Kathyrn and I worked together at IBM  back in the last recession and boom period (it was good times at IBM – the boom bust moved a lot of customers to tried and true and we were busy!) 

She is just loving working at Jive and I can see why – its a small company with under 200 employees and servicing companies around the world with their social collaboration n’ community software platform.   Its very leading edge – god how exciting.   

I noticed that Jive just renamed their 3.0 Clearspace release to social business software or SBS for short.   Jive is tailoring the solution on four major uses (or targets) for the software  - support, marketing, employee based collaboration and innovation.   It had added some improvements in social bookmarking.

I love social bookmarking within a global organization because it can make a company small again.  By using tagging, employees re-categorizing information they find important in terms that they use.  Eventually, like minded employees can find each other based on similar bookmarks and tagging.  Wouldn’t it be great if the social bookmarking includes not only web based bookmarks but all uploaded files, presentations too? (possible if on a wiki with a unique address).

I’ve signed up to be a Jive partner – and will be exploring their offering a little more closely.

I love talking to that man – he is delicious for the brain and I always leave our conversations excited,  motivated and with a paper full of books to read, people to meet and ideas to ponder.

I spoke to Rick at length about the use of social medias to allow consumer or customer created innovation – an area that I am deeply interested in.  Rick has great ideas here since he is well versed in finding hidden consumer or employee insights among large fortune 500 organizations.   I just want to get involved in facilitating crowd wisdom using new social community softwares.  I know of igloosoftware.  Rick encouraged me to look at Jive.

A look at Jive finds the coolest ad video that I’ve seen in a long time.

How I know Rick – we did an extensive research project together for the Canadian Marketing Association funded by IBM (where I worked at the time).  Our research looked at how Canadian marketers were defining brand (brand=customer experience) and what the best approaches were for managing and measuring brands based on this new definition.   A wonderful project that had Rick conducting round, kitchen table discussions with leading marketers as well as a jaunt around Toronto interviewing C-level executives.  The report is available for purchase on the CMA website.