Back on this whole blogging thing after a whole bunch of slacking caused by just a little too much travel. This week’s travel is just the beginning of my Spring Tour which will take me to Chicago this weekend, Boston, Dallas, Calgary, New Orleans, Scottsdale, and Detroit. Trust me this will change and grow, but that’s only the parts I know of between now and June 11, I have a couple of 2 or 3 day holes to fill in still and they WILL. I can only hope that these future trips bring as much rewarding feedback and opportunity as the last 2 trips have to Austin.
Austin has been a whirlwind set of activities over the past two weeks, caught up with folks I haven’t seen in a while and was able to meet a person that I was hoping to meet a long time ago, Michael Wilson, CEO of Small World Labs. I spent some time last night getting the opportunity to better understand where they from a product perspective and was clearly impressed with thier strategic take on Social Networking. Social network technologies are what they are, but the easy to identify differentiation of SML is their understanding of how to effectively plan and implement thriving communities via their expertise and customer engagement processes leveraged for every implementation.
The team’s passion and understanding isn’t contained to Michael, but everyone I’ve had the opportunity to interact with at Small World. Even the newest guy I’ve met, Sam Eder, is emblematic of the folks at SML -he is this high energy creative believer of the good things the team can do for organizations to improve customer relations, drive loyalty and increase companies revenues.
There is good reason for the energy and optimism they have a stable of easily recognizable customer logos and a fairly recently announced funding round to drive out their strategy.
Based on the organization I’ve worked with, it is clear that the success of a community is less about implementing a technology platform but a more a partnership with a vendor which develops a strategy for enablement and community engagement. Unequivocally these guys are positioned to continue to lead the market for social networking platforms, so if you are looking for a social media platform to develop an engaging community you have to put them on the shortlist.
That’s more or less all I got to say about that – on to SOBCon and Chicago where I will finally meet this Brogan cat…. I think.
