First, a quick disclosure: Socialcast has kindly sponsored our Inbound Marketing Summit events. If you have attended our events, you know that I only pick sponsors that have a product or service I like. That said, this is in no way a paid endorsement. I just like the software. So there, let’s talk about Socialcast.
To get you up to speed, Socialcast is software that acts as a private twitter (more accurately, a private FriendFeed). It’s built for internal collaboration and communication. It lets you send messages to multiple people in a group wit a one-to-many kind of method. Messages can be text, an image, a link, or a file. It’s web-based, serves up to 10 users for free, and then has pricing for over 10 users. It’s pretty cost effective, judging by what I saw (and my guess is Tim Young, founder and CEO, would work with you, if you had a huge order).
We’re using it here at New Marketing Labs. We’re using it for an internal presence stream. This bounces between client-specific conversations, to issues of our time and availability. Here’s an example:
So, what’s cool is that we can tag things inline with hashtags (you know, like #hashtag), and it translates to searchable tags. We can edit our posts. We can add details into a “details” area per post so that it lets us stay slim, but go fat. We can upload files and append/update posts, too.
It doesn’t have an iPhone app, but it does have a very nicely formatted website designed for iPhone (so, if you’re not too nitpicky, it has an iPhone user experience). I’ve used it on my iPhone and it works great.
Probably the most popular competitive product would be Yammer, and we haven’t set up an evaluation for that product yet. We will over the next few weeks (and I’ve heard good things about Yammer, too). But so far, we’re digging Socialcast.
How We’re Using Socialcast
What we’re finding about Socialcast as a team tool is that it allows for a better snapshot of how the day is going, a better way to call out how projects are going, a useful method to call out what’s on our plates, and a much better way to gauge the flow of office experiences than email.
We’re using it for collaboration, for simple q&a, for talking about what’s upcoming. I’m happy so far. Of course, we’ll need to test a bit longer to see how it holds up over a few months, but if you’re looking for an interesting internal collaboration tool, this is a pretty neat, lightweight product to consider.
Have you tried Socialcast? Are you considering which tool to use for internal collaboration? This might be the right fit.
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