This is a cool 2.0 style tool to add into any communications or customer reference program.
One aspect of our work within the area of customer advocacy is helping clients to communicate their positive customer stories to other customers, employees and partners. Sometimes this might be a people-based activity, sometimes it helps that we can build tools to get real scale. Recently, Vista in particular has opened up some new communications opportunities for our clients.
This particular gadget sits on the desktop and is continuously updated with information from a central repository, containing many thousands of individual items of customer evidence that are published in the case study section of microsoft.com.
The idea is, you can configure the gadget to only tell you about the type of reference materials you want to be updated upon. The gadget then actively updates you on your chosen technology or industry sector etc. This all cuts down on the levels of noise that exist inside every big company, and helps to catch the eye of busy sales people with relevant, topical updates only. Then they are simply one click from the story that interests them.
The gadget's primary purpose was for Microsoft's own employees worldwide - especially sales execs and partner account managers - but the client loved it, he's a big gadget fan and likes to innovate, and so he simply made it available to anyone who might want to download it.
If you run Vista and want to download the Microsoft CE gadget take a look here in the Windows Live Gallery. If you are curious about Enterprise Reference Manager go here.
Gadgets aren't massively complex to build and offer organizations another delivery channel for information direct to audiences inside and outside the enterprise, making sure you wring every last ounce of value from content that is created or news that needs to be communicated. I'll post again on some more gadgets we have in the pipeline and a cool mobile publishing tool.
Tags: customer advocacy, customer references, Microsoft, Vista Gadget
Disclaimer: it seems a bit redundant, but I'd better say it, Microsoft is a client