Paragon Software Group – A Social Experiment

Life is good at Paragon Software. We just finished one of our most successful years to date. The momentum rolling into 2010 is looking really good for us. I am still managing the direction of the companies channel sales group and helping out with product management. Being in these two key sections of Paragon Software Group lets me get a very high level view of where the company is and will be moving to in the future. I am excited for what this year is to bring with new products and some additional technology that is needed and different enough to get peoples attention. One of the obstacles many companies face is the ability to get exposure to more people. Traditional marketing only goes so far and emailing news is not the best way to communicate with people and even worse if you want to have your message shared with others. Social Media seemed like a great venue for Paragon to shift into. The company has a corporate marketing team that manages a Twitter profile and a Facebook page but our region (America) wanted to do more. So we started creating accounts on social media sites so we can push out messaging specifically for the channel and the corporate products in the US.

Paragon Software Group Facebook

I setup a Facebook page for the company and kicked it off with a contest for a free 1TB hard drive and some other prizes. All you need to do for a chance at winning is become a fan. Too easy. Facebook will be the platform to share updates and promotions as well as push out news to fans that want to follow us. I am getting more familiar with Facebook Markup Language or FBML to the rest of you geeks. There are some great examples of Facebook Fan sites that I am using for inspiration. Stay tuned for updates.

Paragon Software Group America Twitter

Every company should have a profile on Twitter. Just about every article on my Corporate Social Media Reading List that talked about Twitter made this point very clear. even as a passive user Twitter can be beneficial. The best companies on Twitter are doing more proactive updates and being a voice for their company and customers. That’s the plan with the Paragon America profile. I’ll be putting out news about storage, server virtualization and retweeting news and tweets from our partners.

Paragon Software Blog

Having a Facebook and Twitter profile is great but the company needed a place to hold key information and a platform to spread news outside of 140 characters. To do this we needed a Paragon Software blog. I chose WordPress as the platform since I already know how to use it and they are by far the easiest and most customizable blogging platform to use. I started by putting in some of thje latest press about the company and have several new posts planned covering our products and the industry. Subscribe to the Paragon Software Blog RSS feed. Running this blog on WordPress servers has some limitations with customization but for the purpose of the site, they offer more than enough for now.