Crowdcast: Your Social Business Intelligence

A few weeks ago, I posted a blog regarding Trueinsider.com, which is a site dedicated to improving the workplace by letting employees post comments and suggestions about their employers. Another company I came across that also uses employee inputs as a business model but in a different way is Crowdcast.com, which I found very interesting.

"The company’s name is a combination of the words ‘crowd’ and ‘forecast’, and its self-declared goal is to help companies find out what their people really know about their businesses, in order to make better strategic leadership decisions."

It is a site that uses social media to improve work processes by posing questions to employees, customers, and other business partners. It is designed to be able to forecast the outcome of a product or a project and could be used to improve inefficiencies or organizational challenges at the workplace. It also seeks to make new information readily available.

An example could be a question such as "When does the product launch?" that is posed to different departments involved in the project. The employees are asked to put in their forecast dates. If the project manager finds that all the departments have different rollout dates for the project, he or she can look for the root of the problem to see why there are different timelines and which department does the discrepancy come from.

I think this is another great solution to opening up more dialogue among many departments within a company and with customers that may know more updated information about a product. However, it may end up as information overload for senior management to digest if it is not properly managed. The availability of more information does not always lead to better solutions.

The company already has several prominent customers such EA, Harvard Business School, and Hallmark. They were recently able to raise $6 million in Series A funding.

Here is the link to the article:
http://www.techcrunchit.com/2010/06/10/crowdcast-raises-6-million-for-social-business-intelligence-solutions/