Socialcast

The development of our Socialcast software over the past two years has given us a living, breathing application that’s evolving on a daily basis. As we’ve molded the system to fit our vision, we’ve constantly tried to focus on integrating other web feeds, services, and software that you already use.  We believe that employees have a lot of offer their companies via these outside services. Therefore, we’re pleased to announce the launch of three new services and applications that allow you to work smarter and share information more easily via email, while browsing the web, or from your instant messaging platform.

Update Your Status with Jabber (beta)

Send IM messages to the Jabber Socialcast bot to update your Status or Worklog within your community. Many employees stay logged into Jabber all day, but they don’t do the same with a web browser. This Jabber integration lets you keep your working habits the same while enabling rapid information sharing with a quick IM message. 

The Socialcast Gmail Plugin (beta)

Create a real-time sidebar display of your community’s activity directly inside your Gmail inbox by installing the Gmail plugin for Firefox. You’re going to be checking your emails at some point, but that shouldn’t prevent you from staying on top of new information inside your community. This plugin lets you view and rapidly respond to information without having to abandon those 42 unread messages.

The Socialcast Bookmarklet

This is an old tool that’s made a comeback recently. The Socialcast Bookmarklet makes it easy to share links and update your status from your Favorites tab. Again, we know you simply can’t always be logged into your community, so this provides a quick way to share information with your team at the moment you discover a useful link.

There are definitely more features coming soon, including an Outlook plugin that is on its way. If you have any other ideas for new features, please let us know. And, anyone who is going to Defrag this week – I’d love to meet you, so please feel free to track me down introduce yourself!

In the spirit of the upcoming Presidential elections, we’d like to take a moment to honor our favorite Founding Father of America – the ever-famous, lightning-rod-wielding, bifocal-inventing, freedom-loving Benjamin Franklin. Here, we expound upon one of his most notable quotes, with a few creative liberties taken to make it a bit more relevant for today’s audience.

“In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes and a free Socialcast site for 5 users.”

We all know that neither death nor taxes are very exciting. But a free Socialcast site? Now THAT is pretty cool.

We recently announced that anyone can sign up for a free Socialcast site for up to 5 unique users. It’s not a free trial, and it’s not a short-term gimmick. We believe in Socialcast so much that we’re happily giving you the opportunity to try it out and see if it’s right for your team. Permanently.

So please go ahead – try it out for free. We’re certain that you’ll enjoy it.

It is with great pleasure that I welcome the newest member to our Socialcast Feature Family - file attachments. Now, when you share a new status message, question, or idea, you can attach a supporting file that emphasizes your point. Why is this important? Well, we think that providing evidence and documentation to support a question or idea makes all the difference in the workplace. And, instead of simply accessing information somewhere on your Share drive or via your intranet, you can find and share information now within a specific context. You’ll know where a document came from, why it was developed, and who was responsible for its creation.

An old Marketing guru once told me, “In God I trust - everyone else, bring data.” Now you can use Socialcast to share that data with your colleagues, whether it be artwork mockups, accounting spreadsheets, presentations, or marketing copy.

Your company has its own unique vibe to it – and so should your community. That’s why we just introduced the first set of themes that you can choose from to make your community look and feel the way you want it to. There is something for everybody – from sleek to clean to just plain cute.

Aqua – Think bubblegum, watermelon Nerds, and eyeshadow colors reserved for a girls’ night out in Vegas. This theme exudes fun and excitement to make your online community double as a creative playground.

Ice Blue – It’s the grey skies of Seattle meeting the deep waters of Alaska. Ice blue is subdued and professional – basic enough for your SVP to approve yet just exciting enough for Marketing to like.  Ice Blue is like a hot dog at a baseball game, a golden retriever named Jack, or a yellow highlighter – it just always works.

Ice Cream Social – Did you grow up in a master planned community? Then this theme will rock your world. With two shades of beige and a rich chocolate accent, we’ve brought Everytown USA’s pre-approved paint colors onto the web in a funkier, more useable format. Take that, HOA!

Monochrome – We created this with Dwight Schrute from The Office in mind. Steely grey screams stealth and power. Less color means less distraction from a quest to dominate the office (and then the world). Plus, Monochrome is incognito – your competitors will never suspect your new secret weapon of domination is an online community filled with ideas from superior beings such as yourself.

Vintage – With this theme we celebrate the colors of mom’s plush floral sofa, dad’s best polyester suit, and in general a time when we didn’t spend 80% of our days attached to an electronic gadget.

Default – You too can have the same look and feel as our very own Socialcast community with the Default color scheme. Our creative guys spent a lot of time developing the best theme ever. We tried a bunch of them out and this one made the cut. We use it – you should too! That is, unless you don’t want to copy us. Which is ok too.

Ready to switch it up and try out a new theme? Just go to the admin panel in your community, click on the “customize” button, select one of the six themes, and then hit the “save” button near the bottom of the screen. Change it up as often as you like for a little variety.

So which of the news themes do YOU like? Have an idea for a new theme? Let us know!

“Always be in a publishing mindset. Being in the rhythm of sharing is key.” - Jason Fried & DHH (from a recent live broadcast.)

This statement is huge in my mind. As we were knuckling down and getting Socialcast v3 ready for its debut, I kept thinking, “Oh! This would be awesome to talk about…” and proceed to keep working and forget that something that I thought was so valuable to share.

So from today on I am getting into my “rhythm of sharing” by using one of my favorite features of Socialcast: the worklog. My plan is to post a worklog whenever I am in the middle of something that I want to share and add a little hashtag at the end: #rhythm. Then when I have some time to write, I just search for #rhythm and violá I am in the rhythm of sharing. Super easy since posting worklogs is part of my every-day activities!

Ultimately, every one of us will have a different method, but the most important thing is to actually keep yourself in that publishing mindset and constantly looking for ways to share the things that matter to you and your team. Open it up. Get it out there. I will bet that someone out there could really use that little tip you keep not writing about.

We believe that email can suck the productivity out of business. We believe that every employee can and should make meaningful contributions to your company. We believe that enterprise communication is fundamentally broken. That’s what we’re here to fix.

Today we’re launching the most important, exciting and fundamentally powerful upgrade to our enterprise software that addresses these challenges. We’ve deployed our new Enterprise Social Messaging system that allows teams, entire companies, departments, and workgroups to organize, shape and share information more effectively. Some have called it a “Twitter for the Enterprise,” and we think that’s a pretty great analogy.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out our software to companies big and small. Check back frequently for updates, news, and more – and we invite you to sign up and try out Socialcast for free for 30 days. We are excited to get your feedback so we can continue to develop Socialcast into a tool that helps solve your communication and knowledge sharing challenges.