The social media stuff is probably the most important thing we do today, from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the other elements of our marketing mix has sort of become more and more transactional and more and more tactical in nature. The social media stuff is much more strategic… It’s about how to use social media to power the fundamentals of the business. That’s what we’re focused on.

ShareThis

What’s The Platform’s Sweet Spot?

Does the vendor’s strength play unevenly towards certain elements of social computing. In other words, did they start out as a blog provider and magically reinvent themselves as as a platform play?

Can They Play Inside and Outside the Firewall?

The lines between external and internal communities are becoming increasingly blurred. If your vendor doesn’t have an answer for playing nicely with SharePoint and can’t turn that around and go external, move on.

What Are Their Social Media Credentials?

You can quantify this pretty easily. Do they blog? Are they good at involving customers in the conversation? If they haven’t synchronized their own communications, there’s a good chance they can’t do it for you.

Is The Platform Geared For Particular Verticals?

Did the vendor grow up in a particular industry? If so, you might find the product cluttered with unnecessary or thin layers of specific applications you don’t need. You’d be surprised how much big paychecks from certain clients influence a product roadmap.

A good sign of a platform’s maturity is how many partners have latched on. The key here is to let the solution providers, integrators and digital agencies make the platform hum. While most of the time you can find a good contingency of subject matter experts (SMEs) on the vendor side, the channel is the ecosystem that makes things tick.

Have They Worked With Agencies Before? 

What About 3rd Party Alliances?

This is critical as you expand your online efforts. Whether it’s a CRM integration,or an e-commerce application, the odds are you’ll want to extend your social computing platform as your community grows. Take a close look at who the vendor goes to market with and how they leverage each other.

Send me your questions, I’m putting together a second version now.

First posted on the Telligent blog.

ShareThis

So how do you 2.0-ify your approach to do doing business inside the firewall?

* Start with clear-cut business objectives

This is one you’ll hear us harp on. Too many times we see businesses rush towards technology and tool sets before ensuring there’s a comprehensive look at what the business really expects to gain from an enterprise 2.0 project. A lot of times it can be simple objectives like cutting down on the number of weekly meetings or reducing the amount of emails sent. For every departmental batch of emails you show me, I can give you plenty of ways to move that information into a more conversational and interactive channel with things like blogs, forums, or a wiki.

* Educate and inform

This is your chance to use enterprise 2.0 techniques to socialize your goals internally.Don’t push out an email and cross your fingers you’ll get responses. Create a blog and show the skeptics how easy it is to create content and receive that content automatically through RSS.

* Find the right people

One of our recent webinars with BtoB Magazine included a poll question that asked more than 1000 attendees about their biggest challenge related to creating an online community. Almost 30% said personnel and staffing is the biggest roadblock they’re facing as they develop an enterprise social media strategy. As you put together you’re plan of attack,do an analysis of your colleagues and map their skills back to a social media task or activity. If Jane in corporate communications is almost too good at articulating her thoughts in long emails, there’s a good chance she could lead some of your blog efforts. Let’s call it the social computing “skills audit”.

* Focus on the low-hanging fruit

This one’s about looking at your business processes and figuring out simple ways to incorporate some collaboration and conversation. Marketing, sales and corporate communications are good candidates to get on the enterprise 2.0 bandwagon because the flow of information tends to be fast and furious and collaboration is essential. As you begin socializing enterprise 2.0, make sure you quickly identify the pain points of each group. Try not focus on the technology too much until you have things teed up and can demonstrate how processes will be improved.

* Think of your vendor as a long-term partner. It’s about more than technology.

As you develop your enterprise 2.0 approach, there’s no doubt you’ll need to supplement your talent pool with things like professional services or strategy. The vendors (like us) are often times the best source of readily accessible horsepower. Look beyond vendor roadmaps and dig for subject matter experts (SMEs). These are the folks that have been in the trenches and can quickly identify and uncover industry standards and common practices to build a strategy around.

What else would you add?

Technorati Tags: community+server,social networking,community+server+evolution,enterprise+2.0,web+2.0,telligent

ShareThis

ShareThis

I’m also presenting tomorrow on "Choosing A White Label Social Network", and will be blogging some of that content here later today.  The CoverItLive Widget below will have my updates over the next few days, so send me some comments or let me know if you have any questions. Hope to meet some of you in Chicago.

ShareThis

ShareThis

This is a smart move by MediaNews Group, if for nothing else than realizing that the 1.0 stickiness so enviable at one time has now taken the form of socially-driven content, which brings a whole new meaning to the term pageviews. I think future iterations of the (web 3.0,etc) will revolve around the quality of the content being produced and delivered — or niche content if you like. And the big media companies are realizing that their newspapers alone just ain’t gonna pay the bills. In today’s media landscape, MediaNews can’t be satisfied with simply reaching your doorstep with yesterday’s news printed on dead trees.

They have to know you’re a pregnant mother on the north side of Dallas that’s interested not only in oil prices but bio-degradable diapers. I’ve heard the term hyper-local used on occasion and I think that says it all. The more targeted content MediaNews (and others) can deliver, and the more it can empower its users to deliver, the longer they’ll stay relevant. TauMed is a step in that direction.

You can see a few of the sites below.
http://connpost.taumed.com
http://chicoer.taumed.com
http://greenwichtime.taumed.com
http://stamfordadvocate.taumed.com

ShareThis

I caught up with Oracle VP and enterprise 2.0 evangelist Vince Casarez recently to get the scoop on how the world’s largest software company is ideally positioned to help customers transition to enterprise 2.0, a term describing the tools and processes companies are adopting to drive better collaboration among finicky knowledge workers. He says that while the enterprise 2.0 space is maturing rapidly, companies are figuring out that enterprise 1.0 fundamentals still apply.

“We think it makes more sense to inject best-of-breed Web 2.0 capabilities into your enterprise application environments,” said Casarez.

He says knowledge workers are more likely to adopt new ways of sharing information when they have a sense of familiarity or connectedness to existing applications or workflows. He’s got a point. An overused example of that comes from Oracle’s arch rival Microsoft. Think of all the applications that have lived and died by the Microsoft Outlook sword. Fact is, if you can thrive in the ecosystem of an existing enterprise application, you’ll get a chance to live, or be adopted, as the saying goes in software.

With Oracle’s line of business (LOB) applications so prevalent, does that mean all of its customers will adopt its software to join the e2.0 ranks? Of course not. There will always be customers that gravitate to the start-ups, hoping to get a few months of added capability tacked on to spur time-to-market and and potentially cut costs. After the best-of-breed sparkle fades however, most companies will come to the realization that enterprise 1.0 never really left us.

Things like IT governance, compliance pressures and vendor viability will rear their collective heads just as they always do. Couple that with the fact that CIOs are now realizing they can look to existing infrastructure to satisfy enterprise 2.0 requirements and you have a compelling business case to look to an Oracle.

“Large enterprises have invested millions of dollars in existing applications, not to mention the training that goes along with having to ensure large-scale adoption of that infrastructure,” added Casarez.

I also asked Casarez about the enterprise 2.0 activity within its channel of solution providers and integrators.

“We’re seeing some very sophisticated enterprise 2.0 use cases start to emerge from our channel partners.It’s clear our customers have moved past the experimental phases of enterprise 2.0,” he said.

If you’ve followed any of Oracles’ web 2.0 moves over the last year, you know that customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation are two areas ripe with current pilots and early implementations.On the CRM front, its move to create more social CRM capabilities has drawn some praise from industry observers and it (CRM) seems to a breeding ground for a lot of enterprise 2.0 pure plays.

Its dThree implementation has been a showcase for Oracle on the marketing services front. I spoke to dThree a while back and saw what the right web  2.0 “injection”, as Casarez says, can do to sometimes stale marketing platforms. dThree layered just the right amount of social computing features to its marketing platform, built from the ground up using things like Oracle WebCenter and Fusion middleware.

Who says the enterprise software guys are just enterprise 2.0 window dressing.

ShareThis

You could think of it as a Facebook-like application with just the right amount of administrative flexibility to keep the IT guys happy.

A marquee client for BrightIdea.com is Cisco, which uses the platform to create custom portals that spark collaboration with customers, employees, or partners. According to Greeley, Cisco has seen impressive results using the platform, generating more than 700 ideas from almost 1,500 members in 100 countries. Try to do that with some Web-based surveys and polling widgets.

Greeley told me that many companies lack business focus when deploying a social computing strategy.

“Deploying generic social networks without a specific business objective is like putting up playgrounds at the office; it may be fun for a while, but don’t expect it to improve the bottom line,” said Greeley.

What I really like about Brightidea is how it has honed in on a particular business driver. By looking at how a company can manage innovation, Brightidea takes the best-of-breed approach instead of trying to be all things to all people. Greeley says once it perfects that piece, it can move on, driving deeper into the enterprise and affecting other more traditional areas of collaboration.

That focus should certainly give WebStorm 5.0 a leg up in the battles to provide social computing infrastructure to large corporations over the next few years.

Companies are finally realizing the more you can apply the fundamentals of Web 2.0 to specific business objectives, the better the chance at ROI.

ShareThis

A vendor I covered recently and one that’s in the in the middle of Mashup mania is MindTouch, makers of Deki Wiki, Web 2.0 middleware that’s part content management system (CMS) and part Mashup maker.

Part of my inclination to cover MindTouch’s recent announcement was the results I was able to achieve on my own using Deki Wiki. Pointing and clicking through a hosted instance of its Pro version was a breeze recently. I was able to build a pretty extensive site with multiple pages, widgets and several other web services extensions in less than 30 minutes. Once you navigate through your own instance, you quickly get the sense of what all the fuss is about.

Apparently its latest “Jay Cooke” v8.05 release was good enough to turn the heads of  Mozilla, which selected MindTouch for the upcoming re-launch of its Developer Community. In a prepared statement, Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s Chief Evangelist, said the platform’s ease of use, architecture and feature set drove the decision after a lengthy evaluation.

One of the features MindTouch told InformationWeek about was what it touts as the first polyglot application on the Web.

That new capability is helping Mozilla host all languages as a single site, allowing Deki Wiki’s user interface to adapt to the particular requirements of each page. That’s big, especially if you’re like Mozilla, who previously had to managed 16 distinct multi-lingual sites before partnering up with MindTouch. 

You can see a quick demo of its polyglot feature below:

Similar to last week’s story on Alfresco and its vision of mashups, MindTouch is sometimes hard to pin down. But that’s also the beauty of what both companies do so well: they give the power of the platform back to the users.

ShareThis

“Do you really want Facebook to manage it for you in the outside world, or do you want to do it yourself so you have control?”

Control. It’s a word I hear over and over: How will we maintain control of what’s being said by the community?

I’ve talked to more companies than I can count about social publishing, social media, and setting up communities. The enterprises that typically lead the charge tend to be the ones that want to sell software or services to setup the community. But like communities in the real world, who wants to pay for the roads that others will use? When we talk to the brands in the community cross hairs, well that’s when you see the cold sweat start to break out.

The big brands hire in teams of marketing folk from the best B-schools to manage their content. They pay the most expensive consultants to determine what color has which meaning for their brand; what word has which association in middle America vs. big cities; heck how does this kid think vs. that adult. It’s been done this way for years, decades, and now, that level of tight brand control is showing cracks.

For the last decade or more, people with passion for products are expressing their views over the web - the enterprise fear originates when the views aren’t all that rosy. With all of their collective experience, too many companies still have the fear of shelling out big bucks to develop a social publishing strategy. Do they really want to give the rest of the world a forum to say what they’re really thinking?

The bus has already left the station folks; the negative views are already finding their ways through other sites and locations. I try to encourage brands to embrace both the negative and positive discussions their consumers have, preaching that it’s important to learn from the negative and leverage the positive. 

But for all of those brands who don’t want to build the roads that provide more interaction with their consumers: your consumers are taking other roads already available. Enable them to speak freely with and about you.

That’s social publishing.

ShareThis

And it seems simple, but his recommendation about a highly tailored pitch is dead on. The deeper you dig while uncovering the needs of the business, the more diverse those requirements tend to be.

A well-crafted marketing plan will target each constituency and use its interests to drive value and revenues..

ShareThis

Apparently Schmidt’s oversimplification of Web 2.0 has folks amused. I noticed several Twitters ( or is it Tweets?)  within the hour of posting this poking fun at Schmidt’s take.

And while it’s obvious AJAX  improves the way we interact with content on the web, it’s just technology. Web (whatever the number) dot oh won’t be remembered under the brand of any technology. It’ll be remembered in terms of our collective experiences. I can see the nostalgic headlines already, “Web 2.0, The Era We Made Contact” or “Web 2.0, The True User Experience.”

Schmidt went on to guess at what the next rev of the Web might bring, essentially describing a world of lightweight mashups accessible on any device and pulling the their data from “the cloud.” He finished by predicting the applications would be distributed virally, through social networks, email, and other forms of electronic communications.

Seen first @ Read/Write Web..YouTube posting by KoreaCrunch

ShareThis

James Clark of Room 214 astutely points out many of the the reasons why the PR industry is spinning from a Social Media hangover. The thing I liked the most was his description of the “Conversation Analyst”, a person he describes as part web technician and part media-type.

Must have mainstream media experience as a journalist or communications practitioner. Strong social and analytical capabilities. Has experience with and enthusiasm for blogging, podcasting, RSS feeds, tagging, wikis, e-mail publishing, web analytics, cross-campaign management, adserving, affiliate marketing and online news aggregators. Has maintained a personal or corporate blog for at least one year. Has managed pay-per-click search marketing campaigns across Google, Yahoo, Looksmart, and other services. Can read and understand web analytics and tell a client with confidence what market to speak to. Applicants please submit a brief resume with links to your current and past sites or blogs, as well as your del.icio.us bookmarks. HTML skills required.

So the real question is how many of you reading this thought to yourself, damn that’s me. If you’re a PR practitioner, probably not many.

ShareThis

The venture capital industry funded 167 Web 2.0-related deals in 2006 for a total of $844 million, mostly in Europe and the U.S., according to a March 21 report from the accounting firm Ernst & Young and Dow Jones VentureOne. That’s more than twice as much money and nearly twice as many deals as in 2005.

But back to what spawned my initial thought. It was the Clearswift survey that raises the paranoia visibility of social computing’s impact on corporate America. And I love the headline…

Growing popularity of Web 2.0 sites put corporate information at risk and drains productivity

They should’ve just put an 800 number right behind it with a link to the infomercial on where I can buy their product. Ok, I realize they’re pitching their content filtering products to mitigate privacy risks and data leaks but c’mon. Do they really believe you can lock down this stuff? For you IT’ers, yes I know you can

But let’s face it, there’s a lot of gray area here. Where do you draw the line between what’s personal and business-related? If I have business content (define that for starters) on my Google homepage and someone Twitters, Skypes or IM’s me, am I now in no man’s land? 

Whether I’m on the office network or in the home office, social computing many times is seamless. I can easily go from one workspace to another, regardless of time, place, or device. In fact, most of my services and data are in the cloud anyway. The way I access and use them is part of the way I work..my personal IP. Perhaps I should fight my employer for the rights to my intellectual capital?

More importantly, is anyone thinking about how all the things we web tinkerers bring to an organization? We are experimenters, we are early-adopters. Sometimes we’re even bleeding-edge instead of leading edge. Shame on us. Isn’t it more a question of common sense? What you wouldn’t say around the water cooler probably applies in Johnny’s new Ning network.

Personally, I can tell you a lot of what I learned about social media and Web 2.0 was derived from late nights at home, skipping lunch at work, or yes, even on the job in full work mode. That’s reality folks. And you know what else? Some of the Web 2.0 stuff I did at work almost three years ago has been fully adopted by former employers. They just thought I was goofing off.

ShareThis

  Cadillac’s top ad exec agreed.

..some marketers might be surprised to see the communities that already exist online. Liz Vanzura, global director of advertising for Cadillac, found 300 Cadillac communities in Yahoo Groups and 1,500 YouTube videos tagged Cadillac when she went out to create MyCadillacStory.com. They were already there. We were just providing a unique forum where they could interact using video technology.

Could finding the starting point for social media strategy be as simple as combing through an annual report and a few press releases? You bet. When you’re evangelizing how the new web creates value, you better know your client’s business and be able to identify the folks most likely to champion the cause. Good job Jerry.

ShareThis

One of the best things about the FASTforward conference was seeing how customers have used FAST technology - how they’ve applied it to the real world. I sat down last Thursday with CEO Tauseef Bashir of TauMed, a virtual health community, and got a glimpse of how healthcare information is evolving. This time the evolution is being  driven by social media and powerful search technologies.

(Photo | Tauseef Bashir and Jerry Bowles)

According to some recent stats from TauMed’s PR firm about 10 million Americans go online each day searching for answers to health questions. And to no one’s surprise Health searches are now just as popular as paying bills online, reading blogs, or using the web to find phone numbers and addresses.

With that kind of activity, you can see why there’s an information land grab going on. So Is there room for another WebMD? And how do you compete with the 800 lb. gorilla? Bashir says they’ll do it by improving the quality of information, how that information is delivered and expanding the site’s social networking capabilities. No small task by any stretch.

The beta site, launched in December, is impressive. It’s actually more impressive when you see it go head-to-head with WebMD. During his demo, he showed me some of why there’s so much buzz around search becoming the new interface. When we searched for “MS” (multiple sclerosis) in WebMD’s v1.0 site and asked to see the Web results, we  saw things like Microsoft Corporation and other irrelevant items. Doing the same search in TauMed rendered much more precise results. The other things I liked were the “ask a question” and “HealthShare“ features. Tauseef’s product team uses rich Ajax interfaces to dynamically serve up content, giving the site a clean, interactive feel when searching for data or contributing content for HealthShares. 

Tauseef,a former FAST employee, is passionate about the company’s prospects and knows they’ve got a fight in front of them. He says consumers have short attention spans for fruitless searches and irrelevant information and intends to capitalize on it.  The data mining and contextual analysis is the key, he says, to serving up razor-sharp results and creating a memorable user experience. But search aside, I dug a little deeper on the social networking aspects of TauMed’s community. Apparently, they’ve built their own content management system (CMS) and blog-like capabilities. I couldn’t help but notice how their user profile pages mimic blog features, providing very simple and intuitive interfaces and easy onramps to adding user-generated content. 

The other thing that popped up during the demo was advertisements, mostly from Google. I’m OK with that, but what surprised me was the irrelevancy of certain ads. In the midst of deep-diving for additional multiple sclerosis (MS) information, a political ad obtrusively took over half the side rail in TauMed’s 3 column-ish layout. Suffice to say, Tuaseef quickly pointed out their product team is in the midst of improving their ad-serving backend. He also added TauMed was an early AdMomentum customer, putting much of the platform under rigorous testing and customization.

But let’s face it, as Web 2.0 as TauMed 1.0 is,  they still have a numbers problem. Not the financial kind, but traffic. Outside of mass media advertising, you’ve got  a classic case of a company needing some good ol’ fashioned grassroots and word-of-mouth marketing. Perhaps they should also reach out to other social software providers supplying the resources to companies building intranets, niche communities, and other social-oriented portals. You could even include some of the office 2.0 candidates like ZoHo, CentralDesktop, and others. They too will become more and more dependent on customized content as user bases grow. I guess you could think of it as enabling TauMed to become the de facto health widget.

However it plays out, they’re an interesting company that has a new evangelist.  

Cross-posted @ The FASTforward Blog

ShareThis

I’ve seen a lot more activity on LinkedIn lately. I think some of it has to do with the end-user spike that a new feature can bring, in this case LinkedIn Answers. 

It also might have something to do with my personal widget marketing strategy. (Translation: I have my LinkedIn profile plastered published everywhere)

But more importantly, the thing I’ve noticed about LinkedIn is how well it works at painting a picture of what social software and social networking is all about.Once you invite a client to be your connection on LinkedIn, it’s amazing how fast they get it after you explain how they’ve quickly become part of a vibrant and interactive social network.

Whether you think it’s useful or not, you can’t ignore the ramifications of things like LinkedIn. There’s been a ton of lists on how you can use LinkedIn, but it always fascinates me how each client comes up with their own take on its usefulness. But that’s just the point. Get people thinking about how they use social software and let them create.

Oh, and if you think we should connect, let me know

ShareThis

ShareThis

Thanks Russ

1. My wife and I appeared on the front page of the Dallas Morning News on Christmas Eve 2001. That’s me with the bright yellow shirt on. Clearly it was my wife who garnered the photographer’s attention.

 2. My first internet job was for USWeb Corporation back in 1996. I answered a classified ad in the newspaper looking for an internet salesperson. For those of you that don’t remember USWeb, they were one of the first internet professional services firms (whatever that meant) and they used the franchise model to grow their “affiliate offices”. Sort of the McDonald’s of the web at that time. It still amazes how the web has been transformed in just over a decade. Back then I was pitching $10-20K websites and intranets with functionality less than today’s build-on-the-fly widgets.

3. We had our first son almost a year ago to this post (1|19|2006) – Nate Dearing. What can I say, best thing that’s ever happened to me.

4. My wife and I have an obsession with vintage stuff. We started collecting junk antiques after we got married and quickly filled up our house and garage. Luckily, we’ve honed our tasted to focus on mostly items from the art deco and midcentury eras. Midcentury stuff is my real weakness.

5.   I’m a native Texan and grew up in Houston before moving to Big “D”.

Go Coogs!

And now for my blog tag victims candidates. I’m calling out Jennifer Dearing (ha!), Richard Carey, Jason Hirst, Shannon Whitley, Rick Grant, and Bret Starr. Get on it folks!

Cross-posted on The Enterprise Content Management Blog.

ShareThis