolutely necessary and in harmony with the NFB’s new strategic plan.

As for growing our community, users and content on the site, we are just getting underway with a new communications and marketing campaign for the two sites. This includes presentations at a wide variety of conferences, educational institutions, community groups and festivals. We are also in the final planning stages of an online contest and outreach campaign, encouraging people to submit content. Finally, we continue with our ongoing social networking strategies including our Facebook and flickr accounts. We’re also investigating the possibilities of developing a Widget for the ipone, as well as collaborating with other Widget sites to improve the viral aspects of the site.

One new initiative aimed for early 2009 and currently in development is our educational modules. This will be a sub section of the site aimed specifically at educational institutions (middle school through to college) with the goal of getting both students and teachers to participate directly on the CitizenShift site in order to create a networked community of learners. We hope that this project will develop a new audience for CitizenShift, thus expanding and increasing our user base.

We have just recently entered into an agreement with a new Web-development company for the site improvements, which we hope will take care of the minor annoyances. Hopefully this will be completed by November and we can then focus on upgrades and new features.

And as for monetizing, we are in meetings with some experts in the field of ‘The Double Bottom Line’ (the notion of looking at value in terms of financial as well as social capital) and investigating how to leverage our wealth of content and vibrant community in order to attract a few targeted sponsors. We hope this strategy will pay off for us in the way of some additional financial support for the projects.

As one can see, there is a lot going on! Part of the process of running these sites is in the balancing and managing of priorities. A key priority is always what’s happening on the sites themselves, because in the Web world, you are only as good as your front page! But we are also advancing on all of the areas previously mentioned.

If we look at the initial revamp project, which ran from late summer 2007 until our beta launch in January 2008, we can say that the deployment of the new sites went ahead as planned, that is, more or less on schedule and on budget. However, there were a few obstacles and challenges to overcome, some of which we were successful at immediately, others which took some time to figure out.

As far as the original revamp project, we can now say in retrospect that the deployment process, although ultimately successful, could certainly have been smoother.

In keeping with our grass-roots and indy media leanings, we decided to use open-source tools for our new site. We chose the Drupal platform for its large and active user community, but with that choice came other challenges. Although we firmly embrace the open-source spirit, we also need a ‘professional’ Web presence, with an efficient and attractive interface that will bring people in. Finding the ‘right’ developers and designers has been an ongoing challenge.

As it happened, we were booked to launch the new sites at the Festival de nouveau cinema in Montreal (a major international film and new media festival), and therefore had to make numerous compromises in order to get the site up and running for this highly publicized launch event.

We did finally pull it off, culminating in a wonderful evening where we were surrounded by our local collaborators and supporters in the hall, as well as numerous others who joined us in a live feed online. However in retrospect, we should never have committed ourselves to such a major event so close to the soft launch date. The pressure and amount of compromise we endured were significant and took its toll on the team, the developers and the results online. In the future, we will give the development process the time it needs in order to produce the results we all want to see and not try to force it before being ready. This is why we are now finding it necessary to ‘clean up’ certain design choices made under intense time pressure of the initial site revamp project.

As previously mentioned, we are proud users of the Drupal open source Web platform. Our developers for the revamp project were media (http://www.meidia.ca/?l=en), a Montreal based Web Team. We are also working with Koumbit (http://koumbit.org/en), a community based Web development group and have just began to work with another company Whisky Echo Bravo (http://www.whiskeyechobravo.com/). We have been thrilled to work with all of these companies and, as part of our mandate, seek to grow the knowledge of Drupal development. The source code for our site is available through the Drupal project site and we welcome continued improvements and upgrades by the entire Drupal community.

In this SNCR application we have listed ourselves in the ‘Media’ category. However, this might be a bit misleading. In fact, CitizenShift and Parole citoyenne are produced and funded by The National Film Board of Canada, a government agency and Canada’s public film and new media producer and distributer. However, I did not want to list us in the Government category, as this might seem somewhat inappropriate, even though it is true that are a Govt funded initiative. I was also tempted to put us in the not-for-profit category, as this probably best describes the organic personality of our project, but we are not officially an independent not-for-profit organization. So, in consulting with the SNCR, we decided to apply under the category of media. However, even though we are essentially an independent media project, we certainly do not see ourselves on the same playing field as Time Warner and MSNBC!

All this to say, CitizenShift and Parole citoyenne defy categorization! Both a blessing and a curse in a world that loves fresh innovators who break out of the box, while at the same time constantly looking for labels and pre-determined definitions in order to make sense of the bombardment of new stuff we have thrown at us every day!

Our team is comprised of fantastic individuals, and is our secret weapon and our lifeblood as we all work together to move the projects forward.

On the English side:
Ravida Din, Executive Producer
Reisa Levine, Producer
Colleen Ayoup, Project Coordinator
Denise Hastings, Outreach Officer, Toronto
Lisa G. Nielsen, Outreach Officer, Vancouver
Katie McKay, Outreach Officer, Halifax
Rob Maguire, Technology Coordinator
Dave Ron, Podcast Coordinator

On the French side:
Yves Bisaillon, Executive Producer
Patricia Bergeron, Producer
Frédéric Dubois, Project Leader
Caroline Fournier, Production Coordinator
Daniel Roy, Outreach Officer
Ky-Vy Le Duc, Outreach Officer

These two Web sites are the French and English faces for one project. Although we have two sites and two teams, each reflecting distinct Anglo and Franco communities, we share one site backend and database. As typical within the Canadian multi-cultural landscape, we celebrate our differences but combine forces in order to gain strength and recognition.

It is important to note that although the two teams appear rather large, most people only work part-time. For example, on the English team, we are only two full time staff members (besides for our Exec. Producer, who is our link to the rest of the institution).

The biggest measure of success is to see our new site live online. This is a huge marker for us and we are proud of the results. We are also thrilled to see the amount of user generated content that comes marching in, on a daily basis, completely unsolicited. People obviously appreciate the fact that they can use our sites to find like-minded people and have their works contextualized around the issues, as opposed to a site like YouTube for example, where content is buried and it’s up to each individual to promote their own work.

In the approximately eight months since the new sites have been online, we have over 650 active collaborators (both English and French combined), that is, people who have signed up and are using the site to host their works. We also have over 6,000 members who signed up to receive our regular newsletters.

Site traffic is significantly higher since the new sites have gone online, with an increase of 75% more traffic since the beginning of this year and an average of 2,647 unique visitors per day. So far, since January 2008, we have had 481,092 unique visitors to our two sites with an overall total of 1,006,937 visits.

But perhaps more significant than the metrics, at least as far as the project teams are concerned, are the personal stories of how our sites have helped people and communities. One of many such stories is our experience with the Picture This piece. Picture This was created by the Healthy Generations Family Support Program in Sioux Lookout, a small, somewhat isolated community in northern Ontario. This moving project—originally intended as part of a Photovoice exhibit—addresses the life experiences of parents of children with FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder). What is particularly special about this piece is the way it came together. The women from Sioux Lookout contacted CitizenShift to see if we could help them complete their work. They had all the pieces, but lacked the technical wherewithal to produce a video. We hooked them up with an editor in Montreal and worked together through e-mail and phone correspondence to create the final product, an 18 minute video which is now hosted on CitizenShift. Since then they have had over 6,800 views and umpteen comments on the site, and have been invited to present their video in conferences and schools in Canada, the USA and the UK.

This space does not permit us to list more stories, but we have many. Clearly these sites are deeply appreciated by the people who use them and serve an important role in the community media landscape.

As far as our initial revamp project goes, we can say that it was mainly a great success. Sure, there is still some ongoing work to do, but it is minor and mostly in terms of layout and some usability design improvements. The new site is taking us in directions we had never dreamed of when the project started almost four years ago.

As for the educational modules, we are well underway with the development process for these and are very excited about the work accomplished so far. We are certain that these will boost audience and use of the site and move us more formally into the educational domain.

In terms of monetizing the site, or more accurately, in looking for complementary financial support, we are now well armed with everything we need in order to seek out investors. The next several months will be crucial for us in our search for longer-term sustainability.

CitizenShift and Parole citoyenne are important projects and we all feel strongly that the sites have to continue to grow and thrive. This is why we are constantly jigging our roles, strategies and continue to define ourselves as a creative lab for community media and an incubator for social change.

Division: Nonprofit
Category: Media Creation
Organization: Canadian Centre for Architecture

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) (http://www.cca.qc.ca/) was founded in 1979 as a new form of cultural institution to build public awareness of the role of architecture in society, promote scholarly research in the field, and stimulate innovation in design practice. Based on its extensive collections, the CCA is a leading voice in advancing knowledge, promoting public understanding, and widening thought and debate on the art of architecture, its history, theory, practice, and role in society today.

The CCA offers a range of lectures and events alongside its exhibitions and research activities that address issues in architecture, design, and the built environment. While situated in Montreal, Canada, the CCA has an international collection, program, and audience. A primary institutional challenge is to make both recent and archival audio and video recordings of programs featuring international architects, curators, researchers, and others accessible to existing and new audiences beyond the region.

In order to fulfill the CCA mandate of making architecture a public concern and to serve as a resource for individuals engaged with contemporary urban and architectural issues, communication tools need to be developed to reach the largest possible target audience. Developing a strong online footprint was established as a strategic priority in 2007-2008. In addition to launching a series of Podcasts on iTunes, key initial aspects of this initiative include the development of dedicated websites for special CCA exhibitions hosted on independent URL domains (see the Webby Award-nominated www.sorryoutofgas.org and www.someideasonliving.org), the establishing of profile pages on social networking and sharing sites such as Facebook and YouTube, and the development of a new, content-rich, interactive website scheduled for launch in December 2008.

Initiating a series of Podcasts was a way to place CCA materials in an independent context – outside of its main website and easily accessible to users initially unfamiliar with the institution and its programming. Among familiar and new users, the specific podcasts serve to strengthen the image of the CCA as an institution engaged with contemporary issues in the field of architecture and urban planning, and to define its brand through a continued association with the specific lecturers and the issues they presented.

The lectures and symposia held at the CCA have a limited audience of 200 physical attendees in its theatre. While many programs are filled to this capacity, others are of such specialization that a smaller audience is present. The Podcasts allow the same content to be seen by an exponentially larger audience over time. By releasing the content in advance of the redeveloped website, the Podcasts also provide a clearly demonstrable measure of the potential online interest in past and current program content, and can indicate areas of particular resonance.

The CCA is both a research centre and a museum, serving a specialized international public of students, academics, and professionals in architecture and its related fields alongside the general museum-visiting public.

One way of accomplishing the institutional goal of supporting and encouraging research is to make resources available online and free of charge to its dispersed audiences. For the CCA’s online activities, the three primary audience groups were identified as target and desired users. The General Cultural Audience includes tourists, arts enthusiasts, families, and general interest students. These are mainly served online in ways that inform of the CCA’s activities and instigate and help prepare an actual visit to museum. The Professional Audience includes architects, designers, artists, university students and faculty, while the Scholarly Audience consists of researchers, post-graduate students and curators, among others. While the physical visit and consultation (of library material and collection objects) is central to their work, these audiences need to be better served online through improved collection search tools and media-rich resources presenting program archives, curatorial content, and research documentation.

CCA visitor surveys and targeted interviews regarding online behavior have shown the Professional and Scholarly Audiences to be web-savvy and particularly interested in accessing materials through a range of online resources both on the main website and through outside platforms such as iTunes. An institutional initiative focuses on increasing access to digital materials in order to better serve this primary audience group. Podcasts and the iTunes platform are popular resources used by CCA target audiences.

CCA programs are offered in both French and English, reflecting the regional and national audience in Quebec and Canada and reaching more diverse international audiences.

To increase the CCA presence online in order to improve access to its research, collection, exhibitions, and educational activities while increasing awareness of the CCA’s role locally and internationally. In its mix of online activities, the CCA developed Podcasts specifically as a key method to increasing its audience and strengthen the CCA’s relevance among them through rich, varied, and frequently updated online content.

The plan has been to create a series of Podcasts based on the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s diverse program of exhibitions, lectures, and conferences. This has allowed us to render accessible a mix of recent and archival content that finds new relevance today for an international audience.

A curatorial process involved the selection of past events to highlight the diversity of the program history and creating a vibrant mix with current programming. The selection strengthens the public image of the institution by featuring the most strategic programs. Staff positions were redefined to include responsibilities related to the creation and production of Podcasts including the review and editing of content, digitization where necessary, and preparation of web-ready files that meet the institutional standards for sound and video quality. A system to quickly process files internally was established to post timely material shortly after its original presentation.

In addition to a balanced curatorial selection of current and relevant archival material, a stable and sustainable rhythm of production and dissemination of podcasts was prepared, allowing for an average of two podcasts per month. A tracking system was established to record the download patterns and create analysis (see attached figures).

Promotion for the podcasts was initially modest, through links from the current CCA website and other online venues such as excerpts posted on YouTube as well as selected references in print. External online links and blog references, supported the word-of-mouth promotion, and high listings, recommendations, and links from related content providers in the iTunes store have led to high user numbers and downloads.

CCA Podcasts debuted with a launch of eight audio podcasts drawn from “Sustainable?,” an international colloquium held in 2007 that brought together architects, engineers, and scholars to explore questions of sustainability in relation to architecture. The choice of content was thus seen as topical and of particular relevance to target audiences.

Following these initial episodes, a selection of past and current programs have been made available as audio and video podcasts. Selections have included recent lecture series, conversations between artists and curators, and architects’ discussions of their work as presented in CCA exhibitions.

Technical difficulties were experienced with the profile creation and initial submission of CCA Podcasts to iTunes, which offers no technical support and limited feedback. The CCA’s Podcast team is extremely small and had no prior experience of creating and disseminating Podcasts, but was able to learn through experimentation and peer support.

The increasing popularity of the Podcasts has created a need to re-evaluate our existing methods for file hosting. We are evaluating alternative solutions that are both cost-effective and appropriate for a museum.

CCA Podcasts are available free of charge through iTunes. A page on the current website was created as a link (http://www.cca.qc.ca/pages/Niveau2.asp?page=podcast&lang=eng)

Selected short video excerpts are created and posted on the CCA’s dedicated page on YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/CCAchannel) as “teasers”.

The Director of Communications and the Web Editor identify recent and past programs as potential content for proposal to the Director. After original material of approved content is transferred to appropriate digital formats where necessary, the Web Editor reviews and assesses the content. The Production Manager then prepares the audio and video files, ensuring optimal broadcast quality. The Podcasts are then reviewed and assessed a second time by the Web Editor before submission to iTunes. Final postings are reviewed online by the Director of Communications.

The number of hits and downloads has steadily increased since the launch of CCA Podcasts. Individual podcasts typically average 1,000 listeners at launch with a steady rate of subsequent downloads. Even the earliest posted files are still active at a rate of 50-100 downloads per month. The presence on iTunes has led to over 28,000 individual downloads of CCA lectures in the first eight months of 2008. On iTunes Canada, the CCA Podcasts icon appears as a “featured” podcast, as well being listed among the “top podcasts” in the Design section, a sub-category of the Arts page. More significantly, since our recent introduction of video episodes, CCA Podcasts are currently featured in the top video podcasts among the larger and more diverse selection of Arts podcasts and often ranks in the top 5-10.

Measurable statistics indicate not only the hits on the CCA iTunes page, but allow for a comparison between those hits and actual downloads – indicating the level of interest. CCA Podcasts are downloaded by more than one of six visitors to the page, a very high rate.

Visible on the CCA’s iTunes page are the other Podcasts to which CCA listeners subscribe. These include some of the most highly regarded publications, radio programs, and organizations in the field (such as KCRW radio, the American Institute of Architects, and Dwell magazine). All of these links indicate listeners aligned with the CCA’s target audience.

In addition to the quantitative statistics and popularity on iTunes, a truly rewarding measure of success has been the unsolicited emails from fans around the world who have taken the time to send us a note to convey their appreciation. They include architecture professors in Spain, museum members in Japan, and others who stay in touch with CCA’s activities.

Through its Podcast initiative CCA has been able demonstrate a viable and large audience for its programs. Individual events attended by 100–200 persons in-house subsequently reach upwards of 1,500 listeners and viewers on iTunes. The continued and increasing popularity indicates a growing audience as more files are posted. This supports the primary objective – both institutional and specific to this project – of increasing access to its resources and developing its international audience specialized in architecture and its related fields. The large number of Podcast subscribers alongside the feedback of individual listeners indicate that the CCA is able to use this content platform to increase awareness of its role and activities in making architecture a public concern.

Division: Nonprofit
Category: Media Creation
Organization: Intercultural Development Research Association

The Intercultural Development Research Association (http://www.idra.org/) is an independent, non-profit organization that advocates the right of every child to a quality education. For more than three decades, IDRA has worked for excellence and equity in education. Across the country, school populations have grown more diverse at dramatic rates. Many teachers realize that they have not been prepared to teach diverse students or those who do not yet speak English. Educators are looking for tools and skills to better serve their students.

IDRA works primarily in the United States to provide professional development, research and evaluation, policy and leadership development, and community and public engagement in education. We provide on-site training and technical assistance to more than 75,000 teachers, students and community-based organizations nationwide each year. The target populations served by these schools and groups are primarily low-income, minority and non-English speaking children. Our assistance covers education topics, such as bilingual education and English as a second language (ESL), desegregation, early childhood education and reading, math and science education, student engagement, equity, school funding, and many more areas.

We have struggled to find ways to supplement these on-site visits as well as to expand our reach beyond the locations our staff are able to travel to. With these issues in mind, IDRA decided to launch a podcast series for public school teachers and administrators. Based on our early research, we knew that, through podcasting, IDRA would be able to provide information quickly to targeted audiences, provide information directly to targeted audiences, make information more understandable and compelling through a verbal means, provide timely information to audience members who do not have time to read our newsletter, expand on information contained the IDRA Newsletter and other communications, build a network of engaged audience members, and promote services.

Thus, we set a goal to produce a podcast series targeted to school teachers and administrators nationally. Each episode would focus on a topic specific to improving public education in the United States. Topics would provide information and perspective on serving diverse students in order to provide them an excellent and equitable education through to graduation.

While podcasts are accessible to individuals of any profession, etc., across the globe, our target audience is teachers and administrators in U.S. public schools.

Primary Target Audiences
• U.S. public school teachers who serve low-income, minority and non-English speaking children.
• U.S. public school and school district administrators who serve low-income, minority and non-English speaking children.

First-level Focus Audience
• Teachers and administrators who participate in IDRA events or training. The podcast episodes will be used in conjunction with training provided by IDRA.
• Teachers and administrators in schools and schools systems served by IDRA. The podcast will help expand the impact of training provided by reaching colleagues of those who participate in training sessions.

Second-level Focus Audience
• Networks of education technical assistance service providers. Several organizations across the country have federal funding, as IDRA does, to provide assistance to schools in certain geographic areas on better serving diverse populations. These providers can disseminate news of the Classnotes podcast through their networks and use the podcast to supplement their work as well.

Third-level Focus Audience
• Teachers and administrators who participate in online networks and blogging. Since many teachers are not yet engaged in social media (some we work with rarely even use e-mail), we are targeting those who are using social media to help us gain footing and promote the podcast, as they often find themselves in the role of encouraging peers to use online collaboration and conversation to enhance their work.
• School and school district technology directors. This group was not a key audience initially, but since they are in a position to train teachers to use technology and integrate it into their instruction, they can also inform teachers about Classnotes and show them how to listen.
• School district public relations staff. District-level public relations officers often produce newsletters for teachers and administrators, which can promote the Classnotes podcast.

Goal: Build leadership among public school teachers and administrators, particularly those who serve low-income and minority students.

Strategy: Deliver professional development services in ways that are accessible to teachers and administrators.

Objectives
• Initiate or supplement IDRA training to teachers and administrators nationally
• Provide information quickly and communicate IDRA’s valuing philosophy (“All children are valuable; none is expendable”)
• Promote IDRA expertise and services (Not a hard sell by any means. Many IDRA services are free to schools.)

Tactic: Produce a podcast series targeted to school teachers and administrators nationally.

Our detailed plan included the following components:

Frequency – Post one podcast episode twice each month

Planned topics and schedule – First three: Racial and Sexual Harassment – A School’s Legal Obligations (early Sept), Using the New High School Allotment in Texas (late Sept), and School holding power (early Oct).

Staff roles – Two staff persons would alternate serving as moderator/interviewers (AMM, BS); Persons to be interviewed include MRM, AV, AMM, BS, AC as well as other experts outside of IDRA; HB would provide technical support; SA would provide web site support; and CG would provide promotional support and supporting web site content.

Equipment needs – Recording equipment, software, feedback mechanisms, web site (details are below)

Sponsoring projects – Expenses would be covered by two federally-funded projects for which we had included podcasting as a deliverable.

Initial out-of-pocket costs – To launch the podcast, costs would include: Feedburner account ($0); Music ($19.95); Digital recorder ($150.00); Consultant contract (for set up work and production of first five episodes) ($2,800.00) = Total ($2,969.95).

Preparation timeline – July: Launch redesigned IDRA web site (mid-July); August: Finalize schedule of topics and interviewers/interviewees (by mid-August), Test recording equipment (by mid-August), Create intro segment with music (by August 25), Begin offline promotion during IDRA trainings and events and mailouts (mid-August), Begin online promotion (late-August), Record and produce first podcast (by last week of August), Post first podcast (September 1); Sept-Nov: Post following podcasts on the first and 15th of each month until the middle of December.

Policy statements and licenses – Copyright, privacy policy, release form, music licenses

Name of the series – Classnotes (named after an earlier IDRA print publication)

Style – Conversational and informative, one person interviewing one to three others

Program length – Average 20 minutes

Program format – 20 sec: Identification with music background, professionally recorded (“You are listening to…” with one brief excerpt of the interviewee); 30 sec: Opening remarks (What this podcast is about, how to comment, IDRA news…); 60 sec: Introductions (identify the topic and interviewee); Tbd: Conduct interview with prepared and spontaneous questions (est 12 minutes); 45 sec: Closing and outro (professionally recorded)

Production process – IDRA staff to record interview, write tags, send to consultant; Consultant to edit audio; IDRA staff to write web site text and post online

Early promotion – Include promotions in existing IDRA publications and produce postcards

Measurement – Feedburner, web site usage data, monitor feedback (details are below)
First, we learned about podcasting through listening to major communications- and public relations-related podcasts, taking webinars and reading related blogs.

Second, we investigated the landscape of existing podcasts related to education and targeting teachers. We found very few that serve our niche.

Third, we conducted a T-chart of the hindering and facilitating forces related to our hosting a podcast series (attached).

IDRA contracted with an expert podcasting consultant to: assist with data collection methods, select and integrate music, set up our iTunes account, establish our series in other directories, edit the audio for each episode and compile show notes.

This enabled IDRA to focus on the content by determining topics and persons to be interviewed, outlining key points to cover, recording the podcasts, compiling resources, writing web site text and promoting the series.

The first episode was launched on September 20, 2006. The initial episodes were monthly. In 2007, the series gained footing and episodes were posted every two weeks as planned. Primarily, we have used staff members as interviewers of other staff who are experts in certain areas of focus. Occasionally, interviews are conducted of people outside the organization, or speeches are used for the podcast.

The series was integrated into the IDRA web site (http://www.idra.org) so that audiences who already are familiar with IDRA would be able to find it easily. Each episode is announced on the IDRA home page and relevant topical pages as well as through IDRA’s main RSS feed. In addition, each episode is loaded into iTunes and is made available through our podcast RSS feed. There is an accompanying web page for each episode that includes show notes and links to resources.

In July of 2007, we set up an automated e-mail alert through Feedburner to notify listeners when a new episode is available. This would be valuable since many listeners do not use iTunes or other RSS services.

Release forms are signed and collected from all non-IDRA staff who are interviewed or whose speech is recorded for the podcast.

It took some trial and error for us to figure out how to work with ID3 tags and how to tweak text for iTunes compared to our web site RSS feed (which we learn doesn’t accept dashes or colons in titles). In late 2006, there weren’t many resources with this kind of information.

Our target audience is made up primarily of late-adopters. Thus, our promotions include a description of what a podcast is and how to listen.

Also, teachers are not sitting at their computers during the day, which is noteworthy since more than half of podcast listeners listen to podcasts from their computers rather than through mp3 players and iPods. However, we also knew that if the content is deemed by first-time listeners to be useful, practical and relevant to them, they are likely to find a way to continue listening. So we have focused our planning of topics on these priorities.

Recording Equipment: Until very recently, the Classnotes podcast has been recorded on an Olympus digital audio recorder. We had not used external microphones or other equipment. But as of August 2008, we began using a mixer, microphones and the ZoomH2 for recording.

Software: We use Audacity (open source) software.

Web Site: The IDRA web site includes a description of each podcast topic, show notes, and links. Standard online elements include: contact information, copyright information, subscription links (and buttons), streaming audio player, list of recent shows, archives, and RSS feed. We set up a unique web site address (within the IDRA web site) for the podcast descriptions and downloads. The web site includes a form for listener feedback. We also set up a separate e-mail address for feedback. Our web site uses the Joomla CMS along with CSS.

Consultant: IDRA contracted with Bryan Person to produce the initial five podcasts, to establish our series on iTunes and other directories, and to assist us with data collection methods. He also recorded a brief introduction and closing. The closing includes details on how listeners can leave feedback. Bryan has continued to do audio editing for each episode.

Music: Music (“The Open Road”) was obtained from Shockwave for use in the opening of each podcast. There is a nominal one-time fee ($20) for the music and license.

iTunes: Bryan set up our iTunes account so that people can search for our series and subscribe through iTunes. We added a button to our web site so that people can subscribe through iTunes with one easy click. Our iTunes page includes our logo and descriptive text.

Data Collection: We set up a feed through Feedburner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/idra. This gives us some subscriber statistics, including source of subscription. In addition, Feedburner provides us with the name and e-mail address of people who have subscribed to the e-mail alert. We do not use these e-mail addresses for any other purpose, but we can tell from the addresses that most are school and school-district generated addresses.

We are also using our own web server data to measure how many people our viewing our podcast-related pages, including the actual podcast audio files. The launch of our new IDRA web site in the summer of 2006 required us to change our method of collecting and reporting web site usage statistics. But in the process, some data has been lost. So the download data provided below is quite conservative.

Episode checklist: We have developed and follow a checklist for planning podcast episodes that includes the show title, key messages to cover and related resources to provide online.
The process we have followed for production, once the topic is determined and the interview is scheduled, is as follows:

• Prepare for interview. Determine key points to be conveyed, using a one-page tool. – CG (30 min)
• Set up equipment – CG (15 min)
• Record interview(s) on the topic. – CG plus interviewer and interviewee(s) (1 hour)
• Post the recording for sending to consultant (The audio files are too large for emailing). – SA (15 min)
• Edit the recording. This includes leveling the sound, recording the intro, adding the quote excerpts, adding the music, and adding the closing. It also includes adjusting sound quality and removing long pauses and ums, etc. Create detailed show notes. – Consultant (5 hours)
• Create web site text: ID3 tags (electronic labels), text for IDRA home page and podcast page, and create resource list. – CG (1 hour)
• Post text online – SA (30 min)
• Post podcast online and add to RSS newsfeed – SA (30 min)

Thus, each episode takes about 10 hours to produce over the course of two weeks (not including the interviewee’s preparation time).

To date, we have used traditional means and online means to promote our new podcast series:

• Using iTunes to enable subscriptions
• Promotions in the IDRA Newsletter
• Notices on the IDRA web site
• Postcards for staff to take to training sessions and meetings and for distribution at community and school-related events
• Promotions and links in our e-mail newsletter, GradforAll, to education advocates
• Registering the podcast on online directories (Podcast Alley, etc.)
• Inclusion in staff e-mail signatures
• Search engine optimization
• Distributing news release to education trade publications
• Distributing news release to education networks
• Monitoring and commenting on related blogs and in response to specific posts

Our goal was to establish our own podcast series. That goal has been met. To date, IDRA has released 39 episodes of the Classnotes Podcast series. With each new episode, our staff members became more accustomed to the informal, conversational nature of podcasting. Since our staff members are experts in their fields and are professional trainers, they are comfortable speaking into a microphone with little coaching for our podcast. We also became better at keeping each episode close to our target length of 20 minutes. Podcasters typically do not see significant audience sizes immediately. We knew this would be particularly the case since our audience is made up of mostly late-adopters. Still, to date, the series has averaged a 138 percent growth in podcast downloads per month.

IDRA is measuring podcast use in the following ways:

Podcast Downloads – There has been a combined total of more than 20,884 downloads of our episodes directly from our web site (and another 1,158 through other sites), with an average of 1,576 per month during the last quarter.

Podcast Subscriptions – IDRA is using the standard online service, Feedburner, that tracks subscriptions to our podcast through web sites other than our own. Feedburner reports look at averages. Our current average is 91 off-site subscriptions.

E-mail Subscriptions – 93 listeners have subscribed to our e-mail alert that lets them know when a new episode is available (established in July 2007). Data about the subscribers indicate they primarily are teachers and other education professionals.

Listener Feedback – We have received numerous positive responses by phone, e-mail and face-to-face contact, including from a former governor who now heads an education organization. Following are examples:

• “Your podcasts and other resources have also proven an excellent way to bring Board members and employees up to speed on the needs of our students.” (e-mail)
• “I have to point you to the recent Classnotes Podcast with Aurelio Montemayor from the Intercultural Development Research Association in San Antonio, Texas… I know that I subscribe to his podcast on iTunes.” (blog post)
• “I am so pleased with your web site. It has tons of information for me and my colleagues. I will disseminate within our 100 plus members. I just heard your podcast on Effective [Parent] Outreach and I will recommend it.” (e-mail)
• “It was a proud few moments to have just listened to the podcast, “A Model for Successful Reading Instruction”… It is a privilege to have such a wonderful partnership with IDRA!” (e-mail)
• “The interview with principal, Sandy Doland, was great! Sandy is a genuine person whose care and concern for students and faculty alike is sincere.” (e-mail)

Page Views – Our podcast web pages have seen a total of 19,099 page views, in addition to 6,461 page views of the RSS page.

Listener Behaviors – Some podcast listeners listen to each episode as it is released once they first discover Classnotes. Often, they will go back and listen to certain past episodes. In other cases, we have listeners who listen to one or two past episodes of direct interest to them or in relation to work we are doing with them. By monitoring the past episodes that are getting attention, we know to expand on those topics in future episodes.

Cost Benefit – If we were to lead a session with the content of one podcast as a keynote in a face-to-face setting in a single location, the cost would be about $5,000. But, the cost for producing each podcast is only $500, and it reaches a wider geographic audience.

Awards – The Classnotes Podcast has received the El Bronce Award (first place) from the Public Relations Society of America, San Antonio Chapter; the Lean Communicator Award from Ragan Communications; and Best of Texas Silver Award (first place) statewide competition by the Texas Public Relations Association.

As our T-chart predicted, podcasting has become a valuable tool in extending the reach for IDRA’s key messages. Because we are dealing with innovation and changes in attitudes, many of these messages are communicated more effectively verbally than they are in print.

Prior to and during specific training sessions, our staff use related episodes as illustration or have participants listen beforehand to prepare for the session. In 2008, we set up a new section of our web site for newsletter readers called, Newsletter Plus. The content provides links to additional information, resources, research, video clips, etc., that are directly related to articles in the newsletter. We have been producing podcast episodes on topics also related to those articles and releasing them at the time the newsletter is mailed as a resource to our readers and others.

Interestingly, a blogger posted a recommendation for her readers to listen to our podcast and particularly an episode on effective parent engagement. The staff member who was interviewed left a thank-you comment on her blog. They have since begun a dialog that has introduced him to her network of readers. As a result, he has begun to use Twitter, started his own blog and built a network in LinkedIn of more than 200 school parent advocates that includes state- and national-level PTA leaders. This is a new development but will undoubtedly expand our use of social media to engage our audiences to work together to create schools that work for all children.

Division: Nonprofit
Category: Media Creation
Organization: PRX

The Public Radio Exchange (PRX) (http://www.prx.org/), is an online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming. PRX is also a growing social network and community of listeners, producers, and stations collaborating to reshape public radio. The Generation PRX project was started in 2004 to support, connect and distribute youth-produced radio. One of the major challenges facing youth radio is the absence of a national and centralized marketplace where produced work can be reviewed, contextualized and made available for distribution.

Since its creation, Generation PRX has become the hub for youth-produced radio. Not only as a place to share, review and broadcast audio, but also as the source to solicit youth radio work for programs, collaborate on projects or share information, news and events. The site is the youth radio movement’s most powerful tool.

We work with youth radio producers, age 16-25, to create audio pieces for a growing public radio audience of 28 million listeners. Led by youth voices and youth leaders, Generation PRX is dedicated to youth radio distribution. We support youth producers and teachers to help listeners discover the next generation of sound. The goal is to get more youth produced radio licensed and aired by public radio stations.

We create an interactive network:

Working with an advisory board of seasoned broadcasters and experienced youth radio producers and leaders, we've created an online space for youth radio groups to share ideas, strategies and materials.

Develop peer feedback to help producers edit and improve work:

Through the online network, trained Youth Editorial Board members and Generation PRX members provide review and feedback to their peers.

Build a catalogue of youth-produced radio:

As young producers upload their pieces, they help build an online catalogue of youth radio, the first anywhere. This storehouse provides a shared and growing body of content accessible to stations, producers and listeners through PRX.

Generate new channels for youth radio distribution:

Generation PRX is advocating for greater broadcast of youth-produced radio and exploring new channels for distribution through PRX partnerships with iTunes, Audible, podcasting and internet streaming.

One of the objectives of the Generation PRX project is to offer mentoring and advice to aspiring radio producers. We moved to ning.org as a host so that we could rate and review radio pieces in their development - as opposed to rating a finished product. This has proved to be immensely valuable to youth groups around the country. It also has helped build a community of support and creativity.

Generation PRX recently moved to www.ning.org so that we could take advantage of the latest social networking collaborative tools. Producers use the main PRX site to create, identify, tag and encode their work for broadcast quality.

Generation PRX is coordinated by Johanna (Jones) Franzel, who holds a Masters in the Arts in Education program (with a focus on media and technology) from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is supported by a Youth Editorial Board (YEB)which is a rotating group of three youth responsible for writing reviews of audio pieces produced by youth (YEB members write reviews of adult pieces too, but their priority is youth-produced audio). YEB members serve for three months, go through practice and training and receive a stipend for their reviews. In addition, Chantel Harley is our podcast host. Youthcast is a bi-weekly collection of youth produced radio works.

Results:
The highest measure of success is to have youth produced radio licensed by public radio stations. Other measures of success include increased activity on the site and subscribers to the podcast.

Over the last five years, there has been a proliferation of youth radio production. Dozens of projects across the country have taken root – at public radio stations, schools, community centers – working with teens to develop radio production skills and youth-focused content. This effort ensures that young people have access to media today and are empowered to create radio tomorrow.

Division: Nonprofit
Category: Media Creation
Organization: Terra-1530

The non-governmental organization Terra-1530 (http://www.terra1530.md/), in operation since June 30, 1999 in Moldova, is an umbrella organization for 18 organizations. Their mission is to create and consolidate the sustainable development capacities of rural communities. One of their main activities is to publish the independent periodical ADEVARUL (Truth) (http://www.terra1530.md/publicatia.htm).

One of the most stringent problems of the Moldovan society at the moment, especially of the rural society, is the absence of access to information or limited access to the public information. While the price of subscriptions to periodicals is very high for the majority of the village people, and the Radio and TV are at the disposal of the power, the population from the rural regions remains uninformed about different fields of general interest. Because of this, rural people may be easily manipulated by those who have the monopoly on the informational market.

The right to information is fundamental, and limiting it, or even enclosing it, is an infraction of the human rights. Even if it is not declared by the official institutions, this is the situation of the absolute majority of the rural localities from Republic of Moldova. But in a society that is not informed, the public authorities can easily camouflage the inactivates or even the anti popular actions in the most cases.

Goal: Assurance, due to some well thought out efforts and having the necessary logistic means, of the multilateral information of all the social levels, inclusive of the vulnerable and marginalized groups. In fact, at the moment, the majority of the village people can be treated from this very perspective.

The information will be effectuated via the following directions/objectives:
- Informing on the actions decided by the Central Public Authorities;
- Informing on the actions decided by the Local Public Authorities;
- Initiating an interactive dialog between the decision factors and the simple citizen, according the priority to those who cannot get into the “Chiefs” offices;
- Informing on the actions that can be undertaken by each rural citizen – to be aware of the fact that to be informed means to be protected.

These groups are:
- The youngsters that are unsure, that are neglected in the labor sphere, and that do not have an immediate perspective;
- Old people that are hopeless who are ready to elect anyone that promises a symbolic rise to the symbolic pension;
- The village intellectuals (professors, engineers, agronomists, doctors, librarians, etc), that lost the respect they once had and now feel isolated and marginalized even by former students;
- Employees from different fields that usually do not know the essence of the decisions of the Superior Instances, even if they totally contradict the interests of this group.

Concrete measures will be undertaken in order to make the citizens of the villages feel their involvement in the actions that will lead to the awareness of the fact that the political, economical, social situation depends on the real participation of each village inhabitant at the respective locality matters.

It is obvious that the village population is not homogeneous, that is why social groups will be identified, target groups with common characters and interests, with similar behavior when it is treated with promises by the powerful leaders, identifying the groups with a certain way of thinking and appreciating the decisions taken by the authorities.

Editing some special supplements to the Adevărul (Truth) publication, the topics of which will be fundamental human rights and freedom. The ways of benefiting these rights will be highlighted; we will assure the public participation at the decision-making process; the third sector strengthening, rural women life, civic education, ethnic and political harmony – all these will be issues for the Adevărul.

The public survey will be undertaken within the community and will have the purpose of:
- Identifying the most important problem of the community members;
- Identifying the causes of these problems;
- finding out if there were attempts to solve the problem and what was the result;
- finding out if the person will be available to be involved in the problem’s solution.

We think that the results of the survey will help in finding out the top community problems, the motives that generated them and also the available percentage of the village people to be involved in the solution process.

Everything will count on actions with persuasive character via meetings in the territory with the members of the target groups or with representatives of these groups; via disseminating in every family the publication Adevărul.

The expected result is, in the first place, to make the people aware that everything is happening and why it is happening depends on most of each citizen of the respective locality.

Surveys will be undertaken and the actions foreseen within the project will be discussed at a round table with the participation of the representatives of the civil society and of the power. The results will be generalized and eventually proposed to be as an example for other communities.