Sazbean

Bulletin boards, forums and wikis are a great place for your customers to get support and to form a community, but they are often difficult to use for finding information. Searches or tags that do not have any intelligence about what is truly important make it difficult to filter for relevant information. Your customers are often the most knowledgeable in certain aspects of your products and/or industry. It takes time and effort to create documentation to help and support your customers. Is there a way to tap into the expertise and effort of your customers to allow them to help themselves more effectively than you can?

GroupSwim’s unique product creates this intelligent community by tying together traditional board and forum functionality with semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise so that important information is easy to find. How does this all work?

• Tagging – Tagging is a great way to get an overview about the subjects a post covers and is usually useful for searching. Typical boards and forums may allow tagging, but require people to add their own tags to posts, many of which do not. In GroupSwim, every post and comment (and any other content) in the system is automatically tagged using a semantic engine (you can also add your own tags) and your community can be pre-loaded with tags that are important to your industries or situation (including alternatives and synonyms).
• Ranking – In busy communities, important posts are often missed or buried within a long list. Business readers do not have time to read an entire forum to search for answers. GroupSwim automatically brings important posts and content to the top to make them easy to find .
• Expertise – In every community there are recognized experts in certain subjects. In traditional forums, these experts are found only through personal experience reading the forum. GroupSwim identifies experts by allowing readers to vote on posts and responses. These experts are identified for subjects and their responses and posts are ranked higher in searches and browsing. Customers can easily identify experts in each subject and build trust that they have the answers they need.
• Search – Search is key to finding information buried in a forum, but GroupSwim combines semantic search, tagging, ranking and expertise to give you intelligent answers. Searches include posts, tags, groups and member results all on one page. Search results can be ordered according to relevance, recent activity and popularity.

GroupSwim’s hosted application has member groups and privacy controls. Profiles are created automatically and contain all the activity for that person, including posts, tags, replied and ratings. Video, audio, documents, etc. can be posted and readers can create watchlists and subscribe to rss feeds to keep up-to-date on what’s going on. The addition of wiki-style pages is in the works for a future release.

Pricing is very transparent and is based on the number of users and file storage, with discounts for higher numbers of users. Starting at $150 minimum per month, this solution can be both affordable and scalable for even a small business.

If you just want a community for social networking, look elsewhere. But if you want to create an intelligent community to tap into expertise with little effort for a knowledge base, technical support site, or Intranet, add GroupSwim to your short list.

Update: I’ve created a B2B Knowledge Base & Discussion Board using GroupSwim. Please feel to check it out. I hope you consider joining if you’d like to have a discussion about the issues facing B2B Websites.

Technorati Tags: community intelligence, knowledge base, customer support, intranet, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting