Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with Chad Bockius, VP of Marketing and Product Strategy for Socialware. Socialware is a young company with an innovative approach for companies that realize they need to engage in social media, but don’t want to relinquish all control over the process.
When you work in technology PR, one of your jobs is to be on the look-out for new applications and services that can help your clients conduct business more efficiently. This applies to services you provide directly, and those that you don’t. Since Strategic works in the b2b and b2g markets, we have a number of clients who know they need to take advantage of social media but who also have corporate policies and regulatory requirements they don’t know how to address. They realize that enabling rather than prohibiting social media participation will result in better productivity and staff morale, but they have very legitimate concerns about how to proceed.
Socialware is a SaaS-based cloud service that inserts itself between the social network and the end user, allowing the enterprise a very granular level of control. Their Compass product is designed for larger enterprises, and currently can be used with the socmed “big three” – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Companies gain varying degrees of access control, moderation and analytics so they fully understand what’s going on and where from a centralized dashboard.
Socialware’s Synch product is more tailored to SMBs, and more focused on data archiving than access control. This makes so much sense for me, since I’ve had clients who were involved in email archiving and related legal and regulatory issues like e-discovery. It’s only a matter of time before correspondence on social media networks falls under the same regulatory umbrella as other electronic communications, and Socialware is an early mover.
Based on our conversation it sounds as if Socialware is on a good path. According to Chad Compass and Synch will soon be able to work with YouTube and blog feeds, and he is negotiating OEM deals with existing archiving vendors — think companies like Iron Mountain and Symantec. Socialware got a nice mention in this Gartner Cool Vendor report just out last week. Chad also writes a nice blog, which I can sure appreciate!
I know I’ve got clients who need this — what about your company?
