Imagine for a second, the difference in your communication style when in the middle of a crowded restaurant with a large table of distracted people vs when you are part of a small focus group in a conference room where you can hear yourself think. Which is most similar to how you communicate with your customers?

There is a strong correlation between Customer Retention and a positive Customer Experience, and an even more direct correlation between Customer Churn and a negative experience.

It’s the dead of winter here at home in Minnesota. WorkOutLoud is keeping warm by staying busy completely reinventing the way we’re going to support you and your business initiatives in 2018.

With 2018 looming ever so near, It's time to reflect on this past year.   Are your customers happy? Have you been able to grow? Hey, look out the window, it's starting to snow! Back to business as you string up the lights, Have your customer's best interests been in your sights? As you light the candles or sip your nog, Imagine a new kind of customer dialogue. We know your customers are your number one, And we think interacting with them...

We believe there are 5 components to help your customers coming back for more products and support creating longterm business relationships.

SmartNPS™ provides an simple and easy way to deliver NPS and related questions to your customer and is an integrated function within the WorkOutLoud Customer Experience platform. NPS (Net Promoter Score) is an effective algorithm for clearly identifying a “score” for a customer relationship or virtually any “subject matter” you would like to use an NPS approach to understanding how the customer values the company, product, service, or individual.

Creating a competitive edge, 39% of CEOs rated Customer Experience as the most effective - almost 2-1 over the next method: Talent. (CRM Magazine/2017) It’s complex - on average it takes at least 5 software solutions to execute a simple customer collaboration event and to keep the customer conversation going. CMOs are under pressure to acquire, grow, and keep customers who are technically and socially connected with one another.” - From The Path to 2020 ~ Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) (The Economist Research Division)

Why do your users come to your customer community? They come to review the calendar for upcoming education meetings – web and face to face. They come to connect with others like them They come to follow the activities of a special interest They come to ask a question...

When you listen and stop talking, you might be able to take in more information as well as earn more respect by allowing other people to have a voice. You also may benefit from others opening up and trusting you more which creates stronger business relationships. There have been many times when I have been at a conference or networking event with many Elephants in the room.

Loyalty can be a good thing, although it can also be bad and what I mean by that is when wanting to be loyal you might be losing money because you trust the business. Business is just business and everyone is trying to make money just like you. Have I confused you? Good. Hear me out…I just had a AHA experience and had to share to help protect others like me trying to run a successful smart business.

What is the state of online community in 2016? As I noted in my recent round-up of enterprise tech to watch in 2016, the social business industry -- which largely runs on community platforms and is the center of gravity of the practice -- is in the midst of a growth surge, with compound annual growth of 26% expected through 2019 to become a $23 billion industry. This is a significantly higher growth rate than the entire big data industry, and so it's good evidence that we'll continue to see communities become ever more integral to everything we do. The reason online communities are being used more is simple: Communities have become very efficient and effective vehicles, especially in certain high value functions, for connecting people and information together, while making the resulting knowledge collectively easy to wield and reuse across a wide variety of business functions. For years now, the respected The Community Roundtable has been tracking the growth of the industry and sharing its data with the world, especially with its widely-followed annual State of Community Management report, or SOCM. The recently released SOCM for 2016 has by far the largest data sampling ever, with data from 339 community programs from around the world.

Customers involved with complex, sophisticated, and mission-critical business applications/products have a natural need to organize themselves into groups that represent their nuanced and general needs of their role with these products.

WorkOutLoud's Loring Kaveney and Eric Lopez had the honor and privilege to speak at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management's Entrepreneurial group this afternoon on campus. A lively and intimate discussion talking about bootstrapping, failures, successes, networking, legal, marketing, and even how serendipity plays a key role in successful start-ups. Tremendous interaction from some very thoughtful young entrepreneurs. Impressed not only with the number of companies that these kids are driving, but also the global nature of a couple of the businesses... mostly Juniors, a few seniors, and even one high school kid that goes full-time at the UofM... Smart!

Welcome Infor/Lawson users! Excited to see our Infor/Lawson community begin to come into their new community powered by WorkOutLoud! This new community helps them manage their members, network, collaboration, events, surveys, and more and will consist of more than 30K users.

Professional business communities sometimes require specific exlusivity, security, and even fees. With WorkOutLoud's Member Managent "App", we can integrate your user community experience with member validation, payment, start and stop dates, and more. In addition, our algorithms can detect people of specific organizations that apply to a specific membership.... By using our tools, we help you deliver membership opportunities to both organizations AND/OR individuals.

Startup Grind is proud to announce Minneapolis, MN. has been added to their list of many cities around the world to focus on successful experiences of being an Entrepreneur. Minneapolis Entrepreneurs believe in the power of collaborating with peers around great successes and learning failures.

911 - Never forget... It directly touched our "Lawson" family when we lost our colleague, Tim Haviland. Tim worked in Marketing at our Lawson Godward office. He actually sat a couple of desks behind me. I remember his lanky body lumbering in fresh from his bike ride in, backpack, and a great big nerdy - yet, intellectual smile. He lived in St. Paul at the time... He was quick with his dry wit and a great big smile! Truly a pleasant and fun, quirky guy.

WorkOutLoud delivers integrated analytics for your Community, Group, Blog, Connections, Advertising, Profiles... and just about anything that has a number to it! Why is this important? Because you can't improve if you don't have the right information, in a timely manner, available everywhere. 100's of KPI's related to your community come standard with our platform!

Look... no coding! WorkOutLoud is so tailorable through it's Collaboration Foundry, your Community Managers can be truly in control. In this case "Laurie" wanted to wait to have her customer's profiles to be publicly viewable outside the network. With one setting, she can turn it off. Later, when she is ready to "roll out" the feature of public profile sites, she simply clicks the option. That's simple!

No two communities are alike... that is why WorkOutLoud Foundry technology is a must have feature to tailor your community to your exact standards. From strong capabilties that require no coding to advanced capabilities that allow you to integrate into your existing systems. Becase... No two communities are alike. #WorkOutLoud #100TimesBetter #WOLFoundry

Enterprise Social is here to stay - Check out this analysis from 451 Research (http://451research.com/) or read the blog from ChannelInsider.com (social-business-applications-ride-a-growth-wave

This is our office in the Minneapolis Grain Exchange 100 years ago... still a lively place and it looks like people were prone to "WorkOutLoud" even back then. Note the collaboration going on and the guys tending to the "feed" on the chalkboard. #workoutloud #wearepartofhistory #minneapolis Workoutloud.com

The WorkOutLoud Foundry is designed to provide the world the ability to extend and integrate to our customer collaboration platform. Unlike other customer communities, WorkOutLoud is an open platform. Supporting integrated OAuth API's, push and pull API's and form services - from integration to tools like GMail, Box, and MS Office to all new "Apps" - WorkOutLoud is ready for the needs of your business. In today's world, we believe that solutions chosen today, must remain relevant to your organization tomorrow. We also know we need the world of imagineers, developers, designers, and business people to help us build out the functionality that is necessary. Already with our initial customers, we are all benefiting from this new approach.

Utilizing our new "WorkOutLoud Collaboration Foundry" for single sign-on and API integration. More about this new part of our platform and how it benefits our customers later this summer. ‪#‎WorkOutLoud‬ ‪#‎WOLFoundry‬ ‪#‎100TimesBetter‬ @CoCoMSP

Just taking a moment to say a little bit about us... WorkOutLoud is Enterprise Collaboration. We focus on the way you work today, revolutionizing the way your customers experience and benefit from your organization. Communication, Collaboration, and Achievement

WorkOutLoud.com is coming! First of all... YES, we have a new collaboration solution focused on customer/product centric businesses coming out spring, 2015. At this time we are targeting mid-April. We are currently still building out functionality and market testing the new concepts, designs, and user functionality. We have a strong advisory board representing the Retail, Healthcare(Payer), Higher Ed, and Government. Our advisors have many years of collaboration as well as large scale enterprise system experience under their belt and we appreciate their involvement.

A look back to the early days of social and Web 2.0. Love this video and can still get inspiration from the thoughtful perspectives, music, and production.

Social Business can mean many things to many people. Of course you have what could be called “classic” social business; the implementation of popular social sites into your marketing strategy. But that’s not what I am talking about here.

Let’s start by first asking some simple questions. This is not exhaustive by any means, but it would be the questions I would ask a customer as they consider upgrading their marketing initiatives.