ChannelEyes

2012-02-15T13:07:00.002-05:00

ChannelEyes is announcing public release of the first free and secure social network for Suppliers and Channel Partners to use every day!

Vendors can now join at: http://pilot.channeleyes.com

A simple wizard will walk you through creating your vendor account. Once you login, you can create one or more feeds for your company and start posting. A Welcome Post is the first thing a partner will see when they start following your feed. The whole process will only take a few minutes!

VENDORS | SIGN UP TODAY!
(Channel Partners coming soon!)

1. Go to http://pilot.channeleyes.com
2. Enter business email address and click:

3. Go to inbox and confirm the email

4. Complete wizard with company information
5. Once you complete wizard, create a new Feed by pressing:
6. Finally, start posting!

NEED A HAND? | ATTEND A QUICK DEMO

1. Thursday, Feb 16 @ 10am EST

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/471003214

2. Thursday, Feb 16 @ 3pm EST https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/907819134

3. Friday, Feb 17 @ 10am EST https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/234986622

4. Friday, Feb 17 @ 3pm EST https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/628358470

TIMELINE | THINGS ARE MOVING FAST!

FOLLOW US | FOR MORE BREAKING NEWS

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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/channeleyes
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/company/channeleyes

ChannelEyes Coming VERY SOON - Now in Pilot!

2011-12-29T17:21:00.003-05:00

We have had an exciting holiday season here at ChannelEyes as the platform was completed and a number of pilots were kicked off. The level of interest remains very high in the industry with almost daily coverage.

ChannelEyes was started as a better way for Vendors to work with and engage their Channel Partners every day. Something that makes Partner Portals, Newsletters and Email - work better!

We are opening up the pilot to all Early Access participants starting on January 12th.

With thousands of Channel Partners and over 500 vendors already signed up, the early access window will be closing in the next couple of weeks. You still have time to invite your colleagues to sign up at www.ChannelEyes.com

Remember to follow us on Facebook or Twitter for all the latest information!

ChannelEyes to Open Early Access on January 12
Several large organizations and associations are currently working with their members on a ChannelEyes pilot. We will start activating our Early Access participants on January 12!

What Makes ChannelEyes Different?
One of the most common questions we get is: What makes ChannelEyes different than other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn?

In a recent patent filing, ChannelEyes demonstrated 26 new and unique technologies spread across 7 major categories. We pushed the envelope in security, information filtering, content relevance and posting management to name a few!

"Charlie Channel" Sparking Interest
At a recent keynote overseas, Bob Godgart, Managing Partner of ChannelEyes was surprised in the level of interest in our mascot Charlie.

Not only did he field questions on stage, they kept pouring in afterwards as well. "Perhaps the question about Charlie's gender came as the most surprising!" Godgart said.

ChannelEyes Prepares for First Pilots

2011-12-08T17:39:00.001-05:00

In one of the most anticipated Channel product launches of2011, ChannelEyes is preparing to go into pilot mode in the next few weeks. A few months after announcing the new socialnetwork and releasing an early access signup website, the platform is goingthrough its final quality assurance testing.

Larry Walsh from Channelnomics scooped some of the initial pilotmembers as CompTIA and HTG Peer Groups earlier this week. Arlin Sorensen, HTG Founder, confirmed thenews and posted publicly that he was very impressed after seeing a demo ofChannelEyes: “It is what we need in theIT channel to reduce the noise and help us have meaningful and relevantrelationships between IT companies, vendors, distributors and partnercommunities. I am pumped about the pilot HTG will be doing!

The early pilot groups will be augmented by the thousands of earlyaccess participants shortly after. Larrywent on the state that “ChannelEyes is different from other social networks andprevious attempts at socializing the channel.” It is a communication platformthat will drive a new level of engagement between vendors and their ChannelPartners.

Having a trusted security model as well as advanced filteringability, it will solve the big problem of information overload and lack of programparticipation. “Vendors get frustratedby their inability to communicate effectively with partners” said Walsh. “ChannelEyes aims to create a platform throughwhich vendors can communicate to select or mass audiences with news, materialsand promotions.”

Stay tuned: We will beannouncing a number of other pilots in the next few days – the excitement isvery high from all different parts of the industry: vendors, distributors, associations, peergroups and the media!

Kind of Like Facebook, but...

2011-11-18T13:51:00.001-05:00

Early chatter about ChannelEyes likened it to popular consumer social media tools such as Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter. You don’t have to go far to read about the viral growth of social as a communication vehicle and its steady movement into business.

Most vendors are experiencing alarming drops in email open rates, webinar attendance and portal usage. On the other side of the fence, Channel Partners are getting inundated from dozens of vendors that are spraying across 30 different vehicles. What is missing is engagement – a conversation – that is relevant and beneficial for both sides.

Recent social metrics speak for themselves:

Average age of a Facebook user is now 38 (from 33 in 2008).
On an average day almost a quarter of users are active by liking content, commenting on a status or photo, or creating their own content. Over half of all people engage weekly with their social network.
Average number of connections is 229 (up from 150 in 2009). Friends are evenly distributed across different parts of life including school, co-workers, family, neighbors, hobbies and peer groups.

The growth of social media in business has been surprisingly strong. It is likely that you have spent some time polishing your Linkedin, allowing some colleagues to leak into your personal network on Facebook and perhaps even built a Twitter following. Mirroring some of the challenges of bringing consumer devices into the workplace, consumer social media presents another layer of complexity:

1. Security

Knowing who you are dealing with – especially when it comes to sensitive business dealings – is absolutely critical. Trust is the core of business relationships, and having a layer of authentication will be required for engagement.

2. Noise

Business social will allow you the ability to self-select and filter information, giving you as much or as little information that you require to be successful. This reduces the massive broadcasting and amplification that has become too apparent in today’s major social networks.

3. Productivity

In the end, the value of anything that you add to your business will be defined by its ability to drive revenue or control costs. Properly applied, business social will work on both sides of the equation.

It is likely that social networking will continue to mature and replace traditional vehicles in usage and importance. It has the power to transform the way we communicate, build relationships and trust, learn and transact business. How would you work better in a conversation format?

Collaborating in bite sized chunks, effectively building a message or a story, and moving the ball forward in real-time will be hallmarks of this new medium. The conversations will use links and rich media and utilize the power of the crowd to solve issues.

In the end, it is hard to predict the impact of business social – it will never completely replace the written word, email, or other vehicles such as webinars or video. It will definitely not replace the benefit of human contact that trade shows, in person meetings and voice calls have. However, in a world that works around constant contact, it will be impossible to ignore.

Early ChannelEyes Signups Reveal Interesting Industry Trending

2011-10-26T13:54:00.000-04:00

Teaser website growingat a viral rate, revealing key Channel alliances

ChannelEyes today announced new Industry Trending data from its early accesswebsite. Earlier this month, ChannelEyesannounced that it is creating the first free and secure social network toaggregate Channel Program information, transforming communication betweensuppliers and Channel Partners.

Since that time,thousands of social media savvy people have signed up providing key industrytrends and insight. “It was interestingto see the sharp demand from the vendor side” said Bob Godgart, Founder ofChannelEyes, as 35% of initial signups come from the supplier community.

Proving how broadthe supplier community is, a significant number of sign-ups have come from manufacturers,distributors, associations, consultants, franchises and master MSPs:

“The response toour early access website has surpassed expectations” said Godgart. “It has truly gone viral in only a few weeks.” With such a large sample size of ChannelPartners, almost three quarters of which are Owner/CEO level, it wasinteresting to see the different vertical and technology specialtiesrepresented. In addition to traditionalIT vendors, a strong showing of Managed Service Providers, ISVs, Telco,Vertical Systems, Print and Audio/Video professionals are also looking forbetter collaboration with their suppliers as well as a simplified way to followChannel Programs.

The response has also been strongglobally, with over 30 countries represented in the first few weeks. Beyond North America, a significant amount ofsignups came from the United Kingdom, Australia, and Western Europe.

The Channel Partnersselected their key suppliers they wanted to follow on the early access website. The average partner indicated they workclosely with 7 suppliers.

The average mixincluded:

2major hardware/software vendors
1-2major distributors
1-2 associations,peer groups or coaches
2-3cloud tools
50%of Channel Partners wanted to follow a PSA
Thetop 3 most requested: Microsoft, HP and Ingram

With a universeof over 3,000 suppliers, around 600 were consistently chosen. In fact, 54 were selected more than 10% ofthe time. Of these top 54 suppliers,over 90% have reached out to ChannelEyes for early access – including all ofthe top 10.

“Today, programinformation is sent to Channel Partners by email, newsletters, webinars,telesales, social media tools and usually stored in web portals” Godgart said. “Tremendous amounts of time and energy gointo creating these materials but they receive little traffic.”

ChannelEyes.comwill be the single place for Channel Partners to get a snapshot of new programhighlights every day on a Social Wall. They will follow feeds from suppliers, control the programs they need tofollow, filter the information they want to share and easily build socialconversations around it.

Channel Partners andsuppliers can still sign up for early access today at http://www.channeleyes.com

About ChannelEyes

ChannelEyes LLC is creating the first free and secure social network toaggregate Channel Program information, transforming communication betweensuppliers and Channel Partners, integrators, dealers and agents.

For more information, follow us on:

www.twitter.com/channeleyes
www.facebook.com/channeleyes

www.linkedin.com/company/channeleyes

channeleyes.blogspot.com

ChannelEyes^TM is a trademarkof ChannelEyes LLC. All other trademarks mentioned in this document arethe property of their respective owners.

MediaInquiries:

press@channeleyes.com

518-915-1188

Business Social and the Future of Channel Communication

2011-10-10T13:36:00.000-04:00

Jay McBain, Advisor to ChannelEyes
October 10, 2011

One of the most intriguing trends underway is the future of business to business communication. The meteoric rise of consumer social media has inspired new thinking on an age-old problem of building, nurturing and leveraging the right business relationships. In fact, Tiffani Bova, VP at Gartner Research, has added Business Social to 5th place on her 10 developing trends to watch.

In the past, I have written about Dandelion Marketing, conceived by Chris Anderson and made popular in Channel circles by Jeremy Epstein. In a universe of billions of messages across dozens of different broadcast mediums, the challenges are escalating for both sides:

• Channel Partners are getting numb to the increasing amount of noise and increasingly joining forces with their peers (and competitors) to cut through it all. Resources and money are tighter than ever and the effort it takes to find the right information at the right time is growing exponentially.

• Vendors, distributors and all members of the supply side are scrambling to participate in the latest marketing vehicle du jour. Maintaining legacy portals, newsletters, direct mail and other broadcast engines, combined with keeping up with consumer social media outlets as well as podcasts, vodcasts, webinars and virtual trade shows is getting out of hand.

Further complicating this issue are other trends such as cloud computing, mobility and vertical specialization. I argued earlier this year in the blog “A World With 100,000 Channel Vendors?” that we are a few years away from potentially having more vendors than resellers. If Channel Partners are having difficulty keeping up to date with programs, promotions, product updates and education of a half dozen vendors, what happens when that number multiplies?

Language that has grown from consumer social media is now poised to be applied to business.

For example:

Social Graph – a mapping of everyone you know in the world. The Channel social graph is interesting because it includes Solution Providers of all types, vendors, distributors, associations, franchisees, consultants, media and bloggers, events as well as peer and user group communities. Think you have a small network? Sit down for a moment and list names from all of the above influencers!

Social Ties – the level of relationship with everyone in your social graph. This was one of the key differentiators of Google+ when it hit the market earlier this year; Not only do you have “circles” of acquaintances from different parts of your life (work, school, hobbies, sports, neighbors, etc.), your relationship within each circle has strong, weak and absent ties. Each of these ties have differing and sometimes surprising amounts of influence on what people read, follow, and subsequently buy. (If you are interested, A quick search on Granovetter 1973 will fill in the blanks here)

Social Learning – a new trend in absorbing information in 140 character peer recommended snippets and having the option of clicking for more. Learning is now an iterative process, non-linear, networked and collaborative. This is the modern form of storytelling, a narrative that is built from your peer community and spread.It is inevitable that social technologies will continue to grow in both personal and business arenas. The line between them needs to be established as noise filtering is the most important attribute for driving business value.

This is simply a function of evolution:

• The first 5 years of the internet grew large and unwieldy until search engines filtered and tamed it.
• When it became unwieldy again, social media stepped in and provided another personal filter for the past 5 years.
• Social media is now approaching the unwieldy stage, and Business Social will provide the additional security and self-selected filters to bring the tonnage of information back under control.

Business Social will allow two-way collaboration as opposed to one-way broadcast. It will be secure so both sides will have trust in the message and source. Finally, it will be purpose driven. Many consumers were turned off social media due to the frivolity of what someone had for breakfast or the fear of skeletons resurfacing from the past.

What are your thoughts? Is this the start of a new era of business communication or simply a new set of marketing vehicles to augment the legacy ones? Is there a demographic gate to this trend?

ChannelEyes Creating the First Secure Social Network for the Channel

2011-09-30T14:43:00.000-04:00

East Greenbush, NY – September 30, 2011 — ChannelEyes LLC today announced that they are creating the first free and secure social network to aggregate Channel Program information, transforming communication between suppliers and Channel Partners, integrators, dealers and agents.

For all types of Channel Partners, ChannelEyes.com will be the single place to see a snapshot of new channel information every day. Partners can control the programs they need to follow, filter the information they want to share and easily build social conversations around it.

For suppliers like vendors, distributors, associations, franchises and other players in the ecosystem, it will be the place to engage with their entire channel. Organizations will be able to target the right person with the right information at the right time. The net result is better engagement and sell-through.

ChannelEyes is the brainchild of Bob Godgart, a well-known industry veteran and current Chairman of CompTIA. Bob was a pioneer in Cloud Computing, and spent the last 11 years automating how Channel Partners run their business. Now, the focus is on enhancing how they communicate. Godgart’s vision is to create a “ridiculously simple and secure way to engage all Channel Partners.”

Gartner Group noted in their Channel research that social communication and collaboration are in the Top 5 Strategic Technology Areas for 2011. Traditional vehicles such as email, newsletters and Portals are quickly being replaced by social conversations across peer networks.

The ChannelEyes team has talked to hundreds of Channel Partners and they agree it’s virtually impossible to continually read and disseminate industry information. In fact, only 5% use vendor portals and less than 17% open vendor emails. “This is a big problem!” states Godgart, “and ChannelEyes is going to fix that. What Facebook did for collaboration among friends, ChannelEyes will do for business.”

ChannelEyes has an impressive roster of industry talent and has secured strong backing from leading vendors, associations and major VARs. Announcements will be made in the coming weeks.

“Business social applications go beyond simple sharing to create an industry focused, secure environment where information is filtered reaching the right person at the right time” said David Geoghegan, Chief Technology Officer of ChannelEyes. The Company has committed to product availability before year-end.

Vendors and channel partners can sign up for early access today at http://www.channeleyes.com

About ChannelEyes

ChannelEyes LLC will provide the first free and secure social network to aggregate Channel Program information , transforming communication between suppliers and Channel Partners, integrators, dealers and agents.

For more information about ChannelEyes, follow us on:

www.facebook.com/channeleyes
www.twitter.com/channeleyes
www.linkedin.com/channeleyes

ChannelEyesTM is a trademark of ChannelEyes LLC. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.

Media Inquiries:

press@channeleyes.com
518-915-1188