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Platform Bazaar > Sponge.com
Younomy's Platform Bazaar publishes reviews of social media and online platforms that are used by organizations for running idea contests, developer challenges, open innovation, and social product development.
Sponge: Unquestionably, the Friendliest Forum BuilderQuestions are the core elements of conversations, especially those happen between producers and consumers. Sponge thinks its structured Q&A platform can help us build a great FAQ page, crowd source answers (it could be your private Quora! ), and run forums to provide support to customers.
Building Community Around Questions"To use the vocabulary of the day, the most powerful search engines available are other people. No computer is needed to find life-changing answers – just the right questions," says Andrew Finlayson, Author, Questions That Work
As the illustration explains, companies and customers can use questions to run crowd sourcing contests; explain ideas effectively in FAQ formats; and keep forums alive. Sponge is an exclusive online Q&A platform that makes it easy for companies to ask, and customers to answer, and vice versa. Unquestionably, Sponge is the easiest way to setup a community platform like a forum. Setting up involves three steps: 1) provide your name, email ID, and password to create a user account, 2) name your forum or FAQ page or idea contest, 3) enter your questions to your customers and tag them. You can use the widgets to provide access to your sponge platform from your website. Interview with Henry Khachatryan, Co-Founder, SpongeHenry Khachatryan, Co-Founder, Sponge
Henry is the Co-Founder of Sponge, which provides enterprise Q&A community software. Prior to starting Sponge, he worked as an engineer at The New York Times Company, and had also been in charge of Software.com and Computer.com before their eventual sales. Excerpts from the interview:
What is the idea behind Sponge? How successful has it been so far? The idea behind Sponge arose from what we gathered to be a lack of community software on the web at that time. Since the beginning of the web, forums have pretty much been the only means of creating a community to interact with your users. However, forums aren't ideal because they lead to a lot of noise, therefore making it difficult to extract the information you seek from hundred of unnecessary responses. Q&A is much more conducive to a conversation since naturally we're used to asking questions and receiving an answer. Moreover, unlike most forum software, Sponge is ideal for capturing long tail SEO traffic as the content that's created is quality and optimized for search engine crawlers. We've been quite successful in introducing this relatively new form of community software (Q&A), thus as companies continue to learn the benefits of this format, they're much more willing to embrace our software to build their communities. Whether it is for support, knowledge bases, or general communities, Sponge satisfies a number of use cases. In your perception, how does social media evolve the producer-customer and customer-customer interactions? Social media has completely revolutionized how individuals interact with one-another and with companies as well. Even just 3-4 years ago if we had an issue with a company or a product, our only means of resolving the issue or voicing our concerns would be to call or email them. Today, there is Twitter, Facebook and a number of other support-type software we can go to and get almost an immediate response. Moreover, with the public forum that social media has created, companies have to be more weary of satisfying their customers, or else a disgruntled customer can voice their opinion and have it be seen by millions of other potential customers. On the flip-side, social media has also brought our world closer together. Today we can interact and communicate with anybody anywhere on earth in a matter of seconds, it's truly remarkable. The most notable example of this can be seen in the Arab Spring revolutions that took place a few months ago; they were primarily spurred by social media and broadcast to the entire world, something that would seem impossible just 5-6 years ago. Apart from providing support to the user community, what are other potential applications of your product? Can they be used to crowd source product ideas for instance? Right now our product is used primarily for support, knowledge base creation and general community interaction, but the possibilities of Sponge are truly endless; and as I tell all of my clients, it's really just up to your imagination on how you use it. Our software is flexible enough that it can be applied to a number of different use cases: Whether it's publishing to extract thoughts of the readers, or even crowdsourcing product ideas, it's really just a matter of how the software is utilized. Is Sponge used as an intranet Q&A portal for enterprises as a knowledge management tool? Yes, a number of companies currently use Sponge for their internal knowledge management system. This has been a large growing segment of our customer base. What are the reasons businesses come to you for customized/bespoke solutions? Primarily because of the desire to have a solution that fits their need to create a community (whether it’s for support, internal knowledge base, etc) and also have it look like it's a part of their overall software, and not just something off the shelf. It's always been ideal to have software that integrates so well that it looks like you built it yourself, rather than a SaaS product you pay for. And with our customization tools, companies are able to do just that. How safe are the community content - they are taking a risk of developing their community in a third-party platform? We tell our customers from day one that the content generated on their communities belongs to them, and we are simply "leasing" it from them. This means at any time they can get their data exported and close their community if they so choose. This transparency between us and our customers has led to a great deal of success and thus a very low customer turnover. What are the upcoming product features? Support for more languages, better widgets that integrate deeper between Sponge software and our clients' websites, default templates that clients can pick from. We're constantly gathering feedback, iterating and improving our software. Since we don't keep long roadmaps, we are able to change our focus on a different aspect of the software if the situation necessitates. For example, recently there has been an upsurge in the demand from customers for an internal implementation of Sponge, so we've been focused on improving the feature set on that aspect of the software. Case Example: Admission Quest.com
UK based Admission Quest (AQ) uses Sponge in an effective way. The primary purpose of this entity itself is to provide assistance to the students and their parents by answering their questions. Using Sponge platform, AQ serves a community forum for families to ask questions and learn about boarding school.
Since encouraging its customers to "ask away and contribute to the conversation" is central to its business, AQ uses sponge actively to run its Q&A forum. Note: This platform review is done based on some of the essential co-creation features as outlined in the book, The Co-creation Roadmap: Six Steps to Tap the Wisdom of Crowds, authored by G Sankaranarayanan, CEO, Younomy.com. A free copy of the book is available for online reading at Issuu. Read on. For a free PDF copy of the book, send a mail.
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