1. 6.  Gathers and Publishes the Stories that Shape the Culture
   6.  of Your Organization
2. 5.  Builds Real Social Capital
3. 4.  Introduces Talent-Spotting
4. 3.  Builds a Searchable Knowledge-Base of the Employees
   3.  and Events that Positively Impact your Company
5. 2.  Increases Employee Retention
6. 1.  Promotes Industry, Engagement and Collaboration

PollStream would like to introduce you to the latest addition to our growing suite of innovative solutions for employee engagement: The Hive.

The Hive encourages employees to recognize the achievements, ideas, and milestones of their peers via electronic messages known as BeeLines. Members connect with others through the Gallery, a collective space for viewing and contributing to all public BeeLines. As employees contribute comments to the BeeLines of others, members construct storylines around specific contributions and milestones, building deep connections to the mission and purpose of the organization.

The Hive is Live. Find out more here.

This month marks a milestone for us at PollStream—our participants surpassed the 10,000,000 vote mark! To give you an idea what this looks like, if every vote was a penny, it would make a stack 9.8 miles high...almost twice as high as Mount Everest!

Of course our clients get much more than a penny for their stakeholder's thoughts; PollStream participants spend an average of 35 seconds with each poll question. To put this in perspective, television commercials also run about 30 seconds and offer no interaction. PollStream participants have been engaged in highly relevant dialogue with our clients for 350,000,000 seconds—or just over 11 years of total targeted engagement!

We'd like to thank our clients (and their clients and employees) for helping us reach this milestone. As we continue to refine our solutions and roll out new, exciting ways to engage people online, the vote count numbers only climb faster. To find out how you can make this flow of engaging dialogue work for you, contact PollStream today.

This is the third part of a series exploring the art of managing customer relationships though online communications.
Previously: Keep It Relevant; Every Relationship is Different.

The primary goal of advertising campaigns has traditionally been to drive new sales. Simple enough, right? Today, as markets continue to grow more competitive, the focus has shifted from increasing new sales to increasing customer loyalty. Not simply because it's more profitable to retain an existing client than to acquire a new one (say it with us: "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"), but because in today's highly networked environment loyal customers become your most important evangelists.

Real-time needs identification and instant behavioral assessments, including the delivery of relevant content, are the first steps towards keeping the conversation relevant. Now that you have an engaged client on the line—having satisfied their expectation to interact with your brand—go even further and empower them with the ability to quickly spread your message, and their experience, to their social network.

Every interaction provides an opportunity to better understand consumer behavior. PollStream's solutions enable you to facilitate conversations based on your customer's current behavior, deliver relevant information and offers to drive action, and tap into their social networks to exponentially expand the message.

Next time: Build Upon a Mutual Exchange of Values

• RBC Local Marketing and Sales Enablement