Profile: Social Media with Awareness Networks

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Aug 26, 2008

The Social Media industry seems to get just a little bit bigger every hour and it's amazing how many different vendors can come on the scene and offer products and solutions that can help us design and build communities of one sort or another.

As an enterprise though, you need to be sure you are working with the right solution provider. Someone who is not only selling you a service, but helping you truly understand why and how to implement it. This is where you see Awareness — an on-demand social media platform for Web 2.0 communities provider — emerge as a front-runner. They have the right technology platform and what appears to be a wealth of knowledge and understanding to implement your community(s) the right way.

As interested as we are in social media and content management, we were very open to the opportunity to speak with Awareness about their SaaS solution. Expecting it to be a good review of their product and how it works, we were pleasantly surprised to have a genuinely good conversation about social media in the enterprise in general. A discussion that made this writer more open to the possibilities of enterprise social networks.

A Little History on Awareness

David Carter, CTO of Awareness took us through a brief history of Awareness. We'll say brief because he outlines a deeper one in his blog that will give you even more information on the Canadian roots that grew this company.

The gist however is that David worked for over 11 years with Microsoft on Intranets and Site Server (the original SharePoint for those of you old enough to remember). During that time he met and worked with Robin Hopper, who owned his own company dealing with Fax on Demand Software. The two apparently hit it off and had many good discussions on building communities, something both of them saw a need for — even back in the early 90's when the term “user generated content” didn't exist.

Robin eventually went on to create a Content Management company called IUpload and David a company called WebPartz. Through mysterious forces and the blessing of email, the two joined up together, consolidating their companies into one — IUpload.

The Emergence of Awareness

Through their work with IUpload and closely watching and working with the new Internet that was emerging around them — that of user-generated content becoming a priority — they recognized that it was a different beast and needed to be managed differently from traditional content management. So they started building tools around UGC. RSS feeds, blogging applications that contained versioning, things like that. They started wondering what it takes to make an application enterprise caliber. The answer, they found, was security.

In 2005 Awareness demoed their first Social Networking platform. A couple of years later, in 2007, they moved their headquarters to Boston from Toronto, Canada, but kept their development shop up North. With the help of venture capitalists NorthBridge and Greylock — VC funders for the likes of Digg, Facebook and LinkedIn — they have been able to grow their team and develop a platform that works both inside and outside the firewall. It wasn't until 2007 that they renamed their company Awareness.

Awareness Services

The Awareness Web 2.0 Community Platform

The Awareness Web 2.0 Community Platform is an on demand social media solution designed for both internal and external communities. Awareness believes in the value of the community and that the struggle is getting people to use these tools as opposed to our tried and true email applications.