SocialSphere, Inc.

United States Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps is facing a series of unprecedented challenges as the senior leadership confronted the reality of “The Long War” both on the battlefield and at home.  As regular deployment cycles and the stresses that come with them become the reality of life for Marines and their families, the USMC faces the challenge of communicating to a new generation of Marines and their families in a quickly changing technology and communications environment.  Working with J. Walter Thompson, SocialSphere conducted a major series of research initiatives to understand the way that Marines and their loved ones think about information, technology, and communications about all aspects of life in the Corps.

Using the results of over dozens of focus groups, over 10,000 interviews, and an ORBIT Report, SocialSphere worked with the USMC and JWT to create a plan for the development of an Organizational Communications System that will help the USMC meet the ever-evolving challenges of being on a wartime footing.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick’s 2006 campaign broke new ground in showing how online tools could be used to effectively harness the power of grassroots citizen engagement.  While the campaign served as a blueprint for future campaigns, including the 2008 Obama campaign, Governor Patrick faced the challenge of promoting citizen involvement in the governing process.  Charged with the task of creating a platform to engage citizens in the 2009 budget process, SocialSphere and senior members of Governor Patrick’s staff developed an Idea Mine that focused citizen engagement and energy around the big challenges facing the sate as it confronted a series of difficult budget cut decisions.  Hundreds of citizens from across the state participated, and a task force of a dozen members took the ideas of citizens from across the state and organized them into a report to present to the Governor and his staff.

At the end of the process, the Governor and members of his Cabinet met in person with the task force to discuss the ideas of citizens from across the state as they navigated their way through the budget process and sought ways to incorporate the ideas into the 2009 budget.

National Thoroughbred Racing Association

The National Thoroughbred Racing Association, the marketing and governing body of thoroughbred racing faced difficult challenges adapting to a new era in sports.  With an aging fan base and a series of high profile controversies involving safety and drug use confronting the sport, the CEO and senior leadership of the industry realized that in order to move the sport forward, it had to open up and embrace fans, technology, and bring in ideas from the outside to help grow a shrinking sport.  SocialSphere worked with the NTRA to create an all encompassing online strategy that used social media to better communicate to fans, as well as worked with the CEO to open direct channels of communication to fans.

The NTRA has gone from having a very minimal online presence to embracing and using social media in all aspects of the organization’s efforts.  In 2008, the LAist named thoroughbred racing “The most blogger friendly sport in America.”

Catholic Charities USA

In commemoration of their 100th anniversary, Catholic Charities, USA is seeking to find new and innovative solutions to meet the organization’s goal of reducing the impact of poverty on the world.  Working with the national leadership of the organization, SocialSphere used our Idea Mine to solicit and organize ideas from around the country of how local Catholic Charities organizations could better combat poverty in their own communities.  The early results have included a detailed report and presentation to leadership on “Five Big Ideas” for solving poverty in the future – and a string of additional online events are scheduled for 2010.

Understanding impact of new investment in old industry

As the economic crisis and the uncertainty that it has caused has forced financial institutions to seek out new areas of investment, private equity firms like Thomas H. Lee seek to gain a deep understanding of the potential of new investments to ensure that they are making prudent decisions on behalf of their investors.  SocialSphere led the diligence research surrounding a potential multi-billion dollar investment by Thomas H. Lee Partners into an industry that had never before seen serious efforts toward private investment.  Using years of industry expertise and research experience, SocialSphere was able to deliver financial forecasts and sales models for the potential target, as well as advise on best practices for improving the value of the investment over time, by shedding light on years of historic data that no other firms had been able to understand or address in such a thorough and systematic manner.

Harvard University

On several occasions in the last year, we had the honor of advising President Drew Faust's office on a host of issues related to Millennials, their attitudes about life after Harvard and their use of Web 2.0 and social technologies.  Our work included qualitative research on campus, in-depth interviews with parents of Millennials and presentations to Harvard's Council of Deans and the Communications Directors from the Ivy Plus consortium of colleges and universities.  Based on the insights derived from this and other primary research, we will introduce "Parents' House," an online collaborative forum for parents of college students on selective campuses in 2010.

Nokia
The ongoing changes in the mobile phone and smart phone market have presented a series of difficult strategic challenges for all organizations within the industry.   As Nokia, a leader in the international market for cell phones strives to keep pace and ahead of the curve in developments in the smart phone market, the global leadership has sought the advice of SocialSphere to speak to them and help them understand the way in which they can best understand how new generations of customers think about communications and technology.