Services

Consulting - Training - Lectures - Community building

Consulting

Our consulting services are completely adaptable to your needs - we have worked on projects ranging from a few brainstorming sessions and a recommendation document to year-long engagements with included development of custom software. Our fields of expertise are:

Online communities

Realize the business potential of online communities! We can help you find the best business processes to optimize using online communities and help develop a comprehensive strategy plan. If you are interested in a complete community building package which includes software platform definition and implementation, please see our Community building services.

Social media

Our social media consulting will help your company discover what communication channels can be enhanced using social media, find the social profiles of your users and optimize your social media strategy.

Virtual worlds

Virtual worlds are not as niche as you may believe. Studies show that over 300 million users are already using some kind of virtual world - from play-oriented flash worlds to 3D virtual worlds, and a study by Strategy Analytics predicts that a billion users will be using virtual worlds in the next 10 years. Virtual worlds can help you bridge the geography and communication gap, save on travel expenses and build stronger relationships with your customers, business partners and among your employees. We can help you discover (or build!) the kind of virtual environment that is most suited to your business needs and help with the comprehensive, long term virtual world business strategy.

Distance learning

E-learning platforms enable education institutions a simple way to expand their reach, foster better relationships with students and lower operating costs. Artesia employes Moodle-certified teachers with extensive experience in using the Moodle learning platform.

Training

Our targeted training services are focused on helping your employees better understand their users and communicate with them using the most appropriate social media tools. The training sessions are customized for your company and are a great starting point in defining or fine-tuning your social media, online community or virtual world business strategy. We currenty offer the following training courses:

Social media and the enterprise
Best practices in social media communication
Managing online communities
Second Life introduction
Second Life advanced

Lectures and workshops

Jump ahead of the competition with our lectures and workshops! Our lectures help you realize the effect that disruptive social media, user community, distance learning and virtual world technologies will have on your business. The focused 90 minute sessions are a great way to get a feel for the future - and at an introductory price of 500 EUR, they are excellent value for money.

Lectures:

Introduction to social media and user communities
Enterprise use of user communities
Building user communities
Introduction to virtual worlds
E-learning with Moodle

Our in-depth workshops familiarize you with the social media and virtual world technologies and the effect they are having on your relationships and conversations with your employees, customers, and business partners. They will help you decide on the best way to transform your business - whether the internal communication and collaboration, product development, sales and marketing or user support. The workshops are composed of two 4-hour parts and are priced at 2500 EUR per workshop.

Workshops:

Social media technologies
Building user communities
Virtual worlds - Second Life and beyond

The lectures and workshops are available worldwide - either in-person for local customers or using the latest virtual communication technologies.

Community building

	"'Build a great environment, and they will come' has been the attitude of technologists, who think everything runs on physics. Instead brands and developers should think, 'Build a great community and they will come.'"
	Steve Prentice, VP of Gartner Research, July 2008

Online communities are a part of user-focused communication, using their preferred communication channels, called social media. While building online communities is not a universal solution for all companies and brands, they can be a powerful business tool. They can help transform all parts of your business by engaging customers during product development, spreading word of your services and products to target users and fostering sales, enabling users a degree of self-support to streamline your customer service department or assist with the enterprise collaboration and coordination. But success does not come easy - it depends on careful planning, knowing the social profiles of your users and exact business goals.

Using our SocialMatch™ methodology we can help you enhance your existing online community or build a new one by accurately defining your target users and preparing the optimal list of community tools based on the users and the business goals. The community specification document can be easily turned into software specification by your IT professionals - or simply leave the platform implementation and technical support to us. We also provide employee training to help them effectively communicate with the future online community users and are there during the crucial first phases of community launch.

For more information about the business potential of online communities, please see our "Using online communities in business" whitepaper, available in our library.