GroupSwim provides on-demand software to support online communities both within and outside the enterprise. I spoke recently with Jason Rothbart, their VP of Customer Success. The company was founded with a focus on consumer web communities to provide a better solution for online forums. These forums can use a lot of help as they are often disorganized and the information is not easily accessed. GroupSwim shifted to enterprise collaboration as they saw even greater opportunities there. Their focus is small to mid-size companies who often lack the infrastructure or budget to provide effective tools.

Their goal for internal communities is to facilitate collaboration and enable knowledge sharing across departments, divisions and geographies within a company. GroupSwim sees online communities as ideal for companies that are growing quickly, geographically disbursed, focused on knowledge work, and utilize multiple systems and platforms. Jason comes from a professional services background where he was often involved in a three-way partnership with clients, software vendors, and solution integrators. Jason mentioned a project that leveraged GroupSwim where IBM was the solution integrator, newScale was the software provider and American Express was the customer. The collective group used GroupSwim to share best practices and document project decisions. I certainly agree with his perception that a community tool can lend invaluable support to such efforts. It also allows you to build an accessible knowledge base as a by-product of using a common community platform over email, document storage applications or even wikis that can become silos if not actively managed.

To provide a more robust community platform, GroupSwim has built-in intelligence to help surface what is likely to be most important to community participants. Content is organized by topics and automatically tagged based on semantic analysis that GroupSwim performs on all discussions, documents and emails. You can override these tags and produce your own. Your response to the auto-generated tags helps to train the system. I find that people are often lazy (me included) and do not persist in their tagging so I would find this feature useful. Experts within the community are identified by their behavior and the reaction of the group. This is also done automatically as people are even less likely to vote on content as tag it. The same strategy is applied to content to determine what is valued by the group. You can also see the top contributors to a topic.

You can search on both text and social behavior to uncover content and experts that might meet your needs. RSS feeds on topics are available and you can create watch lists on people, topics, and tags. There is a single sign-on that allows you to enter the GroupSwim environment and access all of your communities.

GroupSwim also offers the ability to create outward facing communities for companies to connect with their customers, prospects, and partners. Their site summarizes some of the advantages of this. “Online customer communities…offer valuable insight on your products or services. You can see on a real-time basis exactly what your customers want and need. The community becomes a channel for identifying opportunities to address problems and/or offer new solutions. Second, customers can help each other reducing your costs. Customers want to swap best practices, tips and tricks and technical solutions. When they are collaborating with each other, they reduce costs for you and enhance the value they get from your solution.”

One example I found intriguing was the support GroupSwim received from a well known financial services blogger, Tim Knight. He writes “The Slope of Hope” offering investment advice. He has a GroupSwim community to allow his readers to collaborate and extend the conservations that Tim starts on his blog. Tim’s GroupSwim community now has over 800 members since its early Fall 07 start. In another example, a sales training firm offers a GroupSwim community to allow their course alumni to stay in touch and share best practices. I find that sales training is often “one and done” – and then forgotten. This follow-on could really help embed the learning. GroupSwim offers a blog, The Diving Board, to support their community.