GeoFluent for Telligent Enables Multilingual Social Communities

Social communities are great for communication, but what if they span several countries and different language zones? Social software provider Telligent is now offering a new integrated translation solution for its products.

Called GeoFluent for Telligent, the software combines Lionbridge Technologies’ software-as-a-service, customized real-time translation technology with Telligent’s enterprise social suite of applications.

IBM Machine Translation Engine

GeoFluent utilizes an IBM-developed machine translation engine with a proprietary Lionbridge customization. In addition to translation solutions, the Waltham, Mass.-based Lionbridge also offers online marketing, global content management and application testing. Dallas-based Telligent provides an enterprise-grade social platform, as well as community applications and social intelligence tools for employee networking, customer-driven support communities and interactive marketing communities.

The companies said one benefit of the solution is that expensive support calls in the country of origin can instead be handled through online forums, blogs and wikis, where information can be obtained regardless of language.

According to Lionbridge, over 90 percent of enterprise content does not reach non-English speaking audiences because of time and cost requirements. GeoFluent allows an organization to create a global online community, instead of separate communities for each language environment. The companies noted that administrative costs can be reduced by combing language-specific forums into one common space, where visitors can read and post in their own language.

All Content, All the Time

Utilizing multilingual support from major search engines, the companies said, such communities can now provide access to all relevant content on an 24 x 7 basis. All public-facing community content, in whatever language, becomes available when a visitor searches in any language.

Telligent Founder and CTO Rob Howard said in a statement that GeoFluent for Telligent “removes geographic and language barriers and ensures that marketing, customer service and key stakeholders are at the forefront of customer engagement.”

Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan noted that “the next growth wave for enterprise social software is global market adoption with local-market relevance.” He added that, by breaking the language barrier in social communities, organizations can increase revenue conversions and expedite time-to-market, as well as boost the quality of customer experience.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Collaboration and Communications on the Intranet

The five fundamental purposes to intranets are: content, communication, collaboration, activity and culture. Each purpose plays a key role in meeting staff and organizational needs and successful intranets maintain a balance between all five.

Intranet teams benefit from having a clear picture of the current focus of their intranets, highlighting areas of strength and weakness. By focusing on improving key areas, intranet teams can transform their intranets into valuable business tools.

This article focuses on two of the five purposes and looks at where intranets are in terms of communication and collaboration. 

 

Communications

Intranets can do much to support communication and collaboration, which are now seen as integral to the success of modern organizations. Over the past few years we have seen intranets evolve in these areas from just providing news on the home page and the odd project collaboration space, to delivering tailored news, giving staff the ability to comment on, like or add to news articles, and promoting the use of social and other collaborative tools.

In Step Two’s annual Intranet Innovation Awards we have seen improvements in these areas including innovative use of team-based collaboration tools, knowledge-sharing initiatives, integration of other communication channels and uses of technologies such as blogs and wikis.

Intranet Communications Tailored to User Needs

The intranet has a clear role to play as a corporate communication channel, one that reaches most staff across the organization.

On most intranets, this consists of one or more news boxes on the home page, publishing regular items of organization-wide interest. While the intranet’s role as a communications channel is well recognized, it only delivers on this objective when the site is being regularly used, and news alone isn’t enough to draw staff to the site.

We are now seeing a move to tailoring communications to the needs of the audience with home page news including corporate messages as well as departmental, local or role-specific messages. As the intranet delivers greater business value within organizations, we see more effective use of intranet news.

Microblogging and the use of activity streams within the enterprise were prevalent among this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries. While this is becoming standard in many intranets, success is not as common. 

Collaboration

Historically, there has been little corporate recognition of collaboration, and teams and business units were left with just email and shared network folders. Intranets acted solely as publishing and news platforms, providing access to corporate documents but not directly supporting collaboration.

The changing organizational landscape has made collaboration an imperative, to support knowledge sharing, enhance service delivery and improve competitiveness. In this year’s Intranet Innovation Award entries, we saw the continuation of the key theme that intranets were becoming increasingly "social" and more informal.

We also predicted that they would start to add more business value and this appears to be correct this year too. However, there is some way to go before social tools are truly integrated into core processes and workflow.

Social Tools Positioned Around how People Work

We are starting to see the use of social tools being positioned much more around how people work, than the value of the tools themselves. In this year’s awards, both Stockland and Coca-Cola Enterprises delivered new iterations of their intranets that integrated social tools into their homepages.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Building a Social Media Team: The Community Manager

Social Media has evolved from its beginnings as a recreational pastime into a tool for communication, social activism — and of course, business. While even the most conservative organizations are incorporating social components into their operations and strategy, many continue to struggle with exactly how to get started. An almost infinite number of consultants, books and articles offer guidance on strategy, but many fail to answer a key question: who will actually do the work? In the first installment in our six-part series, we take a look at building a social media team.

First Things First

Organizations of all sizes and types are embracing social media. But just as there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, social media goals vary as well — by business type, budget, philosophy and industry. Some view social as a marketing channel to reach new customers; others leverage it more for customer service purposes. Still others only participate as a defensive mechanism to avoid reputation damage. Before building a team, it is critical to have a social strategy. 

This guidance isn’t limited to social media. But given the age of social and urgency of social initiatives in many businesses, some leaders choose to believe social media teams can figure everything out along the way.

They won’t.

Throwing people together and assuming they will find a common goal — one that will be compatible with the company's business strategy — is a recipe for disaster. In extreme cases, it can lead to a very public and expensive disaster.

This doesn’t mean every organization must engage in endless strategy discussions. Small businesses may be able to define goals in a meeting or two. After establishing a strategy, prioritize goals and needs before moving forward. Identifying goals will help provide direction and clarify the scope of activities the team might perform such as:

• Listening and following up
• Content creation
• Monitoring and analytics
• Setting internal social media policy

In addition to the strategy, it is important to have strong, engaged leadership (somebody had to set those goals, right?). The leadership function could be described as a team role, however, that person (or leaders' group) is often external to the team performing day to day activities. The leader is typically responsible for getting buy-in with other executives, and becomes the “face” of the initiative to encourage adoption (and the intersection of social with other corporate programs). Although we don’t explore the leadership role, it is very critical for ensuring the long-term success of social efforts.

The Community Manager

The Altimeter Group conducted a survey of 144 social business program managers at corporations with more than 1,000 employees. The firm used the data from this survey and a few other studies to create the report, "Social Business Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally" detailing the ways in which companies prepare to engage in social media. The guidance was helpful, but not all companies are enterprise class, nor do all organizations want to engage — at least initially — in activities as comprehensive as those described by the firm.

There are a few roles which we will explore in the series, that are essential for any social effort. Keep in mind that these are roles, not positions. It is possible for a single individual to serve multiple roles as long as the individual is able to address all of the responsibilities.

The first role organizations should consider establishing is the external liaison — or as it’s more commonly known, the Community Manager. This person performs a vital function — even for companies not attempting to create throngs of enamored fans on social networks — because social inherently requires interacting with the public. The community manager is the point of contact between the organization and the public. Before social media, this role might have been handled by corporate communications. But it has become clear that traditional corporate communications strategies aren’t adequate in an environment where 140-characters can travel the world — and handicap a business — in seconds.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com