Weekly Feature Recap – Socialcast updates for 8/5/09 (the "We're still free" edition)
The Socialcast office has been abuzz with lots of new feature development this week. Both of our recent major updates began with a dialogue about customer needs several months ago. We’re pleased to have been able to understand the business challenges our customers faced to be able to create Socialcast features that would help alleviate them.
What’s New
Broadcast Message Feature: As we announced last week, this new feature allows company leadership to send time-sensitive and critical information to the community immediately. Broadcast Messages appear highlighted in the live stream and are accompanied by an email alert with the URL to send members directly to the message.
According to Marcia Connor and Bill Ives from Pistachio Consulting, “This feature can provide a greater sense of community within the enterprise as all levels of the organization can now respond to breaking broadcasted news through a channel that provides greater collaboration than email.” Read their full blog post about this feature’s implications for enterprise microblogging here.
What You Requested
List View: We recognize that some messages can dominate a stream’s real estate with comments. Therefore, this new viewing option condenses the information if desired, allowing you to grab a high level overview of conversations without all of the comments. More details can be found on our blog post about this view.
Did You Know:
Did you know that the on-demand version of Socialcast is completely free to use and administer for unlimited users? Other vendors are charging $3 per user, per month for features such as exporting your messages, adding non-employees to the network, and creating a custom usage policy. These are free services with Socialcast. Try us out and see what you think!
- Socialcast Interface Update: List and Expanded Views Now Available
- By Carrie on Aug 4, 2009
- Twitter integration on temporary hiaitus
- By Carrie on Aug 6, 2009
This freemium mode that you guys have is incredible. I believe we are going to the paid version soon as we work through getting it going internally. I really hope that this free edition upperhand pays off for you guys in the long run. Well done!
As you know, Carrie, we are using Socialcast for the 2.0 Adoption Council. I love the new broadcast feature. In addition to the obvious benefits for broadcasting something important, it has additional benefits. It jogs all members to check out Council news and discussions if they’ve been wrapped up in their day jobs. The members like it too (and you would expect them to have the opposite reaction to an email alert!).