"There were a lot of people on Facebook talking about what was happening at the company, but we had absolutely no control over what would happen or what was said there," Graebe says. "We knew we had to build a platform that was so compelling they'd have to use it."

From an IT perspective, Tom Sherrod, senior director of IT for SAS's information systems division, says that their main requirement was that the solution was fast to roll out. "Different business units had different requirements," he says. "We narrowed down the requirements to only the common ones." In total, they gathered more than 100 requirements from every division in the company.

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Still unsure whether or not they would build the system themselves, they looked at several vendors. One in particular----met many of their requirements. "Socialcast had the right balance between feature set and cost for what we were looking for," Sherrod says. They signed with Socialcast, and after six weeks, SAS launched a pilot of their platform, which they later would call "The Hub."