iKonect

The Challenge

Create Romania’s first Online Business Network. Then redefine the concept and take it to a global level.

Short presentation

Any businessman will tell you personal connections and interactions are the key to business success. Most of them belong to one or more social networks related to business. Some built their whole strategy on social networking and lead generation.
We were commissioned by Rockmedia, probably the most innovative new media network, to develop Romania’s first business social network and find a good monetization model that can be applied locally as well as globally.

So we started planning. We researched and found that most of the business social networks available at the moment were focused on developing the network and offering the network interaction tools such as groups, internal messaging, recommendations and others. Most of them lacked business specific tools users could interact with and use in day to day work.
So we thought we should challenge that.

The solution

We’ve split the development and communication strategy in four stages:

• Pre-Beta release – developing profiles, defining user case scenarios, testing interactions, adding the global timeline, developing the first version of the albums, creating a brand identity, creating a communication strategy draft and defining private beta launch strategy.
• Private beta release – further development of profiles and user interaction scenarios, groups feature, bug fixing, further development of albums and communicating iKonect as the first local Business Social Network.
• Public beta launch – development in groups, profiles, company profiles and features, search engine optimization, online marketing through social media, online PR and rich media in Rockmedia’s network.
• The final planned step – launch of innovative products that would act as cloud computing software for companies outsourcing their business software solutions to online. What we did here was invent new models in interaction, collaboration, communication and productivity with the help of social media.

The results

Once we’ve launched the Private beta, the crowd went wild. In just two months after the launch we managed to gather over 4750 mentions from local media and bloggers regarding the product we’ve developed and marketed.
The show is still on the road and we continue to add new features, develop and innovate for this product on a day to day basis.