Infor has announced that it was recently presented with the Open Leadership Award by Altimeter Group, an analyst firm and a global authority in the use of social media strategies for increasing business value.

Altimeter recognized the company for a continuing program it began in early 2010. Company officials said that the program encourages and trains the company’s employees on the use of multiple social media channels to create more open and transparent relationships with internal and external contacts.

In the first few months of the program, Infor increased Yammer (News - Alert) activity by 367 percent; LinkedIn connections by 160 percent; and Twitter usage by 50 percent. Company officials said that this growth happened at a current rate of 10 percent per month for each.

“What really impressed us was Infor’s detailed implementation program, which included contests, parties, and incentives to engage people both at the grassroots level and also involve senior executives," said Charlene Li, founder, of Altimeter Group.

Li said that it was the thoroughness of the thinking and excellence in implementation that brought Infor this award.

Infor is a provider of business applications to mid-sized companies, with over 8,000 employees serving over 70,000 customers in 125 countries. It delivers software that is simple to buy, easy to deploy, and convenient to manage.

Venson Kuchipudi, senior director for social computing strategy at Infor, said that receiving the Open Leadership Award is an added bonus to the increased communication and transparency they have achieved across their entire organization.

Earlier this year in July, Infor officials promoted Interaction Advisor, a component of its Infor CRM Epiphany suite, as an “easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use” packaged product “designed to meet the toughest demands of today’s marketing and IT departments.”