YoolinkPro Provides a Useful Combination of Social Media Features Designed for Enterprise Adoption
by Bill Ives
YoolinkPro is a French social networking tool and a major player in the enterprise 2.0 industry in Europe. The company was founded by Sunny Paris, co-founder and former CEO of Weborama, an online marketing service. I recently spoke with Sebastien Blanc from YoolinkPro about their offering.
YoolinkPro combines social bookmarking, social networking, and micro-blogging. They began as a social bookmarking tool and then added social networking features. Most recently, they added micro-messaging so users could provide more context with their bookmarks and start conversations on related topics. The micro-blogging capability is similar to Twitter in functionality except that you have 199 characters for your messages. These are all good moves. In addition to these social networking capabilities, you can upload documents for centralized access.
Sebastien said they have a taken a middle road between the standalone micro-messaging tools and the comprehensive collaboration platforms that have added micro-messaging and other social networking capabilities. On one hand, many clients have said to YoolinkPro that they need more functionality that simply micro-messaging. On the other hand, the complex implementation issues that a comprehensive collaboration platform requires can slow adoption. YoolinkPro is focused on adoption and the spread of usage through viral means.
Sebastien provides several use cases. RATP is the company operating the train/metro system for the city of Paris, with 45,000 employees. YoolinkPro is deployed within the engineering department and allows people to save, share and discuss new information about technologies and services in the transportation industry. The service is used alongside other services such as wikis. It is great to hear about this enterprise 2.0 case in France and the ones below.
BNP is the largest corporate and private bank in France. Here the innovation team uses YoolinkPro to share and centralize what is happening in the banking industry. SPF Diana is a company producing pet food, It employs 500 people in more than six countries. YoolinkPro is used to create better connection between several local marketing teams. It allows to centralize marketing documents and to start discussions about business topics. Adsolut is a communication agency with 12 people. YoolinkPro is used here as a stand alone Intranet 2.0 (foster discussions, centralize key documents, distribute company’s news, etc.).
I like their focus on adoption and their goal to keep things simple but not too simple. They are operating in a robust and growth market. This is a good thing, as it validates the enterprise 2.0 approach. It will be interesting to see how they do in North America, with their useful combination of features.
The company also develops Yoolink.to, a universal browser extension that shows the philosophy and features of the corporate service. It can be downloaded free from the Yoolink.to site and there is no need to create an account. You can start using it as soon as you log on to your Facebook or Twitter account. While surfing the internet, you can share and comment on web content in a couple of clicks on major social services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or del.icio.us. As they said, we have many digital lives and Yoolink.to allows us to not mix them all. Yoolink supports Bit.ly, Gravatar, Netvibes, IGoogle, and Wordpress.
