We are pleased to share the news that one of our customers, CO.NX, has been nominated for an Adobe MAX Award. The U.S. Department of State developed CO.NX to connect U.S. experts with international audiences to better teach the world about the U.S., its policies, and people. Included in their program has been internet simulcasts of President Obama’s historic speeches in Egypt and Ghana earlier this year that provide a way for viewers around the world to experience the speechs in real time and augment that experience with collaborative features such as chat, real-time polls, integrated closed captions, and sharing of web links.
President Obama's Speech from Ghana
CO.NX, who runs their Connect Pro implementation on the ConnectSolutions QuickConnect platform, has had over 10,000 participants attend the over 200 events they ran last year. We are proud to have CO.NX as a customer and applaud the new standard they are setting in promoting transparency through citizen outreach and open dialog in government.
The CO.NX project is a well deserved finalist for the Adobe MAX Award in the public sector category. We encourage you to take a few moments and learn more about their Connect Pro usage here: http://max.adobe.com/awards/finalists/#public.
If you like what you see, please take a minute and vote for CO.NX here: https://www.adobemaxsubmission.com/viewer/?projectid=121.
You can also find CO.NX on Facebook and Twitter and experience an upcoming webchat first hand.
For federal employees, telework is a mandated option (read more about ConnectSolutions support of FISMA-compliant web conferencing), and with the productivity gains combined with the benefits of remote work in the face of pandemic flu concerns, a very logical option at that. It is good to see the continued support for telework by Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry and federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra:
“When you think about it, the president is really the teleworker in chief. He’s connected wherever he goes,” Berry said. “Yesterday was a good example: New York City in the morning, Pittsburgh in the afternoon and Washington at night. While the president has a little bit of a unique position, and everyone can’t have all of his communications gear, the technology is catching up to that.”
Source
The reality is that everyone does have access to sufficient communication systems to empower successful telework. We’ve been doing this for quite some time with thousands of federal employees, and look forward to continuing to expand upon these services with ConnectSolutions Podium for large-scale events and communication efforts as well.
ConnectSolutions has had the opportunity to support a variety of webcasts for President Obama through its partnership with the U.S. State Department and its highly successful CO.NX program, but we’ll have to work on providing him with his own personal virtual oval office meeting room as well.
Not sure if it is the case in your neck of the woods, but ads for the Connect Pro Connect and Conserve campaign have been popping up all over the Bay Area. Saw this ad on the side of a bus yesterday. The neatest part of Adobe’s campaign is that they donate $25 to schools to help them become greener every time someone signs up for a Connect Pro trial. So now’s the time to spread the word and tell your friends and colleagues about Connect Pro and get them to try it for themselves. Not only are you finding ways to help make them more productive, but you’ll be doing something good for the earth and for our youth.
Connect Pro Ad
Bit off-topic here, but this was too funny to pass on. I was driving up 101N from our Burlingame to Oakland office this morning, when I came upon one of the most absurd uses of a huge flat-bed truck I’ve ever seen:
Yes…that really is a single bike being transported on a gigantic flatbed towards San Francisco. So much for lowering carbon footprints with bikes.
ConnectSolutions’ customer success over the past few years has been fueled by three key ingredients:
- No-limits Customer Service = From day one, our company culture has centered around extreme empathy for our customers, and the result is that everyone in the company has consistently demonstrated their willingness and motivation to do whatever it takes to make our customers and partners successful. Required reading around here is Jack Mitchell’s “Hug Your Customers,” and we draw lots of inspiration from other examples such as Zappos and others.
- Great Technology = Combining award-winning products from Adobe, with our own Engineering and Operations innovations, has provided organizations with an extremely reliable and scalable platform to support adoption and rapid growth. Reliable technology combined with passionate customer service is proving to be a deadly combination to our competition…
- Coffee…
That last bullet is what brought me to Starbucks this morning in Burlingame, CA, and resulted in a great reminder of how important exceptional customer service is for businesses of any size. I hadn’t been in that store for some time, and yet the manager said “Hello Michael.” No use of fancy CRM systems, just “WOW” customer service. Then, as I waited for my coffee to be brewed, I noticed this same manager quickly pulling all of the staff together in front of the line of waiting customers. Suddenly, they were all singing “Happy Birthday” to a man who appeared to be in his upper-80s, and all of the customers in the store jumped right-in with them. This man was almost in tears at the sound of 30 people singing to him. If that’s not “hugging” your customers, I don’t know what is.
ConnectSolutions Customers: expect a note from me looking for birthdays…
Adobe Systems announced some big news today with its planned acquisition of Omniture. In the short time since, I’ve been asked by customers and a few analysts about our perspectives on it. I don’t have any information other than what’s out on the various PR announcements and blogs. That said, I do have an opinion 
In discussing the acquisition, Adobe’s Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen stated:
“This is a game changer for both Adobe and our customers,” Narayen said in a statement. “We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets.”
The rich internet application (RIA) proponents have long since stood by the concept of rich, engaging experiences driving more revenue, customer satisfaction, eyeballs, etc… While we all may agree that great experiences build great businesses (Zappos, Amazon, and others come to mind), many RIA projects lack the hardened metrics to back up this intuition. Given this gap in metrics, this acquisition is strategic in turning the RIA-defense from intuition to fact.
However, I suspect this acquisition was driven by an even more strategic imperative: transitioning Adobe from one of the world’s greatest boxed product vendors to that of a true services-based powerhouse. While the wonderful tracking and metrics analysis from Omniture will be useful for Adobe and its customers, I have to imagine the “hidden gem” in this purchase is that of the Omniture services architecture and operations. Omniture is currently supporting more than 1 Trillion transactions per quarter. The embedded domain expertise to make that happen inside Omniture has to be of great value for Adobe in this transition. The transfusion of Omniture’s massive services know-how into Adobe’s foray into services-based products that mirror their rich heritage in desktop products, has definitely got me excited about the potential.
What are your thoughts?
I recently attended a webinar led by Ken Moley. He offers consulting services through his company Webinar Success (www.wsuccess.com) and blogs regulary on all things related to web conferencing and on what it takes to create a compelling and effective presentation and deliver it over the web.
Ken gave this webinar alongside Adobe using Adobe Connect Pro but it was not the traditional or expected comparative, competitive fare that said how or why this feature works better in Adobe Connect v. Webex rather a more compelling presentation was made on what we all can do to use the features in Connect in other ways that promote more interactivity with the audience and keep everyone engaged in any meeting or presentation topic we might deliver. He started with a quick multi-choice poll where everyone chose five of ten presentation points; the top five things you would like to discuss and the bottom five that are of lesser interest, and then spoke to those items in succession.
One of the first things I noticed in the Connect meeting room with Ken was a simple layout. 5 pods total. Two on the bottom for chat (one for attendees to chat amongst themselves and the other to send questions to Ken) above that a share pod with a ppt file and to the left side the attendee list pod and a polling pod. Now it is the polling pod asking two simple questions that is key here. The choices were: “This topic is interesting, keep going” and “We have covered enough on this topic, move on”. This pod was open the entire time and as subjects moved forward and questions came in from attendees real-time feedback was being given to Ken and the attendees could see the vote percentages in real time too. This was insturmental to keeping the presentation moving along as everyone had a voice in the pacing and content of the meeting. Voices, questions and comments were also heard (read) in the chat pods as attendees shared the opinion and thoughts on why their presentations succeed or fail. This constant, polite and professional dialog also kept the meeting flow moving right along and when question on one topic faded Ken led us all on to the next topic. If your next Connect meeting lends itself to this type of format use polling in a similar fashion, not to sample final opinions on a subject but rather to promote dynamic interaction on the subject at hand.
The second thing I noticed was a lot of trust Ken had with the attendees. Having such open chat pods can invite passions to flame up and comments to get desultory and yet that never happened here during the entire hour. Now he laid out the ground rules at the beginning and gave us all some guidance but things just went smooth and no one got out of control. If someone had Connect has the ability to remove attendees from the room and of course the chat pods could always be closed but that was not needed here. The biggest question I recall was “How do you prepare for holding such a meeting?” All this real-time feedback and progress could cause your one hour meeting to last 35 minutes, some topics might not get the attention you think they deserve and you could run out of material before the meeting end time; and that’s okay. If you are prepared to talk to the topics, you do so at the depth and scope prompted by the attendees and your audience has told you so then you have more than likely had a successful meeting.
The interactivity is also likely to bring up a few new topics you might choose to address in this meeting or use as topics in a future meeting. Either way you engaged your audience and if they told you in real-time “move on” then keep it moving. I cannot recall the last time I or any speaker was chastized for ending a meeting early. Can you?
We very recently opened up an office in Columbus, OH where we’ve been able to expand the ConnectSolutions team with some incredible new team members, and during a visit this week, I arrived to find one of the more random animals sitting at the front-door…a turkey. The following pic is definitely not something I see everyday on the way to the office:
The reflection in the window had him strutting
