Filed under: enterprise products
More social media is a good thing. We know because our customers say so. But with more comes a key provision: That the information streams include the metadata you need to intelligently select, sort and serve exactly the right content to the right customer, at the right time.
That’s why this week we’ve increased the number of publishing platforms available through Moreover’s UGC Metabase to more than double what it was before. The top 50 of these show up in our ‘White List’ – a spam free index of the web’s top blogs and social media:
Moreover Metabase customers receive the platform information as metadata in their XML feeds of the links and posts we send them, to help organise the universe of content.
And we’ve added country categorisation, so we can list bloggers and other social web-alites by nationality, for example, these are UK bloggers, these are Canadian, etc:
A case of more media and deeper data to drown the noise and serve the signals, or to that effect!
June 19, 2009
In pursuit of providing tools for sharing news and blogs across the organisation, we’re pleased to announce we’ve just released our new newsletter feature in Newsdesk. With newsletter you can create professional looking news emails for sending out across your company, teams and colleagues. You can set up scheduled newsletters to automatically email out the latest news and blogs, or you can send them by hand with your own inline editorial commentary and notes.
It uses a standard Web email interface like you get with Hotmail or Gmail. Combined with Newsdesk’s news and social media search it creates a compelling and powerful tool, easy to use and with an eye on removing the “manual” out of “manually intensive process”, as one customer described their current newsletter tool.
If you’re a customer reading this please contact your account manager for more details.
newsletter screenshot
March 9, 2009
An interesting piece by Julien Le Nestour from Schlumberger on pricing social applications for the enterprise market. He argues why the usual volume discount approach to sales actually doesn’t reflect the way value is derived by the customer when it comes to social computing products, who, thanks to the network effect, gain value per seat the more employees participate. So the argument goes: price low, or give for free, the first x nr of seats, secure adoption, then increase cost per seat with uptake and as value starts to show. So in a way volume discounting in reverse (what’s that termed then?)
There’s more to it than that, and reasons why life might not quite follow model, but a good article and worth a read.
February 24, 2009
We’re pleased and proud to share a great customer success story with you – we’re pleased because the customer is pleased, and we’re pleased because we can tell you about it. We’ll be even more pleased when we repeat the success at other organisations looking for similar solutions to those of Royal Dutch Shell.
The customer case study is on our website, but it’s printed below in full as well - as you can appreciate this is a pretty good story for us to tell, so please forgive us this slightly vanglorious customer case study post!
Two requirements stood out: the technical capability to deliver and integrate with Shell’s IT environment, plus extensive coverage of international news across the many languages needed by a global corporation. Delivery of service started in the autumn of that year and has progressed in close partnership ever since. In the process Shell has become one of Moreover’s largest customers.
Over time the project has developed and expanded. As part of an intranet re-design, Moreover’s Newsdesk was embedded within the Shell online portal as a key component, providing Shell’s employees with access to real-time news and blogs directly from the intranet – thanks to integration with Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory there are no additional login requirements for users.
In fact, employees on the intranet don’t even realise that they are using an externally provided service. When they click the News tab on the intranet, they go straight through to a Shell-branded version of Newsdesk, where they can search for news, retrieve saved feeds, set up email alerts and read feeds and headlines set up by central office. As part of a custom implementation for Shell, users can also search across internal company content through the portal.
Rossen Roussev, Head of External Intelligence at Shell who has led the project on their side, puts it as follows: “Usage of Moreover’s Newsdesk and its content has been quite phenomenal, with users accessing thousands of articles on a daily basis. The combination of excellent content, easy-to-use interface and full integration with our intranet were key to acceptance with minimal effort required for change management and end-user training.”
The other half of the Moreover-Shell project has been to provide Shell’s marketing and business intelligence teams with a media monitoring service, to help them manage the global tide of online news. For example, Shell uses Moreover to track and respond to news about the company and its subsidiaries, to monitor local operations and political developments, to read up on the industry and other companies and to track developments in technology, science and the environment.
Creating these targeted news channels takes editorial intelligence and expertise. “Having access to so much content at your fingertips requires a careful consideration of the topics and issues we wanted to expose to our readers”, says Rossen. “User’s confidence can be easily lost if you’re tracking a issue critical to Shell and your tailored feed has captured an irrelevant article. Moreover’s Editorial and Customer Services teams have been a major factor in ensuring this was a success and minimising the risk factors of running this in a fully automated manner.”
In the process, Shell was able to target and replace a number of existing media monitoring contracts and consolidate under a single provider. This has produced real, measurable bottom-line impact and has proven the service. Rossen states it clearly: “Utilising Moreover’s Newsdesk, we’ve been able to stop and consolidate a number of contracts with external agencies providing media monitoring for us. $4mln saved and another $1mln avoided in a single year – do I need to say more?!”
Today the work continues. Shell’s business requirements provide a great blueprint for the wider market opportunity for this type of service. Their product feedback has been hugely valuable to the product and engineering teams at Moreover. For instance, new features such as the recently introduced analytics, the upcoming newsletter and the improved email alerts service all incorporate feedback from Shell.
The challenges continue too of course, with intranets developing apace, driven forward by Web 2.0 technologies and expectations. Moreover’s long-term design on enterprise services and its commitment to Shell and its many other global clients create an excellent position from which to take advantage of the ever-evolving opportunities in this sector. These are challenging but also hugely exciting times, and Moreover is looking forward to working with Rossen and his team in the years ahead and to sharing future successes with other great companies and teams to come.
To discuss how Moreover can save your organisation money or to find out more about our products and services, please contact the Moreover Sales department on the following details:
February 10, 2009
We’ve added a new user forum to Newsdesk, for clients and users to submit product ideas and vote on the bright sparks put forward by others. The drill is of course for customers to tell us which features matter most and to help us organise and prioritise our product development schedule.
It’s using Uservoice for out-of-the-box foruming - thanks for making life easy! I recall some years ago we invented our own internal bugtracking tool (sorry, I mean ‘featuretracker’) – pan forward, and it’s nice to enjoy a real-life example of technology helping us work smarter, without actually having to divert and build it. Feels like progress…
Here’s a screenshot of said forum. Click it to link to our Free Feeds forum – same setup again but for the free feeds portion on our website instead of Newsdesk.
January 21, 2009
A note to our French customers and others interested – the UGC Metabase was updated overnight with approx. 15,000 French language blogs from blogging platform Canal Blog. Bon.
January 15, 2009
Last Thursday we added <generator> and <publishingPlatform> tags to the UGC Metabase XML. It lets us list out feeds by blogging platform, and help customers organise the data accordingly. The <generator> tag gets the raw generator value from the original RSS, which <publishingPlatform> then consolidates under their common platform name, e.g. Wordpess, Blogger etc.. At the moment we’ve marked out 150 blogging platforms (some pretty obscure ones out there…. ). The top 25 show in the White List:
November 18, 2008
The latest version of Newsdesk is scheduled for release shortly, in the first half of November - the main addition is a new Analytics tab that lets you graph news feeds over a one year period. So we enter the fray of diy media monitoring for the enterprise.
It’s written in flex, so it’s, well, pretty flexy!
newsdesk analytics screenshot
We’re also nearing the release of our new Email Manager, so Newsdesk administrators have full functionality for managing emails and news clippings across the organisation and teams. More on that shortly.
October 29, 2008
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