SiliconBeat

As the economy sputters and Silicon Valley tries to reboot once again, I’ve been spending time visiting various companies that seem to be doing well. It’s not such an uncommon story. In fact, anyone working on the Mercury News business desk gets several pitches each week along the lines of, “How would you like to actually meet with a company that’s growing in the downturn?”

Beyond individual companies, I’ve been trying to identify some larger themes that might connect companies that are prospering. I haven’t mapped those out yet. But I wanted to start sharing some thoughts from those visits.

First up: SocialText.

Ross Mayfield

This Palo Alto Web 2.0 pioneer was founded by Ross Mayfield to provide wiki services for businesses. Having a product that it actually sold to customers who were willing to pay money for it made SocialText notable in a space dominated by free, ad-driven services.

Eugene Lee

But the company continued to evolve. Last fall I had a chance to chat with Eugene Lee, SocialText CEO and former Adobe executive. At the time, SocialText was rolling out a new suite of social networking services for companies, a major expansion of what the company was able to offer.

“The best companies always invest in a downturn,” Lee said at the time.

Last month, I stopped by their Palo Alto office to catch up with Mayfield and Lee. The company had moved down the block to bigger digs, always an optimistic sign. They’re still private, so they don’t release any revenue numbers. But on the product side, they were certainly continuing to expand.

SocialText had recently been in the news for offering a free version of its social networking suite to companies to create alumni networks for laid off workers.

And this week, the company announced it had added a Twitter-like microblogging service to its platform called SocialText Signals. It’s just the latest example of the company improving, iterating, and working with its customers to improve its product. There’s been no slowdown in investing in improvements and upgrades, something that might be tempting to do to pinch some pennies.

Mayfield said the company can’t afford not to keep adding to its platform.

“Our customers keep coming to us with bigger problems,” he said.

Customers can use SocialText services either online, or by purchasing the software.  By expanding from just wikis to a social platform, Lee and Mayfield believe they’ve given themselves a much bigger market to tackle.

If the grim economic tidings were weighing on Lee or Mayfield, it was hard to tell. Most of our conversation was about the various ways they were continuing to build the SocialText platform and some of the problems they wanted to help their clients solve.

Chief among these challenges was transparency. The SocialText social network is private, for internal employee use and communications. Mayfield said improving internal communications, sharing and transparency still remains a big challenge for most companies.

“Internal transparency can be harder than external transparency,” Mayfield said. “How can you create a collaborative environment with the customers if they can’t collaborate within their own companies.”

True. Even at some of the most Web 2.0 savvy companies, where they preach transparency and putting the community at the center of their work, you’ll still hear the typical grumbling among cubicle dwellers that they have no idea what co-workers are doing, or how management is making decisions.

Those inefficiencies means that often there’s a lot of internal knowledge and expertise that doesn’t get tapped, simply because people are unaware it exists or are not sure how to connect to it.

Beyond that, internal social networking makes sense for dealing with some of the same issues that other social networks like Facebook are popular: They held build and deepen connections.

“You often work with people you don’t know very well,” Lee said.

SocialText has more features on tap, including a client that will run on Adobe Air.

There’s no guarantees, of course. But in going after paying customers, and contuining to invest in new products and features, SocialText seems like a lot better bet to survive the downturn than many of its Web 2.0 brothers and sisters.