Social Edge Consulting is a professional services firm that helps businesses, at any stage of their social journey, develop a customized road map to success and growth. Social Edge is a Jive Consulting Partner that not only helps companies implement Jive, but they use Jive’s solutions themselves every day to collaborate and work more aligned as a team. Social Edge’s services range from overseeing full scale Jive implementations to community management.
Social Edge was first established in February of 2012 by its President and CEO, Andrew Kratz, to meet the growing need for social collaboration expertise. Now, Social Edge has more than 250 combined internal and external community implementations under their belt.
We recently had the opportunity to sit down with Andrew to ask him a few questions about how Social Edge Consulting is partnering with Jive and also utilizing Jive’s Interactive Intranet solutions and Customer Engagement communities to impact their own business.
Social Edge Consulting President and CEO, Andrew Kratz
Social Edge Consulting President and CEO, Andrew Kratz, Shares How They Work With and Utilize Jive
Social Edge Consulting is a professional services firm that specializes in implementing and innovating with Jive
Jive: How do you work with Jive Software?
Andrew: Social Edge has a unique relationship with Jive Software because of our company’s deep roots in Jive. Almost all of the members of our team were Jive clients at one time or another, so we come by our enthusiasm honestly. We are seriously passionate about the benefits of social collaboration, and believe that Jive is the best platform for the digital workplace to achieve true transparency, integration to other platforms and engagement in an online community setting.
So we work with Jive on multiple levels. First of all, as a Jive Consulting Partner, our expertise is Jive-focused. With more than 250 combined internal and external community implementations under our belt, we have the relationships and experience that allows us to bring customer feedback to the sales and product teams that impact product offerings. Our partnerships with other software companies and developers in the Jive ecosystem allows us to enrich the customer experience.
We’re invested in the Jive Community as the “home base” for all things Jive, and use the community as a place to learn more about its products. We were thrilled when Jive asked us to help with the recent branding refresh of their Jive Community. We partnered with Jive to redesign their homepage, as well as their Partner and SMB Labs spaces, which we were very excited to do.
We also use Jive every day—we have multiple Jive communities of our own where we work both internally with our team and externally through secure client and partner groups, so we can collaborate and communicate. Social Edge could not be a dedicated partner if we did not use it day in and day out, so that we can share best practices (and our own bag of tricks!) with our clients.
Jive: What challenges do you see companies facing today with enterprise collaboration (both internal and external)?
Andrew: We see a lot of opportunities in the social collaboration space. Agility is a huge driver as enterprises have to respond to and deliver in new business models. As the markets continue to shift, companies need to quickly form teams from across departments to solve issues. Interactive intranets extend across a company with multiple integration points to other platforms to gather, share and discover information and people. Customer experience and streamlining back offices are driving companies to consider how to improve their customer relationships and employee engagement. Jive nails that with their Customer Engagement communities focused on services, products and support desk, while their Interactive Intranet solution can swiftly onboard and join teams together in the consistently shifting business models.
Social Edge Consulting uses Jive for their internal community, Edgeville
Jive: What are your top three tips for business collaboration excellence?
Andrew: 1. Listening is our first priority—with clients, with our team, with our partners. As part of Social Edge’s best practice, we use Jive to “listen” to what the other party is saying, both in writing, as well as in their behavior in the community.
2. Encourage transparency in everything, whether it’s about the business purpose of your Jive community, or metrics, goals, governance, etc. The more open you are, the less time people spend guessing and surmising on motives for initiatives or changes to the community.
3. Look for the opportunities—the ability to share ideas and knowledge across departments and functions really does make work easier. Internally, Social Edge has been working on a team-based approach to ideate on best practices and methodology. The crossover of information between teams and the exchange of knowledge between different roles was instrumental in the speedy implementation of some of these initiatives.
Jive: Could you tell us a little about Social Edge Consulting, your products and services, and areas of specialization?
Andrew: Social Edge Consulting specializes in Jive and only Jive—we are a reseller and partner to Jive Software. We’ve implemented more than 250 internal and external communities for verticals ranging from financial services to healthcare to multimedia publishing and more. Social Edge provides full-scale implementation and post-launch support to some of the most well-known Fortune 500 firms. Our offerings include long-term community management, strategist and project management resourcing, in addition to UI/UX, on-premise implementations and custom development services. We are North America- and EMEA-based with team members in 12 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and Canada. Our team speaks Spanish and Portuguese and implemented Jive in several countries in Latin America.
Smiles All Around for the Social Edge Team
Jive: Who are some of your notable joint customers with Jive?
Andrew: Since all of our customers are Jive customers, we’ve had many well-known and successful Jive clients. We’ve been involved with the Interactive Intranet implementations of SugarCRM and Verizon, plus many more. In the Customer Engagement communities space, a few of the organizations we’ve worked with include Marketo, MapR and Varonis.
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