GroupSwim released version 6.1 - Cool beans!

GroupSwim, developer of social software for business, released a version 6.1 of their nifty collaboration and community software suite last week.  The platform just keeps getting better and better.

Intellicore Design Consulting is also a GroupSwim partner.  For those of you who are new to GroupSwim, Gartner selected the developer as one of its Cool Vendors in Social Software for 2009. 

We likey GroupSwim for a lot of collaborative communication reasons and you can read more here.  Add to that list, the following new functionality is:

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Automate & collaborate a la Intellicore Design Consulting

In response to queries about the solution sets offered by Intellicore Design Consulting, I prepared a video to give folks and up close and personal look.  Our solutions focus on on-demand business automation, collaboration, and eCommerce.

The slide below is taken out of the presentation and gives you the quick answer.  The presentation gives you more information, hosted by moi.

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Social CRM solution – The integration of social media with traditional CRM

Social CRM (SCRM), sometimes known as CRM 2.0, goes beyond traditional CRM to incorporate social media into the capture of customer relationship information.

A SCRM tool set is intended to help folks within a company deepen their business relationships collecting actionable intelligence from your social channels to help propel your business.

Examples of social channels can span anything from your own community sites to Facebook to Twitter and beyond.

I prepared the slide presentation below to give you insight into Intellicore Design Consulting’s vision for a SCRM solution (and a copy of the presentation is also available under our Resources section).

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How communication styles impact collaboration

I love my mother but some conversations with her drives me crazy.  She needs to explain everything is in excruciating detail, even when I get it, or she provides me with such a minutia of detail that I lose sight of her point.  She can take 5 minutes what it takes me 15 seconds to convey.

The reason?  She and I have conflicting communication styles that require us to work hard to adjust for each others.

While that’s a personal example, variations in communication styles directly impact in the business world and on the ease of collaboration within a group.

There are four primary styles of communication.  Different folks have variable names for them but I playfully call the styles Airheads, Firebrands, Waterways, and Earthworks. Let’s explore how each style is conveyed and the stylistic impacts on social media and internal collaboration.

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Should you fire clients? – Salesforce insights

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a recent article about the strategic value of firing problematic clients during a recession.

In particular, the best candidates for termination are those who lead to some sort of net negative that lowers profitability.

Makes sense to me – although I’d look at the situation in any economic environment.  The question then is how you determine who those net-neg clients are.  The answer is to balance anecdotal information with hard analytics.

Let me show you how you can use your Salesforce solution to determine a thumbs up or down on a client.

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6 tips to protect your Intellectual Property

Intellicore Design Consulting’s business practice is focused on small- to medium-sized businesses.  Some of our clients and prospects are just moving up the line to having professionally managed IT resources.

Nothing wrong with that.  However, whether you build internal or use external IT resources, you'll want to employ best practices to ensure that you safeguard your intellectual property and facilitate smooth-running IT resources.  Here are 6 tips to help you do so.

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How thinking styles impact team collaboration

Tower Bridge in a fog.Cynthina Heinsohn, my business partner, and I have logged more than 20 years in our business and social relationship.  Yet for all those miles traveled together, we’ve sometimes fail to communicate effectively and our connection became like a bridge in the fog…we knew the connection was there but we needed to let the fog blow away to find it.

The fog didn’t derive from a deficiency in either of our abilities or from a lack of our willingness to collaborate.  Rather, sometimes mishaps occurred because we forgot about the reality of several of differing attributes.

Since we became business partners with Intellicore Design Consulting and now conduct the majority of our joint business via phone, some of our attribute differences are more pronounced, impacting our interpersonal art of collaboration with each other, and we’ve required new collaboration tools to help us ensure we keep our bridge unhampered by fog.

Today, one of the differences I want to discuss are the differences in thinking styles and how these can impact collaboration and communication.  Variations in thinking styles impact everyone so businesses need to pay attention to this attribute to be successful collaborators.

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The art of collaboration

Cynthina Heinsohn, my business partner, and I have known each other for more than 20 years as both business associates and close personal friends.  We’ve worked together in two companies and on a variety of projects -- and we work well together too because our strengths compliment each other.

Cynthina and I teamed up together in Intellicore Design Consulting because we wanted to work together and are both passionate about collaboration.  It’s what’s made our partnership strong over the years.

For all of that, though, we still sometimes stumble in our communications and drive each other bonzo.  It’s funny too, because for a small business, we have collaboration tools up the wazoo…because, hey, one of our raison d'être.

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