Here at Moreover we are pleased to announce a free Webinar showcasing how to track and monitor the latest social media buzz using Moreover’s Newsdesk.

It has been estimated that by the year 2010, 70% of all digital information being created will be user-generated, with social media applications, such as Twitter, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Flickr attracting over one billion users within five years.

With the dramatic increase in user generated content, the challenge for today’s content manager is how to track quality social media news and disseminate it across their enterprise.

The Webinar, first in a series of events and activities focused on important industry issues, will take place this Wednesday 23 September at 16.30 BST/11.30 EDT/08.30 PDT. So if you’re interested in attending please register here and we look forward to your company on Wednesday!

As the buzz and influence around social media intensifies we’re pleased to announce the addition of this exciting new content as part of our Newsdesk product. Alongside the existing blogs and podcasts customers can now track content from microblog sites such as Twitter and FriendFeed, video sharing services like YouTube, forums including Neowin and Digital Spy, consumer reviews such as Amazon user reviews, wikis consisting of Wikimedia Foundation sites and photo sharing sites covering the likes of Flickr and SmugMug.

Above showing an example screenshot of a quick search over Microblogs in Newsdesk.

As we look to grow our social media monitoring tools and content we will be continuously adding to our “White List” of feeds, so as conversations happen across the Social Web the best place to track, analyse and manage your information is Moreover’s Newsdesk.

We’re pleased and proud to share a great customer success story with you – we’re pleased because the customer is pleased, and we’re pleased because we can tell you about it. We’ll be even more pleased when we repeat the success at other organisations looking for similar solutions to those of Royal Dutch Shell. 

The customer case study is on our website, but it’s printed below in full as well - as you can appreciate this is a pretty good story for us to tell, so please forgive us this slightly vanglorious customer case study post!

Customer Case Study: How Newsdesk helped Shell save $5 million

A customer case study of Moreover’s Newsdesk implementation across the corporate intranet of Royal Dutch Shell, and how they saved $5 million over two years by consolidating several media monitoring contracts with external agencies under Moreover as a single vendor.

The Shell Project – Introduction

In spring of 2006 Shell approached Moreover for a new project, the aims of which were two-fold: provide Shell employees with access to personalised news and business information directly from the intranet and secondly, find a solution to help consolidate the myriad of media monitoring contracts that had spawned across all the different offices and locations over time.

Two requirements stood out: the technical capability to deliver and integrate with Shell’s IT environment, plus extensive coverage of international news across the many languages needed by a global corporation. Delivery of service started in the autumn of that year and has progressed in close partnership ever since. In the process Shell has become one of Moreover’s largest customers.

Intranet-wide News Portal for all employees

Over time the project has developed and expanded. As part of an intranet re-design, Moreover’s Newsdesk was embedded within the Shell online portal as a key component, providing Shell’s employees with access to real-time news and blogs directly from the intranet – thanks to integration with Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory there are no additional login requirements for users.

In fact, employees on the intranet don’t even realise that they are using an externally provided service. When they click the News tab on the intranet, they go straight through to a Shell-branded version of Newsdesk, where they can search for news, retrieve saved feeds, set up email alerts and read feeds and headlines set up by central office. As part of a custom implementation for Shell, users can also search across internal company content through the portal.

Rossen Roussev, Head of External Intelligence at Shell who has led the project on their side, puts it as follows: “Usage of Moreover’s Newsdesk and its content has been quite phenomenal, with users accessing thousands of articles on a daily basis. The combination of excellent content, easy-to-use interface and full integration with our intranet were key to acceptance with minimal effort required for change management and end-user training.”

Media monitoring for marketing and business intelligence

The other half of the Moreover-Shell project has been to provide Shell’s marketing and business intelligence teams with a media monitoring service, to help them manage the global tide of online news. For example, Shell uses Moreover to track and respond to news about the company and its subsidiaries, to monitor local operations and political developments, to read up on the industry and other companies and to track developments in technology, science and the environment.

Creating these targeted news channels takes editorial intelligence and expertise. “Having access to so much content at your fingertips requires a careful consideration of the topics and issues we wanted to expose to our readers”, says Rossen. “User’s confidence can be easily lost if you’re tracking a issue critical to Shell and your tailored feed has captured an irrelevant article. Moreover’s Editorial and Customer Services teams have been a major factor in ensuring this was a success and minimising the risk factors of running this in a fully automated manner.”

Consolidated media monitoring saves $5 million in two years

In the process, Shell was able to target and replace a number of existing media monitoring contracts and consolidate under a single provider. This has produced real, measurable bottom-line impact and has proven the service. Rossen states it clearly: “Utilising Moreover’s Newsdesk, we’ve been able to stop and consolidate a number of contracts with external agencies providing media monitoring for us. $4mln saved and another $1mln avoided in a single year – do I need to say more?!”

The road ahead

Today the work continues. Shell’s business requirements provide a great blueprint for the wider market opportunity for this type of service. Their product feedback has been hugely valuable to the product and engineering teams at Moreover. For instance, new features such as the recently introduced analytics, the upcoming newsletter and the improved email alerts service all incorporate feedback from Shell.

The challenges continue too of course, with intranets developing apace, driven forward by Web 2.0 technologies and expectations. Moreover’s long-term design on enterprise services and its commitment to Shell and its many other global clients create an excellent position from which to take advantage of the ever-evolving opportunities in this sector. These are challenging but also hugely exciting times, and Moreover is looking forward to working with Rossen and his team in the years ahead and to sharing future successes with other great companies and teams to come.

Moreover Sales and Further Details

To discuss how Moreover can save your organisation money or to find out more about our products and services, please contact the Moreover Sales department on the following details:

UK / EMEA +44 (0)207 253 5003

North America East: +1 415 999 2302 West: +1 206 228 8477

Email: salesinfo@moreover.com Web: www.moreover.com Blog: blog.moreover.com

Posted in aggregation services, enterprise products, media monitoring, RSS feeds Tagged: enterprise 2.0, enterprise RSS, Newsdesk, online news ]]> http://blog.moreover.com/2009/02/10/moreover-helps-shell-save-5-million/feed/ 1 mackieb http://blog.moreover.com/2009/01/21/your-uservoice-heard/ http://blog.moreover.com/2009/01/21/your-uservoice-heard/#comments Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:48:30 +0000 brianmackie http://blog.moreover.com/?p=169 ]]>

We’ve added a new user forum to Newsdesk, for clients and users to submit product ideas and vote on the bright sparks put forward by others. The drill is of course for customers to tell us which features matter most and to help us organise and prioritise our product development schedule.

It’s using Uservoice for out-of-the-box foruming - thanks for making life easy!  I recall some years ago we invented our own internal bugtracking tool (sorry, I mean ‘featuretracker’) – pan forward, and it’s nice to enjoy a real-life example of technology helping us work smarter, without actually having to divert and build it. Feels like progress…

Here’s a screenshot of said forum. Click it to link to our Free Feeds forum – same setup again but for the free feeds portion on our website instead of Newsdesk.