Blogs and social networks and wikis, oh my!

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dynamics for collaboration."

That seems to be the case at JM Family Enterprises, a Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based Toyota automobile distributor that is the 15th-largest privately held company in America. Its 125 dealerships use a hosted version of Socialtext's enterprise wiki to collaborate on projects. "We're moving communication from the current point-to-point of e-mail to the new hub-and-spoke model via wiki," Mayfield says.

Indeed, sales and marketing is a natural fit for wikis. Tech PR firm Eastwick Communications is using a Socialtext wiki to coordinate its public relations efforts on behalf of San Jose, Calif.-based mobile enterprise software maker Intellisync with its client's British, German and Italian agencies. Rather than trying to deal with a nine-hour time difference, different accents and busy schedules, Eastwick established a group wiki to collaborate on press releases, pitch ideas and coordinate major announcements. "Now there's not as much back and forth as there was with e-mail," says Giovanni Rodriguez, an executive vice president at Eastwick.

Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, the original co-founders of Internet search engine pioneer Excite and now the co-founders of San Francisco-based JotSpot, hope to upend the customer relationship management software market by taking a different approach to building enterprise-class wikis. Armed with $5.2 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture firms Mayfield and Redpoint Ventures, the two repeat entrepreneurs are building software so that other developers, companies and entrepreneurs can use wikis to develop customized enterprise applications. JotSpot has already developed 25 easy-to-deploy applications for customer relationship management, blogging and project management. "We are not going to be better than Salesforce.com or Siebel at CRM, but I would argue that most people don't need heavy-duty CRM," Kraus says. "They need lightweight applications."

Another major advantage to the wiki, Kraus adds, is that each company can easily customize the applications to their own needs using nothing more than HTML code. He notes that currently companies either buy expensive and complicated software or customize their own applications using Microsoft Excel macros. Records kept by corporate dealmaking departments, for example, would probably entail building a structured list in Excel detailing such things as the name of their business partner, the key contact there and the stage of the relationship, he explains. That's fine until the corporate development department chief sends that spreadsheet to the rest of the department and updates are made, resulting in no one knowing who has the most updated version.

And if an executive wanted to import specific e-mail conversations with a key contact or attach a document related to a potential deal they were working on to the spreadsheet, he wouldn't be able to do that in Excel. The application JotSpot is testing now with a few unnamed companies allows companies to keep track of their deals and provide additional functionality such as allowing companies to automatically update their data, attach documents to the list, view the data in a calendar format or get real-time news from the Web about each corporate relationship on the list.

Geoff Yang, a partner at Menlo Park, Calif.-based Redpoint, recalls looking at wiki technology and recognizing a large opportunity to bring it to the corporate market. "The prospect of using a base technology that had been used in the Internet community to develop applications in the open-source world and applying it to an industrial-strength enterprise platform was attractive," says Yang, who has previously backed Internet search engines Excite and Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves.

Sidling up to social networking
Social networks are apt to provide companies with even more fertile ground to improve productivity. Take corporate security. San Francisco-based Cloudmark makes security software that determines what messages should be classified as spam by allowing the users of the software to vote. "By having millions of people vote it can solve a problem," Ignition's Tobias says.

Or consider advertising. Avenue A/Razorfish, the interactive agency business of Seattle-based aQuantive, has initiated a test system, called Peers, in which each employee can set up a personal page with personal and professional interests that can be linked to a blog and that shows what they are working on, allowing other employees to review and critique their projects.

Tracy Cohen, a senior content strategist for Avenue A/Razorfish, says the Peers program helped the company better serve a client in the publishing industry that was having trouble integrating its multiple media properties into one Web site. Cohen says that for now the Peers program is just for

[chasen51]

Social networking, a great tool.

Hello,
I am a member of a new and small social network called NetQuesta.com and I have to say that it really is a great way of keeping in touch with friends and family. I recently moved from my home state of Michigan out to Arizona and a good friend made this site so we could keep in touch. Its probably one of the best things for me right now as I dont know many people out here. I really think that this is a wave of the future as more and more people move away for jobs and such. I guess as long as the sites stay clean and keep the rif raff out, they can really be a great tool. NetQuesta.com has become that tool for me and it brings that little piece of home to me that I miss.