Pooling knowledge the GroupSwim way

Kathy Herrmann February 10, 2009

Yesterday we announced our new partnership with GroupSwim. Today let’s do a bit of splashing around so you can see why we’re flipping with excitement about their collaboration and community solutions.

The GroupSwim focus is on the B2B and small- to medium-sized market. At present, the feature functionality of its solutions centers on:

Wikis,
Discussions, and
File sharing.

Intellicore Design Consulting is just gearing up our own value-add development around GroupSwim but for right now, let's just look at GroupSwim as a standalone solution...

Social media is about more than marketing

Kathy Herrmann January 23, 2009

I watchlist a variety of blogs and articles about social media because Intellicore Design Consulting is building part of our consulting practice around offering community solutions.

What strikes me is that the focus in mostly on making marketing initiatives for (again mostly) B2C businesses.

And that’s a great way to use social media. However, social media outreach is about so much more than marketing. It’s about forging connections and collaboration.

Community venues like Facebook and MySpace and their corporate equivalents might get most of the press but, in my mind, they’re only one piece of the social media environment – and of the least value to most B2B businesses.

What sort of community and collaboration do most B2B businesses really need? Let’s dish...

Bagging management back-up books in favor of knowledge bases

Kathy Herrmann October 7, 2008

Most times when a marketer like me touts the benefits of a knowledge base, we focus on the customer service benefits. While those are plentiful, today I want to share a story that exposes the internal benefits of having a well-populated knowledge base.

Back in the day, Cynthina Heinsohn, developer extraordinaire, and I worked in an Exxon Exploration Planning group. Among our various semi-regular responsibilities, the Planning group prepared our division management team (the Exxon way) to weather senior executive reviews of our division's operational activity and investment portfolio (and our division budget encompassed $100s of millions).

For each review, our group's preparation involved undertaking a mountain of analysis, generating a plethora of reports, and then building two to three back-up books filled with the results, with each binder book being about about three to four inches thick. And this happened two to three times per year...

Kathy Herrmann

Building better businesses