Someone just asked me what the benefits of social bookmarking in the enterprise (and thus Cogenz) are. Here’s my attempt at a response. Interested to hear what you think…

Put quite simply, Cogenz manages the knowledge that employees create when they discover useful web pages.

Think about how many web pages you visit during the day. Think also about how many times people send you links to interesting things on the web by email. Maybe some of those links might be useful to you in the future, but not right now. Do you think you’d be able to find them easily again in three months time?

Now think about how many web pages are being viewed and links emailed around by your colleagues in other countries, offices and departments. Maybe some of those links might be useful to you, yet you would never know about them. Maybe some of the things you find interesting would be useful to others, but you would never know…

This is what social bookmarking is all about. Companies are finding it increasingly difficult getting staff to contribute to their intranets. Yet these same staff are happily uploading videos, writing blogs, and posting interesting links using public tools, in full view of customers and competitors.

In a corporate setting Cogenz allows employees to save links to news, research, competitive intelligence, intranet documents, etc., for their own benefit and for the benefit of colleagues that they may not even know. But because it is a private system, it does not make this data available to the rest of the world.

The employee (particularly the younger one) benefits because:

• They get a way to organise and search their links in a way they are familiar with
• They can discover what their colleagues are finding useful
• They can use this information to connect with people who share the same interests as they do
  

At a departmental/office/company level, the benefits come from the aggregated data (or collective intelligence). Companies can use the data from Cogenz to discover:

• Interesting news, research, competitive intelligence, intranet documents, etc. (why have just one research department when the entire company can do it for you?)
• Hot topics (useful for understanding priorities, planning internal communications, etc.)
• Social networks (useful in discovering connections, assessing collaboration, measuring integration)
• Communities of interest (useful when putting together project teams)
• Meaning (what employees think a page on your intranet is really about)

What other questions should we be answering?