Jive Powers StrongMail's Social Business Platform for Internal and External Communities

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Jive Software was recently selected by StrongMail as the social business platform for both their customer and employee communities. According to a recent survey of StrongMail customers, 50% of respondents reported having reduced their use of technical support as a result of greater and faster access to resources within the Jive-powered customer community.

StrongMail is a leading provider of online marketing solutions for email marketing and social media. In 2010, StrongMail's business was growing exponentially, and in order to effectively support that growth, they sought to transform how they supported and engaged with their rapidly growing customer base. Simultaneously, StrongMail saw an opportunity to streamline internal communication and collaboration among their employees.

Jive is now one of the critical back-end systems that StrongMail depends on to run its business. Adoption and participation run high on StrongMail's internal and external communities, with 86% of customers actively using their community and a 100% employee adoption rate.

The two external and internal communities developed on Jive are:

• Spark is StrongMail's online customer community.  It provides customers with a forum that allows them to find answers to their questions, while collaborating with other customers and StrongMail employees. The community provides customers with direct access to StrongMail experts, valuable peer insight and the latest best practices content for improving their email and social media marketing campaigns. Spark complements StrongMail's formal customer service processes via easy integration with StrongMail's Salesforce.com Service Cloud, enabling customers to log support cases directly from the community.
• StrongSpace is the company's internal community for employees, connecting resources across the United States, Europe and India. StrongSpace serves as a central hub for "all things StrongMail," enabling every department to share and collaborate on the latest documents, news and information.

"StrongMail's customer community is not only a powerful platform for finding answers and collaborating with StrongMail employees, it is also an easy way to connect and share information with other StrongMail clients," said Kevin Hickey, Global Manager of Email Marketing at IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group). "Since using Spark, it has become an invaluable resource for my team. I've been impressed with the level of access, participation and responsiveness by all levels within the StrongMail organization, and it's this strong commitment to customer service that clearly sets them apart within the industry."

"The ability to harness the power of social business is a competitive differentiator for StrongMail," said Lynda Smith, SVP of Marketing for Jive Software. "Jive customers like StrongMail are adopting social in the enterprise to change the way they do business and generate material breakthroughs in revenue, customer engagement and innovation."

"StrongMail is committed to making our clients successful, and Jive plays a critical role in that effort by helping us provide our customers with ready access to the people, tools and information that they need to do their jobs effectively," said Kristin Hersant, vice president of corporate marketing at StrongMail. "Given our background in social media, we understood the value that a social business solution could provide to our company. Jive's reputation as the category leader, ranked by top independent analysts, made it the clear choice. We are very pleased with our selection, and have already seen a significant impact in terms of streamlined customer support and heightened customer satisfaction."

About Social Business

Social Business is the new way to engage employees, customers and the social web. Jive's Social Business Software (SBS) combines the power of community software, collaboration software, social networking software, and social media monitoring offerings into an integrated platform. Just as social technologies have changed our personal lives, Social Business is changing how enterprises create competitive advantage.

About Jive – The New Way to Business

Jive is the largest and fastest growing independent Social Business Software company in the world. Jive is backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com.

About StrongMail Systems, Inc.

StrongMail enables marketers to forge meaningful, profitable and long-lasting connections with their customers through email marketing and social media. Offering a comprehensive suite of technology and services, StrongMail takes a fundamentally different approach to traditional email service providers that offers many unique advantages to brands. StrongMail's dedicated solutions offer the lowest total cost of ownership of any enterprise email marketing solution and easily integrate with customer data sources to help marketers improve the performance of their email marketing campaigns. StrongMail's email and social CRM agency provides industry-leading strategic and creative services to help marketers listen, learn, engage and influence best customers. It's these differences that have led Fortune 2000 brands to switch to StrongMail. Learn more at www.strongmail.com.

SOURCE Jive Software