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More than 3 Million Citizens Served in 2006 as Neighborhood America's Solution Drives Public Participation in e-Democracy, Citizen Journalism and the e-Community

December 6, 2006 - In a year marked by a dramatic surge in citizen journalism, social networking and consumer/brand participation, Neighborhood America announced that its 'Software as a Service' solution enabled governments, media and enterprises to engage more than 3 million individuals about the issues most important to them. Neighborhood America is the leading enterprise social network solutions provider for organizations seeking to engage and interact with the public.

"The demand for solutions that offer a structured alternative to the chaos of social networks is real and growing," said Dr. Sara Radicati, CEO and president, The Radicati Group. "Enterprises and governments alike have recognized the importance of empowering their constituents to actively participate and SaaS solutions are the key to any structured public outreach campaign."

Across multiple platforms and transcending boundaries, time zones and demographics, Neighborhood America delivered enterprise social networking to millions of individuals this year, enabling organizations, businesses and governments to collect, manage and analyze public comment.

From media companies such as ABC and CBS to the State of Florida and the National Council on Readiness and Preparedness, numerous customers sought to harness the voice of the public in 2006 through the structured, managed capability of Neighborhood America's solutions. A simple solution to a universal problem shared by customers in media, business and government, Neighborhood America's technology provides a flexible platform on which to not only engage the public, but also to collect, sort and process the information in endless format types.

Neighborhood America customer successes in 2006 include:

• In just one of its Be Seen, Be Heard initiatives using Neighborhood America's structured applications, ABC News forecasted the future of political dialogue and collected viewers' commentary and questions during George Stephanopoulos' interview with President Bush. Bringing a new level of dialogue-including the tone and tenor of citizen participation via video-viewers sent their queries directly to ABC News where they were collected, sorted and used to create user-submitted questions to President Bush during the broadcast.
• The National Council on Readiness and Preparedness (NCORP) and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government chose Neighborhood America to help create a National Blueprint for Secure Communities. The National Blueprint will aim to educate, train and help communities respond during the first 72 hours of a natural disaster or terrorist attack. Neighborhood America will provide citizens, public and private sector officials with an online forum enabling them to provide input and to contribute ideas and procedures to help support this community preparedness initiative.
• Charged by Congress and the President to collect the views of the American public regarding health care reform, the Citizens' Health Care Working Group adopted Neighborhood America's solution, enabling the team to capture the structured views and opinions of more than 20,000 participants through the Web. The Group efficiently combined these views with the comments captured offline, managing the information through one simple Web-based platform.
• This past fall, CBS News leveraged Neighborhood America to support an audience engagement campaign to determine Katie Couric's program sign-off during her live début on "The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric." In its efforts to engage its viewers and encourage citizen journalism, CBS received, managed, and reviewed more than 40,000 responses in the first 48 hours-at an average rate of nearly eight per minute.
• Florida Health Counts, an online initiative led by Florida Representative Holly Benson (R-Pensacola), implemented Neighborhood America's technology to spark innovative ideas for reducing Florida's uninsured population and providing affordable healthcare and health insurance to all Floridians. With more than eight million uninsured Floridians, the Florida Health Counts initiative sought a simple solution to collect a large amount of data from concerned citizens.

In addition to numerous customer successes, Neighborhood America also grew in size with the October 4 acquisition of MOVO Mobile, a mobile advertising and marketing solutions provider. With MOVO's unique interactive mobile capability under its umbrella, Neighborhood America now can uniquely offer customers all of its existing technologies on the mobile platform. As the US population becomes even more mobile-centric, public comment on the mobile platform will find itself on the wish lists of media, government, and business enterprises.

"Social networking has had a monumental year," said Kim Patrick Kobza, CEO of Neighborhood America. "Yet, to be truly effective, traditional consumer-driven social networks must meet the needs of today's organizations and enterprises, including brand protection, structure, analysis and administrative oversight. Neighborhood America was first to recognize this need and has delivered on its promise to make enterprise social networking a reality."

To meet the growing demand for enterprise social network solutions, Neighborhood America also strengthened its management team in 2006. Robert Toatley was tapped to drive revenue growth as vice president of sales and marketing, while Patrick Mulloy was welcomed aboard as the chief financial officer.

"Our customers are proving that enterprise social networks can add real business value, and in government, drive constructive decision-making. Structured networks promise to lead to global transformation," continued Kobza. "There will not be a successful media property, business or government agency that does not effectively manage their social networks with customers and citizens over the next five years. Neighborhood America intends to be a leader in this global transformation of business-to-consumer and government-to-citizen relationships."

Learn about enterprise social networks and the art of building online community with Neighborhood America's free eBooks