2020 Social: Because Business is Social

Social Media Is Tailor-Made for SMBs

Posted on 28. Oct, 2009 by Dave in Announcements, How To Guides, Ideas

How three small to medium-sized businesses tapped social networks to connect with customer.

Post continues here.

Gautam Ghosh Has Joined 2020 Social to Build Our Organizational Collaboration Practice

Posted on 22. Oct, 2009 by gaurav in Announcements

I have a big announcement to make: Gautam Ghosh has joined 2020 Social to build the enterprise side of our Social Business Strategy practice. Gautam will join Dave, Upasana and myself in the core 2020 Social consulting team.

2020 Social is presently working with clients to leverage social technologies to achieve five types of strategic business objectives — increase revenue, decrease cost, design better products and processes, enable stronger relationships and increase productivity.

Instead of focusing on specific tools and technologies, we use a structured methodology to tap into the power of the five underlying value systems embedded in social technologies — user generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence.

Finally, we architect effective solutions in the form of community platforms, social applications, social commerce marketplaces, social CRM programs and enterprise collaboration programs.

Gautam will use his organizational development experience to help our clients think about the organizational culture and governance aspects of using social technologies. Specifically, here are the three questions Gautam will be working on –

1. What are the new challenges face by the customer-facing functions in the organization (sales, marketing, product and customer support) when the boundaries between employees, partners and consumers blur? How do organizations respond to these challenges?

activeCollab – Enterprise Collaboration Tool Review

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Abha in Reviews

activeCollab is a project management tool by A51. It’s open source version was launched in 2006 by one of the founding members of A51 (which formally came into existence in 2007). A51 was born with the objective of developing a commercial version of activeCollab and an added option of being able to install the solution at the client’s end.

activeCollab comes in 2 licensing versions, one called Small Biz ($249) and the other Corporate ($499). Both licenses have unlimited number of users and projects and  are perpetual – you pay once and use for life. There are however annual support and upgradation fees. They also offer a 30 day (post purchase) refund policy. Corporate version adds some advanced tools, like better task management, a tool for collaborative writing, calendar, time tracking etc. on top of the Small Biz features.

activeCollab can be customized as per specific requirement as the full source code is provided with purchase of either license.

We found an interesting assortment of roles and permissions that could be granted to users. System rules included options like Administrator, Client Company Manager, Project Manager, Member etc. Project roles could be defined by the administrator which is great as it invests a lot of powerful options in the hands of the Project Manager / Administrator. There is also an added option of creating new system based roles.

Community Platform Review : ELGG

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by karthick in Reviews

In our first series of Community platforms, we are going to dwell deep into the world of platforms (and tools) that give people the power of forming communities and groups. The first part is targeted at open source social platforms. If you are thinking about forming a community and would like to know which platform would suit your interests best, then these series of posts are for you.

Our first community platform – ELGG.
ELGG gets its name from a town in Switzerland and also means Moose in many languages. It (Website) is an open source social engine that helps you build and form your community.  ELGG has been in development since 2004. What does a 5 year old product (latest version being  1.6.1) have to offer us? Quite a lot of features.

Unlike a lot of other platforms, ELGG started off with a vision to integrate the best of Web 2.0 and all popular social media tools integrated into one community platform. While version 1.0 included RSS feeds, forming groups, uploading pictures and avatars a lot has been added since then.  The ease with which one can use ELGG has made it a popular platform and the Education sector has particularly taken a liking to it. Recognising its efforts, Infoworld awarded ELGG its Bossie Award for the best open social networking platform.

Social Media Face of Consumer Companies

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Hardeep Kaur Rai in Reviews

Social Media Face of Consumer Companies
To tie in with our Social Media in India report, this post covers a review of two International consumer-facing companies-Proctor & Gamble and Nestle- functioning within the Indian social media eco-system. Whilst International companies act as benchmarks in introducing and promoting social media in India, this particular analysis provides an interesting example of how to tweak certain social media aspects to suit cultural backgrounds as a gentle push in the right direction.

Proctor & Gamble

We begin with Proctor & Gamble’s Indian presence through its Indian face – Beinggirl.co.in. Beinggirl.co.in is an online community targeting Indian teenage girls, effortlessly blending in social networking with feminine care. In keeping with this theme, one discovers that the site provides expert advice and extensive articles on healthcare and growing up issues which are still traditionally taboo in the Indian society and not talked about openly. Registration is fairly easy and provides easy access to the articles via the user’s profile page. All possible and related questions are listed, with the added element to post questions publicly or privately. The community educates and addresses numerous concerns ranging from puberty and career to depression and relationships and allows members to engage with the content.

Social Media in India report: International automobile company review

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

This is the third post in a series where we will review performance of companies (and brands) using Social media to connect with Indian customers. As mentioned in our methodology post on soon to be published Social Media in India report, we are reviewing top Indian and International companies from the Forbes list for their presence in social media in India.  In the previous posts we had reviewed some of the Indian companies” ( like the Tatas, Airtel, Reliance Communications) presence on Social Media. In this post we will be reviewing the presence of some international automobile companies on the Indian social web.

The Forbes 2009 list features 4 automobile companies in the top 50 having an Indian market presence. They are Toyota (3), Volkswagen (15) , Mitsubishi ( actually the list ranks Mitsubishi UFJ Financial as the 21st company but since the parent company also has an Indian presence in the car & SUV market, we have considered it for this review ) and Honda (39). Out of these, we found Toyota & Mitsubishi doing something interesting specific to Indian consumers.

On Joining 2020 Social

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by Gautam in Announcements

‘Today I joined 20:20 Social, India’s first social business strategy consulting firm\n\nMost people I told this asked me what the heck is a social business strategy consulting firm?

Social business is the new term (or meme, if you will) that is emerging to describe organizations that are leveraging social software and tools to connect with customers and other stakeholders – that’s right folks, bringing the social web into the organization. As I have believed – such tools (call them web 2.0 or whatever) help in facilitating transparency and openness and help achieve the true goals of Organization Development

In my role in 2020 social (follow it on twitter) I would be looking at the enterprise practice – or essentially how organizations can deploy social tools to empower employees, build collaboration, develop knowledge and positively impact business. Yeah, some people call this Enterprise 2.0 too.

It takes me back to the starting point of my career – when I started out looking at organizational processes for Knowledge Managementand then e-learning.

Huddle – Enterprise Collaboration Tool Review

Posted on 08. Oct, 2009 by Abha in Reviews

Ninian Solutions is UK based company in action since 2006 that offers Huddle.net as an online collaboration tool. It offers a network of workspaces supported by a set of simple and secure project management, collaboration and document sharing tools.

Price plans range from free to $200 per month primarily differing on the number of workspaces, storage, web conferencing features and custom banding options. Security, support and conferencing features are bundled alongwith all plans. Huddle.net does not base costs on the number of users. There are unlimited number of users for all plan types which is great. Currently they have a one month free trial but this is a Limited period offering.

Signing up and getting started with Huddle.net is fairly simple. Glad they avoid the unnecessary complications like detailed sign up forms and restrictive passwords. The confirmation mail for activating the account was almost instantaneous and lead us to our new workspace with single click!

At first sight the dashboard seemed a bit intimidating, but on closer inspection we felt it to be well laid out and packed with a lot of useful features.

Social Media in India: Methodology and Scope

Posted on 07. Oct, 2009 by Achintya in Reviews

With the advent of social technologies grabbing marketing spaces, many brands can be seen embracing social media for adding value to themselves. Dell, IBM and Starbucks are some of the best examples of companies having a majority of their marketing efforts directed towards social media. In India you can see Tata, Airtel, Reliance BIG, HT Media, Toyota and many more doing the same. Hence we at 20:20 social thought it would be interesting to see how different companies are performing in social media specifically in the Indian Ecosystem and document it in form of a report.

In this report we want to look at 2 sets of companies; International companies having a separate social media presence specifically for India and Indian Companies again having a social media presence in their parent country; and rank them on the basis of their presence and engagement. This is to ensure that Companies are compared on an equal platform since most of the international companies have been using social technologies for quite some time while many Indian Companies have recently realized their importance. Also as we want this set of companies to be internationally recognized, we have chosen Forbes top 50 International companies having Indian presence and top 50 Indian companies in Forbes 2000 list as our sample space.

5PM – Enterprise Collaboration Tool review

Posted on 05. Oct, 2009 by Abha in Reviews

5PM is a web based project management solution from QG Software, a US based company founded in 2003. It is offered at price plans ranging from $18 – $175 per month, each primarily differing on number of users, storage and projects. There’s a 2 week trial period and also the option of creating customized plans as per specific client requirements.

5PM has a self guiding and friendly interface that is quick to load on screen (no download delays). It has good navigational features and a well defined project workflow. We particularly liked its dual panel layout and projects timeline.

E-mails have been integrated well with tasks in 5PM. This is a useful feature as it brings together 2 of the most important aspects of project related work – mails and the project management tool and thus shows a clear intent by the 5PM team of bringing together everything related to project work onto one common platform!

Visual cues and rollover hints make the tool very usable (especially for new users and team members). It’s easy to navigate and switch between projects, tasks, progress notes and time reporting/tracking. E.g. when adding a progress note you can also specify the time spent on a task, which is good coz most project management tools expect you to specifically go to the time tab then select the project and the respective task and the time spent on the same!