MEDIA DIVISION, COMMUNITY CATEGORY
AN AWARD OF MERIT GOES TO…IT TOOLBOX!
Website: http://www.ittoolbox.com
The Challenge
Information technology (IT) is complex and always changing. When combined with the reality that every company uses IT solutions in its own unique way, an infinite number of possible IT and business challenges emerge. Nine years ago, ITtoolbox saw the value that the Internet could bring to the business world. In the same way that large consulting firms were able to network their employees to develop and share knowledge, the ITtoolbox community of IT influencers and decision makers would connect millions of professionals, allowing peers to work together to develop best practices.
The Ingenious Proposal
ITtoolbox was created for the sole purpose of getting relevant, best practice information based on the collective intelligence of their professional peers to IT professionals. These are the new water coolers for today’s business. These user-generated content sites are the ones that will impact the business decisions of today and tomorrow. ITtoolbox leverages the power of the community through social media to provide IT professionals with real-time solutions from the front line of IT. By providing a forum for solving problems and gathering information to support decisions through peer collaboration, ITtoolbox is using innovative new ways to foster information-sharing that can significantly impact business. There is no doubt that the world of knowledge sharing has changed in the past year with the evolution of social media. The old-style way of selling information or working through layers of networks to get to knowledge-bearers in an organization is gone. The new way of doing business includes being nimble, using cutting-edge technologies to evaluate data and results and cutting through organizational barriers to get to experienced professionals who are willing to share their knowledge. Through the IT community at ITtoolbox, for the first time IT and business professionals have the ability to tap in to the collective knowledge of over 2 million community members in real-time. ITtoolbox is one of the few social media sites focused on enabling better business decisions. Its goal is to foster active dialogue between peers on a broad range of IT topics — from IT purchasing to software bugs to product enhancements. It provides a forum for professionals to interact, speak with, and listen to others who have experienced similar situations.
The Call
The ITtoolbox network consists of: ITtoolbox Professional Networking: Tools that allow professionals to create their own home pages, connect with other professionals, and communicate with the IT community in a productive environment. Sample profile: Chris Eaton, Product Manager (http://www.ittoolbox.com/profiles/ceaton55) ITtoolbox Blogs: A pioneering community where nearly 400 executives, speakers, book authors and IT gurus write about real issues they are facing today as the IT market is being defined. Sample blog: Adventures in Security, Tom Olzak, Director, Information Security, http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/security/adventures; ITtoolbox Groups: Over 650 professional IT discussion groups where peers engage in question and answer sessions, providing very specific and practical information. Sample discussion group: ERP Vendor Selection, http://erp.ittoolbox.com/groups/vendor-selection/erp-select ITtoolbox Wiki: The first community-edited IT reference guide, enabling the IT community to collaboratively define IT topics and provide practical instructions on anything from IT strategy to operating system configuration. More than 3,900 have been created and edited by the ITtoolbox community. Sample Wiki entry: Information Lifecycle Management, http://wiki.ittoolbox.com/index.php/Information_Lifecycle_Management ITtoolbox Knowledge Bases: 28 Web sites, each focused on one specific segment of the IT market, where content from the ITtoolbox community is organized and bundled with content from third party sources including vendors and news media. Sample knowledge base: Business Intelligence, http://businessintelligence.ittoolbox.com. ITtoolbox has also pioneered the delivery of advertising value through professional online communities. By contextually matching community-generated content that reaches nearly two million IT and business professionals with advertiser messaging, ITtoolbox has set out to deliver quantifiable, industry leading ROI to its clients that include Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Oracle, and over 700 more IT vendors.
The Success Story
Today, millions of professionals are turning to social media sites, like ITtoolbox, that exist for the sole purpose of getting relevant, best practice information based on the collective intelligence of their professional peers. Like e-mail and other essential business tools, online community ITtoolbox.com, has become a daily desktop companion in the professional lives of over one million IT professionals worldwide. ITtoolbox boasts more than 1.8 million unique visitors per month and the network includes more than 1.5 million pages of community-generated content. Since inception, over 1.5 billion e-mails have been exchanged through ITtoolbox Groups on topics ranging from ERP vendor selection to database optimization. Members of the IT community refer to the site often sometimes several times a day to access the knowledge and experience of their peers so they can quickly solve IT problems, make intelligent purchasing decisions, and adeptly manage and improve IT operations for their employers and clients. In terms of specific statistics on its community growth, ITtoolbox cites the following; ITtoolbox Blogs experienced 57% growth in unique visitors and 96% growth in comments on blog entries (Q206 to Q207), and currently has 377 total authors. ITtoolbox Groups experienced 40% growth in unique visitors (Q206 to Q207). Unique visits to ITtoolbox Wiki have increased by more that 55% (Q206 to Q207), and it has become one of the top 10 destinations on the ITtoolbox network.
