Enterprise social network CastleUp gets officially unveiled

This is a first among Asian consultancies.

In a release, CastleUp (castleup.com) - an enterprise social network built on Consulus’ work, officially launches today. Developed by Consulus, a consultancy that possesses 10 years of insights into organisational collaboration, CastleUp offers companies the chance to quickly share ideas and updates, and retrieve them with ease later on. This marks the first time an Asian consultancy is launching an enterprise social network. To date, CastleUp is used in Singapore, Vietnam and Brunei.

Unlike most other enterprise social networks, CastleUp is designed to be visually appealing and catagorisation-centric. CastleUp discourages spam so that users will not be inundated by more information clutter. It does this by encouraging each new post to be first categorised as an ‘Experience’, ‘Know-How’, or for ‘Fun’. Users are also required to tag their posts so that they can be sorted and categorised.

The network also includes a ‘gamified’ element known as Castle Tokens, which is a score of how well users are interacting on CastleUp. It does not simply count the volume of new posts you make, but also how other people react to it. As a result, it is intended as a metric which serves like an indicative value for colleagues to assess the usefulness of their sharing.

Daily usage statistics also help company workers gain an insight into how the company shares and acts on information, which is the first step into understanding the communication flows within an organisation. CastleUp also serves as a dynamic organisational chart for you to connect within your department and with colleagues from another department. The closer the inter-department connection, the more effective the work can be.

CastleUp is designed for use on any mobile device with access to an internet browser so that even staff without a workstation can join the network. They will all see the same company feed, unlocking the potential for useful, bite- sized information to be shared. For example, HR departments can use CastleUp to post staff memos and marketing teams can post new campaigns to seek feedback.

For companies and their employees, privacy and security of information are normally a major concern. This is why many people may not like to connect for work on social media platforms, and why companies are slow to adopt social networking as a collaboration tool. It is this reason that Consulus developed CastleUp to be a safe environment for employees to connect with one another, without revealing too much about themselves through their personal social media accounts.

For the standard version, CastleUp is free for anyone to sign up. Added features such as deeper company insights and enterprise tools will be available for a fee. Plans to include a catalogue of programs and products from other consulting practices from different firms are slated for launch at the end of the year.