» 93Startup Profile: Mzinga, Enterprise Community Management :: 93South

Our next 93Startup Profile is from another MITX finalist that is taking on the task of managing social communities for top brands including AOL and ESPN. It looks like they have been doing quite well with "14,000 communities under management".

What do you think of Mzinga? Let Boston Know.

Mzinga
Location: Burlington, MA
Funding: $32.5 million in early 2008
# of Employees: 150
URL: http://www.mzinga.com
Blog: Mzinga Blog
Careers: Mzinga Career Page
Submitted By: Perkett PR

What’s your elevator pitch?

At Mzinga, we believe that companies can harness the wisdom of their existing communities of people – their employees, customers, their partners, and their shareholders – to help solve their business needs and provide tangible value to the business.

To do this, we combine the richest suite of social media applications with advanced, interactive social networking tools—all powered by software-as-a-service, enterprise community platform. We also offer a fully integrated comprehensive on-demand learning 2.0 suite to give customers the benefits of both formal and informal knowledge sharing. And with our best practice community management and moderation services bundled in, we can ensure that your community thrives as a safe, welcoming environment that delivers business results.

And the proof is in our results. Today, we have 14,000 communities under management and support 27 million users across the globe. Some of the world’s leading brands—including AOL, ESPN, Chevron & ABC to name just a few— all rely on Mzinga solutions to help them increase revenue, improve workplace satisfaction and drive service and support improvements through community

Who is your target market?

Mzinga has three target audiences:

· Workplace communities & Learning 2.0 Solutions: HR & Training

· Marketplace Communities: Marketing

· Extended Enterprise (customers/partner support): Customer Service, IT & CIOs

What makes you different or stand out?

Mzinga is focused on helping our customers achieve growth, innovation, learning, and essentially, competitive advantage, through online community solutions. And we’ve designed our business and our solutions to give our customers the ease of use, flexibility and scalability to do so effectively.

Single source provider: Mzinga offers complete, integrated solutions that include all of the best-in-class tools and technologies, services and best practices to design, launch, manage, moderate and track successful online communities.
Targeted solution sets: We target our community solutions to address common workplace, marketing, and customer and partner support challenges—the areas that we believe online communities can have the greatest impact. Each solution brings the capabilities that have the most relevance and impact on solving particular needs in those areas to the forefront.
Robust, flexible technology suite: Our solutions include the broadest suite of social media applications with the most flexible deployment capabilities. You can leverage our capabilities to create complete destination communities, or to embed our capabilities within their existing or third-party sites.
In-depth community management and moderation services
Mzinga’s solution sets include ongoing community management and moderation services to ensure that your community is a welcoming, safe and thriving environment within your business. Our community managers and moderators are supported by advanced administration and moderation tools that enable them to address your needs efficiently and effectively.
Proven success
Many of the biggest brands in business rely on Mzinga for online community and social media solutions, including ABC, AOL, ESPN, CBS.com, iVillage, and Chevron Corporation. Our proven success and credibility in the marketplace is a testament to our partnership approach to every client relationship.

Who are the founders / key people?

Rick Faulk, President & CEO: Rick’s role as President & CEO of Mzinga represents a natural progression in a career that has long revolved around software-as-a-service solutions, on-demand collaboration, and innovation in executive leadership positions at companies such as Cisco, WebEx, Intranets.com and PictureTel.
Barry Libert, Chairman: As the founder and CEO of one of Mzinga’s predecessor companies, Shared Insights, Barry Libert was one of the first in the industry to recognize and promote the value of communities and Web 2.0 technologies in enabling enterprises to communicate and collaborate to make better decisions based on the experience of peers, experts, and leading industry vendors. As the co-author of the critically acclaimed book "We Are Smarter Than Me," Barry and his co-authors used the power of Web 2.0 technologies and the Wiki-based contributions of more than 4,000 people to illustrate how businesses could profit from the wisdom of crowds
Dan Bruns EVP, Social Media Solutions: One of the first pioneers of the Internet to lead the way in social media, Dan Bruns brings to Mzinga almost two decades of entrepreneurial experience in online technology innovation. Prior to joining Mzinga, Dan was co-founder and CEO of Prospero Technologies, where he was instrumental in developing the company’s secure, reliable platform and custom-branded, high-performance community applications and moderation tools

What is your startup story?

Mzinga is the culmination of three organizations with a heritage of innovation, proven success, and thought leadership. The company’s predecessor organizations—KnowledgePlanet, Shared Insights, and Prospero Technologies— were recognized pioneers in their own right for developing award-winning SaaS technologies, spearheading visionary initiatives, and creating the blueprint for the business social media world. The subsequent rapid emergence and rise of Mzinga as a market-leading online community and business social media solutions provider is a testament to the company’s leadership and strategic vision.

When we began the process of launching the combined entity, we knew we needed a name that would reflect not only our business, but the values we wanted to establish and the company we wanted to create.

In our brainstorming sessions, we kept coming back to beehives, which have long been used as a symbol of industry, teamwork, perseverance, and community. As a company whose focus would be enabling businesses to harness the intrinsic power of their communities, we knew we couldn’t find a more apt symbol to represent us to the world. In our research, we discovered that in Swahili, the word for "beehive" is mzinga. It was perfect for us – memorable, evocative, and as unique as we are.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -