Can you give us an overview of your company, Bloomfire?
Bloomfire was founded in 2010 to solve a common and frustrating workplace problem: being unable to quickly and easily find the knowledge and insights needed to get work done. Today, our cloud-based knowledge engagement software gives people one centralized, searchable place to engage with shared knowledge and grow their organization’s collective intelligence. Our platform helps hundreds of brands and business leaders democratize knowledge so that teams and individuals can always access and leverage the information they need to excel at work, no matter where everyone is working.
Who are some of your current customers and how are they using Bloomfire? Has usage changed for customers who moved to a decentralized work environment this year?
We’re fortunate to work with leading brands including Capital One, Conagra Brands, Jackson Hewitt, MetLife, and DraftKings. Our customers employ Bloomfire for a range of uses, including as a digital library to centralize and share market research, as a customer service knowledge base to help service representatives find answers to customer questions in the moment, and as an organization-wide knowledge engagement platform to keep all departments and teams aligned.
Many of our customers have seen increased employee engagement with Bloomfire since transitioning to remote work in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Several customers have shared that they’re increasingly relying on Bloomfire to onboard remote employees, guiding new hires through onboarding content series and training modules in the platform to set them up for success. Customers who use Bloomfire as a market research library have stressed that Bloomfire has been a critical tool for cascading customer insights to their stakeholders at a time when customer behaviors and needs are changing quickly. Many customers who use Bloomfire organization-wide are currently using the platform to deliver important company updates to decentralized team members; we’ve seen customers using strategies such as having a senior leader share weekly video updates, sending regular newsletter updates with Bloomfire’s newsletter feature, and using Bloomfire’s Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations to notify employees of new Bloomfire content from within their company’s real-time chat application.
Why have you positioned your solution as a knowledge engagement platform? What do you see as the difference between knowledge engagement and knowledge management?
Knowledge engagement is the more apt term for knowledge-related activities in a modern workplace or organization, where information moves quickly and employees often need to collaborate across teams, functions, and geographic locations. While the term “knowledge management” implies that an individual or team will be solely responsible for overseeing and updating an organization’s knowledge base, “knowledge engagement” implies a community-level effort to contribute to, act on, and grow an organization’s collective intelligence.
As a knowledge engagement platform (KEP), Bloomfire serves as a centralized hub for collecting, connecting, and democratizing the knowledge of teams and individuals across an organization. This allows for a one-to-many instead of one-to-one transfer of information and insights, enabling an organization to maximize the value of each contributor’s knowledge. By making information and insights easy to find, a KEP allows everyone across an organization to stay informed and act on the best knowledge available to them.
How does Bloomfire simplify the process of finding knowledge and insights?
Bloomfire’s proprietary search engine deep indexes all content regardless of file type, meaning everything becomes searchable–even words spoken in audio or video files. Bloomfire also allows users to filter their results by criteria such as contribution type, author, or custom categories established by their organization, helping them quickly drill down to the knowledge that’s most relevant to them. By giving users multiple ways to find and filter content, Bloomfire offers an intuitive approach to knowledge discovery that should feel familiar to anyone who has used Google or online retail sites like Amazon.
What do you see as some of the biggest pitfalls of companies failing to share and leverage institutional and individual knowledge across their organization?
Knowledge can be an organization’s biggest competitive advantage–but organizations won’t recognize the full value of their collective knowledge if they don’t have a good way to share and engage with it. Without knowledge engagement, knowledge is a finite resource. Individual intellect lives in the minds of employees, and institutional knowledge may be stored in repositories that aren’t accessible to everyone across the organization. An organization can’t reap the full benefits of its collective intelligence, and existing knowledge erodes over time (most notably when employees leave the company).
What are the biggest benefits you’ve seen for companies that successfully establish a culture of knowledge engagement?
Companies with a culture of knowledge engagement are able to grow their collective intelligence and make knowledge actionable for decision-makers. By increasing the application of existing knowledge, people increase the value of that knowledge to their organization and eliminate duplicative work.
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