iConcertina use social bookmarking to tag and share intelligence across continents

Company information

iConcertina Creative is a full service agency providing digital communications and custom web tool solutions to clients the world over. Their teams are based in London, San Fransisco and Sofia.

www.iconcertina.com

Case description

 iConcertina lacked an effective tool to effectively store and share online information among its 30 staff situated across three continents. Adoption of existing social bookmarking tools was poor and disparate and did not offer management the single private solution it desired.

The key objectives for social bookmarking at iConcertina are:

• Consolidate employees’ own use of public social bookmarking services
• Allow staff to continue using del.icio.us for bookmarks they wanted to share outside the organisation
• Store and share references to online intelligence amongst team working across continents and time zones

Enterprise 2.0 solution

 iConcertina evaluated public bookmarking services with group functionality and open source software such as Scuttle before settling on Cogenz as its primary bookmarking system. As a web development company themselves, they felt that the benefits of using an established service outweighed the time and effort they would have to invest in configuring, customising and supporting an internal solution.

Results / Benefits

“The benefits of social bookmarking within our company were always known but we lacked a single private solution to harness this within our company. Cogenz has simply, effectively and painlessly achieved this”

• High adoption rates with at least 50% of staff posting bookmarks regularly, with everyone using it for research purposes
• Cogenz has now replaced previous tools such as del.icio.us, email or instant message for sharing links to useful information
• Daily email notifications and RSS feeds are extremely popular and allow passive monitoring of daily posts

Cogenz is now used by development, account management, and sales and marketing teams in the UK, USA and Bulgaria.

Lessons learned

Adoption and usage is greatly improved by encouraging

• Encourage users to set up passive alerts using email and/or RSS
• Use the built-in del.icio.us integration to satisfy early adopters of public social bookmarking
• Ensure everyone installs the browser buttons
• Do not restrict people to business interests only – personal content can often expose social connections

Information about the case

Author

Julia Grinham, Commercial Director,Cogenz.com

julia@cogenz.com

www.cogenz.com

t: +44 (0)20 7193 3225
m: +44 (0)7966 888972

Disclosures

This case study has been fully approved by Hayden Hamlet, Finance Director at iConcertina

iConcertina and Cogenz share an investor - Webface Technology Ventures (www.webface.com)