Joining the Merced Group to Offer Social Business Consulting Services

Social business has great potential and I have shared much of my excitement over its opportunities, as well as ideas for its success on this blog.  I am now pleased to announce that I have joined with Catherine Shinners and the Merced Group as a partner. The Merced Group provides business strategy, program design, and implementation services to companies and organizations on social business efforts. The services we offer include: online communities, enterprise collaboration, social media marketing, as well as product marketing and management.

I have been doing some consulting over the past few years on an informal basis, along with my other activities, and this move provides an organization and channel for my consulting going forward. I also plan to get more involved in consulting now, putting into practice all that I have learned in the social business space, both inside the enterprise on the Web.

I chose to partner with Catherine because we have complementary skills and she has an established practice in the social business space. Catherine brings both collaboration expertise and a technology background to bear in her practice. She has helped clients successfully position and market new products, build authentic customer relationships through online communities and create compelling online user experiences for productive collaboration. She writes the Cathexis blog.

Catherine has been based in Palo Alto for the past 23 years and has held senior director level positions in product management, product marketing, business development and marketing at such firms as: WebEx, Tandem, and Compaq.   She developed new lines of business in enterprise software for internet infrastructure solutions for the financial services and telecommunications market, led go-to-market efforts for Web-based business solutions, identified and structured business and technology partnerships and successfully launched Web 2.0 and SaaS online services for collaboration software. 

One of her recent Merced Group projects was the creation of a community strategy and management of the ongoing program of a strategic, global corporate social responsibility initiative that engaged a select executive management clientele in the education sector.  It currently has close to 2500 member sin over 100 countries. The online community program (www.getideas.org) provided education leaders a collaboration environment to advance 21st century innovation and transformation in education and received a 2011 Computerworld Honors Laureate award in the collaboration category.

I will remain connected with Darwin Ecosystems and a part of the team. I am also continuing to provide software reviews on the AppGap blog.  I am excited about this new direction and look forward to writing more about it as it evolves. 

 

Comments

[Gautam]

Congrats, Bill! Hope 2012 is a great year for this venture!

[Jenny Ambrozek]

Congrats indeed Bill. Wishing you interesting new projects and solutions to discover.

[bill Ives]

Jenny and Gautam - thanks to both of you for your well wishes

[Rawn]

Congratulations Bill! Good seeing you last week.

[bill Ives]

Rawn

Thanks so much. great to see you again at Lotusphere. Bill