MUMBAI, INDIA: McAfee, Inc. today announced that it will launch an online support community, enabling customers to interact with other users to resolve issues, share best practices, and discuss emerging trends. McAfeeÒ has partnered with Jive Software, a leader in social business software, to develop and host its new community space.

“Sharing information among peers is an increasing preference for our customers and an integral part of our social media strategy,” said Barry McPherson, executive vice president of worldwide support and services at McAfee. “The new support community will enable us to evolve beyond traditional phone and email based services and focus more on collaboration with our customers through discussions, blogs, wikis, user groups and community polling. The community will tie into our social media presence elsewhere on the Web where customer activity is increasing, and provide a hub with the tools to make conversations easier.”

McAfee, which is already monitoring Twitter and Facebook as part of its listening and response system, will launch the online support community in Q4 of 2009. The site will run on Jive’s Social Business Software platform (SBS) Jive SBS for Support connects the conversations of customers, product experts and support representatives to enable rapid, efficient and consistent issue resolution.

The online support community will help McAfee increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, retain and reuse knowledge and enable customers to share experiences that may help others. Additionally, McAfee technicians, developers and product managers will be able to engage customers in new ways to enhance products and improve processes.