• 10:90 A few employees love it – the majority doesn’t care
• The existence of more closed sites than areas of open communication
• Complete lack of management contributions
• (“welcome to our social _____” posts do not count)
• Social software is just an additional tool added to the stack
• Employees are using social software for work – but on the internet

Far from being just a passing phase – as some predicted – social collaboration tools are helping businesses around the world unlock unprecedented levels of productivity and profit. According to The Social Business: Advent of a New Age study published by IBM, 57% of CIOs whose companies have invested in social media tools outperform their peers. The study also revealed that 55% of companies reported social networking played a significant role in the growth of their business.

SharePoint 2013’s social tools are a great start for companies who are ready to begin their social journey. In our experience this technology represents a much safer, more scalable option than free social collaboration tools like Jive and Yammer (incidentally now Microsoft owned), as it allows for greater integration with other systems, whilst providing a higher level of governance and control. Plenty of companies come to us reporting that their workforce are readily engaging through one of these free sites, having never stopped to consider lack of governance and security as an issue. In the case of one client, ex-staff members who were now working for the competition were still very much engaged in their old communities six months after leaving the business. We can only imagine how much IP and strategy walked out the door during this time!

In most cases, the free cloud based social platforms mentioned are not subjected to the internal de-provisioning processes which traditionally ensures ex-staff members can no longer access valuable information. As the aforementioned studies have shown, staff are happy to use social tools to collaborate with their colleagues – but the same rigor and security should be applied as with any other business application.

Through SharePoint 2013 you can promote an even higher level of collaboration safely within the confines of your own environment. More than this, conversations can be categorised using hash tags and keywords, which can then be easily searched for at a later date. This information can then form the basis of a powerful knowledge database for the future.

Consider all the IP that has traditionally sat within an employee’s email account. Insights, work arounds, problems solved, ‘how to’ conversations – valuable knowledge that dies with the end of an email thread and gets filed away out of your reach. Now imagine all of that knowledge been safely recorded within your SharePoint environment, available to your entire workforce at the click of a button.

From a user’s perspective, SharePoint 2013 also begins to understand what information they want. They can follow people, sites, content and conversation and receive activity feeds each and every day – and the best part is, they already know how to use this technology. Social media is more than just familiar, it’s how they want to receive information.

PartnerPulse has now been live for a couple of months. Things are slowly ramping up, partner numbers are increasing every day, and our marketing plans are gaining momentum. So far so good! Then it struck us the other day, we’ve never actually done a post explaining exactly what we are trying to do. How are we helping Microsoft partners, and those trying to find them?

Who is the site aimed at?

We have identified two audiences that would benefit from PartnerPulse:

1. People trying to find Microsoft partners to work with

These people probably work in the IT or marketing departments of their companies. They have been tasked with finding a Microsoft partner by their employers. They might want a new SharePoint Intranet, a new Dynamics system, or some Windows hosting. They are looking for a trusted Microsoft partner to work with. They might already know a few, but are keen to look at the wider market.

To these people PartnerPulse is a search tool, possibly even a simple directory that they visit from time to time. It is a way to quickly find a company nearby. Once they have located a company, they can find out all about them and even get in touch through the site.

We have worked hard to make PartnerPulse easy to use. That’s why we have a big search box on the homepage, and a really easy way to enter a location (just type!). Search results are presented on a map, so it is nice and clear where partners are. Read more about our search tool here. 

2. Microsoft Partners themselves

Our second audience is of course Microsoft partners themselves. We see PartnerPulse as a platform that they can use to promote themselves to the wider world. This ‘wider world’ includes our visitors, but we are increasingly seeing some really impressive SEO benefits for partners. A good profile improves our partners presence in Google, which is good for their wider brand recognition.

Partners on the site have a wealth of tools available to them, and we are constantly working hard to improve profiles.

Benefits for partners

So exactly what do partners get when they create a profile on PartnerPulse? Well ultimately we hope contact from potential clients, new business, and eventually sales. We are trying to connect those looking to buy Microsoft enterprise services and products, with companies providing those very things. A good profile is the start of all of this.

Microsoft provides a number of (very good) tools to partners. We touch on the key one – PinPoint – below. And of course there are sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook, and Twitter. But nothing out there is currently doing what we are doing.

Firstly the likes of LinkedIn are not dedicated to Microsoft partners. As our partner numbers increase, and our traffic does likewise, the site becomes a very useful ‘one stop shop’. Being dedicated to Microsoft partners also means we can react quicker and smarter to their unique needs. Need a specific feature? Tell us. If we like it, we will build it. We did this recently with our brand new ‘Product and Services’ pages. More on thosehere.

Secondly none of the existing community/profile sites (and we would include PinPoint in this) offer the rich social experience that we do. Profiles on PartnerPulse make use of rich text, images and embedded videos, blog posts, and twitter feeds. Profiles are dynamic, well designed, and rich in useful information. Although obviously a little of this relies on the partners themselves adding compelling content!

Profiles also feature our unique ‘Pulse’ functionality. This means anyone can post a comment, message, or link, on a partners page. These Pulses (as we like to call them) could be announcements, threaded conversations, or simple updates. It is a way for partners and site visitors to interact. And it is integrated with Twitter! We like it so much we wrote a dedicated post on it here. Check it out.

So partners profiles have lot to offer in their own right. But as we touched on earlier we are also seeing PartnerPulse benefit partners with their SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts. A good profile, one updated regularly with useful relevant content, is exactly what Google is looking for. SEO is a difficult game, but it seems PartnerPulse is a useful tool.

And what does all of this mean for visitors to the site? Well good profiles mean a richer more rewarding experience for those viewing them. This in turn means more visitors to the site, which is good for partners themselves. Everybody wins!

What about PinPoint?

Ah yes, Microsoft PinPoint. This is the Redmond giants own tool, to help people find Microsoft partners. Many people have asked us since we launched “How are you different to PinPoint?”. Good question, and the simple answer is – “In lots of ways!”. Hopefully by this point in the post you could almost answer that question yourself.

First and foremost we see PartnerPulse as a very interactive, dynamic, and social site. People may well come to the site to find a partner, grab the phone number, and leave. But we hope to foster much more than this. We hope users will review a partners profile, have a look at their blog, watch a video on their services, and post a few Pulses on the page.

PinPoint is aimed at at slightly different audience, and actually seems to be evolving. Microsoft has already launched several ‘marketplaces’ based on the platform (e.g. The Dynamics marketplace) so a kind of ‘store’ certainly seems to be very much Microsofts thinking. With the launch of app stores for Office 2013 and SharePoint, it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to see PinPoint itself morphing into some kind of app store.

We actually think we are a great complement to Microsoft PinPoint. Users may come to us in the first place, treat us as a search tool, a place to talk to or even compare partners. Having found someone of interest they may well head over to PinPoint to purchase an app or service directly. ParterPulse will always be social, never an ‘app store’, so we hope we can work well with PinPoint long into the future.

What are you going to speak about at the Social Business virtual conference Sept 8th?