Conenza: Building Social into the Core of Franchising

Google was not the first search engine, but it became the most popular. Similarly, Facebook wasn’t the first social network, but using it to communicate is now almost as ubiquitous as e-mail. [caption id="attachment_6249" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Tony Audino, CEO of Conenza"][/caption]

Tony Audino is the founder and CEO of Conenza, a company on the forefront of corporate social networking. Audino founded Conenza to help other organizations leverage corporate social networking technology to build engaging and highly-rewarding extended talent communities. Conenza was one of his many creative ideas and investments following his career at Microsoft. His first venture into the social networking space came with the creation of Microsoft Alumni Network in 1995. The network allows former Microsoft employees to engage with their former colleagues and share interesting content with each other in a safe, secure environment.

“Essentially, it is an ecosystem, an extension of the real world, where people can share information in an open, but private and trusted place” says Audino.

In 2004, while Mark Zuckerberg was creating “The Facebook” in his Harvard dorm room, Audino began developing Conenza as a way for companies to interact with their employees and alumni. What Audino found is people liked the idea of social networking, but didn’t want to put everything on an online public space. He officially launched Conenza in 2006 and today, under Audino’s leadership, Conenza builds and manages the global corporate communities of some of Fortune Magazine’s Most Admired Companies. While the system benefited large companies, Audino noticed it also could work very well in the franchising world.

“Franchising is a wonderful cross between different sectors of business and business people. It’s a combination of big business like Subway and smaller brands just developing.” Amongst various other tools, Conenza allows franchisees to find profiles of everyone at the company, it has dashboards with operational results and allows people to comment and share information. We have seen other programs out there such as Fran Social, but franchising hasn’t really dug deeply into social technologies. Conenza is a way to leverage knowledge and experience for a single brand in one easy to use platform. Currently, Audino is working to fully customize the system for the franchise world, using a franchise-specific data model. He is collaborating with Dave Mortensen, co-founder of Anytime Fitness to further develop and learn from their internal social network with 80 percent participation. Audino is focusing not only where technology is going, but where the world is going. Every business is a digital business and software systems have overturned whole companies. The question today becomes: How can I use a system to change my business and grow? Conenza’s goal strives to build social into the core of business, instead being a place people go.