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When you first visited the eCrowds site, you probably noticed that eCrowds is a hosted platform for managing corporate web content and building a hosted B2B community. You probably also noticed that we have free, group, pro, and enterprise-level editions. However, because our focus is to strengthen the SaaS content management market and our solution, we are making a change. We will be offering eCrowds completely free-of-charge in 2009. We've developed eCrowds to allow organizations and marketers to effectively and easily manage their websites and online communities, and in turn, tap into the wisdom of their crowd.

By offering our eCrowds solution for no cost through 2009, we are doing exactly what we suggest our clients and users do with their system. We're opening the floodgates to our community's feedback and ideas by making eCrowds freely available for anyone who wants to use it. In turn, all we ask for is your feedback. eCrowds is an extremely powerful SaaS content and community management platform, and it's our goal to make our solution the one-stop shop for all things Web CMS, Web community, and SEO-related.

eCrowds will help your organization easily build and manage its website through a simple web interface where you can view, edit, create, and make new content available instantly, without the need for technical experience or assistance.  The best part is, because we're offering eCrowds free-of-charge and it's a fully hosted system, all of this can be done at a fraction of the cost of locally installed CMS solutions, and you never need to worry about servers or scalability. eCrowds also comes with a thorough set of community tools such as forums, wikis, and idea exchanges that can be tied into any or all areas of your site, enabling you to encourage active participation on your website from customers and prospects whose feedback you value.

We're also aware of the value of feedback, which is why we've made the eCrowds forum and idea exchange available for all of our users. We encourage you to give eCrowds a try, and since we're offering it for free through this year, you have nothing to lose!

If you're interested in seeing firsthand the value that eCrowds can bring to your organization, sign-up for your free account today!

Much of the recent commentary about the social Web and its slow march to inevitability has been primarily focused on individuals and the ways in which they use the Web. While it's true that connections made between them will be the driving force behind 'the Social Web' simply becoming 'the Web', there will certainly be room for businesses to participate and thrive in this space.

To join in this transformation, businesses must take on many of the traits that individuals display on the social Web -- they must be flexible, fast, easily accessible, and most importantly, the exchange of information must be reciprocal. Knowledge should travel from business to customer and, in equal measure, from customer to business. Many of eCrowds' most powerful features, like blogging, content tagging, and Idea Exchanges, are the perfect tools for your business to facilitate this kind of interaction. They allow clients, users, or customers to contribute to your business and improve your product or service in a meaningful way. While the customer has always been the focus, businesses must make an effort to alter the methods they use to transform prospects to customers, and then transform those customers to ambassadors.

For too long, what most people think of as marketing has actually been 'direct marketing' - when businesses, using only their perspective and exclusively on their terms, simply and broadly "yell" at prospects, telling them what they can only assume that the prospect would like to hear. But with the commenting, rating, and forum creation capabilities of eCrowds, mining the customer experience for insight, preferences, real-life use cases, and fresh thinking has never been easier. Businesses and organizations of all sizes can transform this information into more highly targeted social marketing efforts that directly impact their business and aid in constantly creating and improving upon site content.

Solid social content management solutions will also include tools aimed at assisting marketing departments in their efforts. eCrowds boasts easy integration with Salesforce.com and Google Analytics, and a variety of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) tools, all extremely valuable in developing and managing opt-in campaigns and strategies. These tools provide your organization with the opportunity to jump-start more social, intuitive, and inclusive marketing. While many businesses will never get to the point of handing the customers the keys to the store, providing them with the closest thing -- a real voice within the company -- will do wonders to attract and retain customers, and make the most of the time that these valuable resources spend interacting with their brand.