I presented some thoughts on choosing a white label social networking platform recently at Adtech Chicago and thought I’d elaborate on some of the pitch points. You can tell the focus drove deeper than product comparisons and suggested a more thorough look at the vendors themselves. How do they use their own product? How do they go to market? Who are their partners and how do they play off one another to create value?

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.

There’s certain times when you have that gut feeling about something. That time when you just know there’s better ways to do things but you can’t seem to decipher the right approach to get there. One shift in today’s business landscape that doesn’t make it any easier is enterprise 2.0, big brother of its more publicized and consumer-oriented Web 2.0.While few of the digerati would ever debate enterprise 2.0’s worth, a lot of businesses still struggle with where to start or how to build a team of technical communicators and media creators.And if you’re a buyer, you’re acutely aware of all the tool sets, software and services at your disposal,something that certainly doesn’t help enterprise 2.0’s signal to noise ratio.

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

It was a hectic June and I’m finally starting to distill some of my conversations and briefings. I was in Boston a few weeks back for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference and while I definitely came back energized, the best part was the old-fashioned version of social networking — pressing the flesh as the saying goes.

I was there as media and while I would’ve liked to have blogged more about the show, I did manage to get some microblogging in courtesy of CoverItLive’s service. I realized early that I’d be attending a bunch of sessions with a crappy Wi-Fi connection in the backdrop, so I figured I’d cut my losses and get as much micro content in place as possible.

The widget below is the snapshot of my ad hoc meetings, session tracks, and a few hallway and bar conversations. Some of the latter were definitely the more interesting as I had several instances where I connected with folks I’d blogged with and collaborated with through Twitter and other channels.

I ran the CoveritLive widget on the Content Management Connection and ECM Blog after the show and noticed it had about 500 unique views over the course of a few days. How much of that had to do with the novelty of the service remains to be seen. Janet Lee Johnson thought it was cool enough to blog about it, and I noticed it had enough lift to light up Twitter with a few Tweets.

I spoke with Matthew Greeley, CEO of Brightidea.com, recently and came away impressed with its approach to delivering real value with Web 2.0 sizzle. It just released WebStorm 5.0, which uses social networking elements to capture information that companies can use to drive innovation.

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.

A while back I attended a PRWeek and Waggener Edstrom event at the posh  Hotel Palomar here in Big D. The event was titled Campaigns in the 21st Century: Measuring Perceptions. Dan Gallagher delivered an interesting look at how they analyzed content being created on the web related to the Presidential candidates. The analysis was done back in Sept. 2007 and was accomplished using the Narrative Network, a toolset they created using some pretty nifty algorithms. You can download Dan’s presentation here. (if it doesn’t work. lemme know) And here’s the movie.

In short, it’s text mining and brand mapping that creates a visual map of how the media perceives a particular brand or topic. That’s pretty hot stuff these days with all the attention on social media measurement or brand monitoring. Smart companies and agencies are finally figuring out that social media measurement is just another layer in a well-integrated approach to digital marketing and public relations.

I’m still a little baffled when clients don’t want to budget for stuff like this. It really gives new meaning to the “intel” connotation.

This post wasn’t meant to be a soapbox for why you need a widget strategy. That’s been broadcast numerous times and there’s even events dedicated to all things widgety.

• Facilitates content distribution. (remember when you had to send content to webmasters and the IT bottleneck?)
• Ensures brand integrity. It’s the easiest digital billboard you’ll ever create.
• Highly portable and mobile-friendly. Great newsletter and email marketing add-ins.
• Feeds users’ habits of consuming bite-size chunks of micro-content.
• Zero maintenance as content is automatically updated via XML and RSS feeds.
• Drives blog and RSS subscribers.
• Social Network (SoNet) ready content that’s easy to integrate and publish to.
• They’re a poor man’s enterprise mash-up.
• You don’t need a “Dummy’s Guide to Widgets” to create them.

                       

If you’re familiar with Twitter, you’ve probably figured out there’s some interesting things you can do with these types of SMS-based apps. If you’re a power Twitterer all of you know it’s way more than “what am I doing”. Jaiku’s the other one, and although essentially both provide the same capabilities, I give an aesthetic edge to Jaiku for its slick looking badges.  That aside, while working on a community project yesterday, we started thinking about how these tools can benefit the business. If you extrapolate what’s being done  by some of the big brands, it’s pretty easy to see the evolution. Take ZDNet for instance. Their approach aggregates all of their blogs into one Twitter feed. Using something like TwitKu, (screenshot below) I get a pulse of what ZDNet is covering that hour. And ZDNet knows most people won’t have the inclination to subscribe to all of their blogs, so they give us options. That’s an important notion when building your business case. Always give the user options. If you want to be a media company, act like one. Show me how to consume, repurpose, mashup, and deliver your content not just in ways you want but ways I want.

Other companies, including Dell and the NYTimes, also use  use Twitter to push out all sorts of content, from product updates and discounts to industry information and news. And isn’t it a bit ironic that the NY Times is so prolific on Twitter? They came across as a skeptic back in April.

So know that we know there’s some real-world scenarios for this stuff, the question becomes how to best incorporate these communication tools into an integrated and cohesive marketing strategy? I’d suggest start by stripping away all the Web 2.0 monikers and buzzwords and boil it down to content and communication. From there think about what everyone else is thinking about. How do I come up with creative ways to distribute my content? After that, think about how to be a facilitator. Once a brand becomes a trusted information source or content provider, conversations happen. Tools like Twitter and Jaiku can drive those conversations.  And conversations build brand.

If you’re not, take a look at a recent document I received from Scott Niesen, head marketer at Attensa. If you don’t know Attensa, you’re in for a treat. Their new feedreader tool sits nicely inside Outlook and brings a unique spin to feed reading via their “River of News” view and AttentionStreamâ„¢ technology. 

Through ongoing analysis of AttentionStreamâ„¢ data, including the time and frequency that feeds are accessed and articles read, deleted and ignored, Attensa displays feeds in a prioritized list based on the likelihood that they will be of interest to the reader. Subscriptions can be displayed in a “River of News” view that simulates a single news feed, regardless of how many RSS feeds

And Scott and I had a good exchange about sharing some of Attensa’s inner RSS workings. When I told him I should just blog the whole document, he quickly fired back that “marketing is all about experiments and a little risk.”

Well said.

 
Attensa Screenshot

I haven’t been a big mind mapper in the past, mostly because of the complexity of the applications. In Web 2.0 times, anything with a learning curve of more than a half hour and my login credentials grow stale. But MindMeister, an Ajax-based mapping tool, has converted me. At least in the short-term. I used it a while back to document some of the things I  found myself doing over and over on certain projects and thought I’d just publish to the web. It’s by no means meant to be comprehensive, it’s more about open sourcing my social media workflow. And on a Web 2.0 app note, I really like the Twitter integration allowing you to be alerted of updates to the mind map via SMS. That’s smart.

I saw this report from Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council pointing to some of the challenges us marketers are facing in 2007. The aggregate of the data validates why Chief Marketing Officers are moving into the C-Suite. Long time coming.

The study was designed to identify key trends from 2006, and capture insights and opinion about where and how marketers are focusing their efforts in 2007. Fielded in the fourth quarter of 2006 to 350 top marketers, the study’s findings show that most top marketers had no interest in gathering moss or paying homage to the status quo last year.

 

Technorati tags: marketing+2.0, marketing, chief+marketing+officer, CMO, CMO+Council, marketing+research

In the words of 80’s band David & David: “Welcome to the boomtown, pick a habit we got plenty to go around.” Those habits are Web 2.0 addictions these days. And the boomtown, according to this InfoWorld story is Web 2.0. 

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.

This post has been marinating for a while in my Live Writer queue. It’s one of those “take a step back and quickly observe” posts. You know, when you realize there’s knowledge to be gleaned from some of your web creations. And with some recent developments in the internet advertising space, I thought it was a good time to resurrect some quick observations. In this case, I’m referencing Google’s AdSense, but I run ads from the other usual suspects as well — namely MSFT, Yahoo, and FeedBurner.

Before you call me a sell out, hear me out on some coffee-shop observations

—————————————————————————————–

1. Competitive Intelligence

This is an easy one. Once you get rid of your paranoia and turn off Google’s competitive ad filter, your competition will be at your blog’s doorstep shortly.

2. Marketing and Advertising insight

Take a quick look at the kind of ads your site serves. Once your content  settles and gets indexed, an aggregate theme begins to develop as you look at the ads. Many times this helps me understand if my content is providing the right context for you, my user.

3. Product discovery and selection

My colleagues and I joke about this one. Anytime we have some downtime and get in an exploratory mode for new webby tools and services, we just take a quick spin through 5 or 10 pages and voila!

4. Business Development

This one’s also terribly apparent. You’re a digital agency and you provide email marketing services. I probably shouldn’t admit this and open source my email marketing strategy, but one of the solutions we’re using for a few of our clients is IntelliContact. How’d we find them? Yep, the ad running on my blog.

5. Brand and Community Building

As you begin to develop consistency in your content, you’ll notice the ads begin to tell your story. WOW Feed has a lot of Web 2.0, social media, and agency-oriented content. If you look around you’ll usually notice some very targeted Ads on at least a few of those topics. Users, in turn, get a quick sense of what the site’s all about..a sense of what conversations are taking place.

FAST Search & Transfer is betting there’s a lot of folks tired of Google’s chokehold on the internet advertising market. The search provider is pitching to put you in control of your own Ad network. Translation: Quit paying third parties like Google and Yahoo.

The Norway-based company released news yesterday morning of AdMomentum, billed as an alternative to internet advertising’s big three - Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. IDC’s Sue Feldman commented on contextual advertising and described FAST’s Ad platform:

Online ad revenue drives the digital economy, and no one has a lock on that revenue stream today,” said Feldman, IDC’s Vice President for Search and Digital Marketplace Technologies. “Online advertising – particularly contextual advertising – continues to soar. IDC believes that large publishers and ad networks can seize a significant share of this revenue. FAST AdMomentum provides the infrastructure for publishers to manage and monetize their online content. It’s a digital marketplace in a box.

You’re probably thinking, big deal right? Nobody’s catching Google. Even if you’re right, think about how wide open the internet ad market is right now. The scramble for number two or even number five or six in market share is worth billions. I’m sure FAST has done the math.

But I’m thinking there’s more to this battle than just fighting for the big brand websites. What about FAST’s position with enterprise customers?

Some of the world’s largest companies use their technology (much of it behind the firewall) to enhance their information management strategies — the company clearly has a strong brand in that respect. The question is, who can expand the footprint of the enterprise customer first? Will it be Google with its search and bevy of web 2.0 apps or a company like FAST whose genealogy already has a decidedly enterprisey slant.

It seems like there’s plenty of customers who could help FAST chip away at Google’s AdSense. If ACME already has FAST infrastructure, why wouldn’t they pilot FAST? Wouldn’t it be an easy ROI to use an existing backend from FAST while ramping up your Ad resources?

I also think it’s a bit naive to think large organizations will be tied to one Ad platform. Someone mentioned how Google customers might threaten to employ FAST to get a better deal. Not sure it really matters. The smart companies will tailor their advertising strategies so precisely, they’ll quickly figure out Google and FAST can each serve their own purpose. One size fits all is dead.

And what about all the channel and OEM communities that companies like FAST have? To me, those are armies entering the enterprise through all sorts of other Trojan horses — back doors like this.

Speaking of back door entrances into the enterprise, it made me think of a comment I ran across (on Rubicon exec Michael Mace’s blog) from Robert Scoble a while back describing Google vs. Microsoft. Although the parallels may not be the same in scale, I think Scoble paints a scenario that can be played out for all sorts of David and Goliath matchups.

Google hasn’t made an impact on the enterprise yet. And I don’t see them challenging Microsoft or taking money off the Office team’s plate in the enterprise for the next two years. Further out, however, they are positioned to come in and take some business from Microsoft. The first thing Google will do is stop the growth of Microsoft Office. Small startups aren’t going to buy Office anymore, they’re going to use the free apps on the Internet. Is Google going to get Chevron to switch from Exchange? No. Not soon. What they are going to do is add new value that Microsoft can’t, like the Google calendar team showing me how to put my calendar on my blog. It’s really nice. Those kinds of things are what you’ll see enterprise companies start to use in little projects here and there. Google will sneak in the back door, just as Microsoft did 25 years ago with DOS and PCs.

So with the above in mind, what’s it gonna take for FAST to take real market share? Running your own Ad network will take some muscle.

Maybe I’ll have the chance to ask the FAST product managers this week in San Diego about  the platform’s complexity, but it’s not even that. It has more to do with an enterprise’s propensity to outsource all the functions related to web advertising. That’s a big reason so many companies look to AdSense, Panama, and Microsoft’s AdCenter. Outside of producing content, all the stuff related to development, payment, stats, etc., is handled effortlessly, maybe too effortlessly. We’ve gotten lazy and the big advertisers are profiting.

So, are we to the point where corporations are finally ready to act like real media companies? You have to think it’s just a matter of time before internal marketing and PR teams get tired of everyone reaching into the coffer.

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

Besides the steep price for most real smartphones, I think complexity still drives away most consumers.  The real question becomes, how smart can your average user make the smartphone after the purchase? Can you really rely on users to to point to an Exchange server, load Skype, or upgrade their instant messaging (IM) software? Add the fact that a lot of smartphones just aren’t very good phones to begin with and it makes the concept of a smartphone nice, but still daunting to most.

I bet if I configured GMail, gave you mobile access to XM radio, and a mobile RSS reader you’d say, WOW that’s a smartphone!

But even with complicated interfaces and bloated software, smartphones sales are growing steadily. In fact, according to eMarketer, the NPD Group says the US  is actually experiencing a ”growth spurt” in the smartphone market. 

And with all that growth comes plummeting prices. Case in point. It was less than a year ago that I dropped almost 5 bills, (yep $500) on one of the early smartphones. I think back then “smart” just meant it ran Windows and had WiFi. Same phone now? Couple hundred bucks. Upgrade anyone?

One tidbit from the report caught my eye.

“Smartphone users spent an average of $6.31 per month for wireless data in the third quarter. By comparison, owners of all types of mobile phones spent just $0.89.”

What I’m a little unsure of is how anyone manages to get any work done with $6.31 of downloaded data. I guess the $0.89 is a few text messages and a quickly downloaded weather forecast? Trust me, you can’t get much content these days without forking over $30-40 bucks for an unlimited data plan. But most consumers ( including myself) think data plans are too expensive. In fact, analyst firm IDC said recently that 73 percent of us think that way.

More importantly I think, you can see why the smartphone user is so coveted. They’re the ones looking at the mobile banner ads, receiving text messages, and using location-based GPS services to get to their next watering hole. That translates to disposable income. And it translates to dollar signs for advertisers and marketers. 

The last week or so I’ve written about developments around the so-called “social media press release” or SMPR as it’s referred to by those in the know.

Specifically, I commented on the collaboration between PR firm Shift Communications and Whitley Media that spawned PRX Builder. Well, I mentioned SHIFT but left out Whitley Media.

S-o-o-o, in the spirit of any good blogger, writer, or journalist, I wanted to get the facts straight and give credit where credit is due. Fortunately I received a comment from Shannon Whitley yesterday reminding me of their part in the ongoing SMPR efforts. We can all join the discussion here. 

This time I’ll just quote him from my email message:

All other firms are more than welcome to pitch-in and help improve PRX Builder, taking us to the next level.  I welcome all new ideas and perspectives.

On the heels of Shift Communications’ social media news release, Edelman just announced their own fancy press release creator. 

And there’s already pundits griping about Edelman’s Shift-like effort, calling it nothing new and copycat-like. But c’mon, how many ways can you really repurpose Digg links and RSS icons to look any different?

The content required to compile social releases is the same — podcasts, blogs, images, technorati, trackbacks — all the usual web 2.0 stuff. The only thing any different is the underlying technology that handles the publishing, things like managing digital assets and rendering HTML. Otherwise nada.

Perhaps Edelman would be better served striking a deal with an open source content management provider and making it (StoryCrafter) available to other agencies.

Shift is ahead here as well.

I know, I know, you’re probably thinking you have plenty of time before the armies of crackberries (blackberrys) and smartphones begin accessing your website or blog. I wouldn’t be so sure. Speedy connections on handheld devices and phones are becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous everyday.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been headed to a meeting and wanted to get some last minute tidbits on a company’s products or services, only to find their website was horribly formatted for mobile access. Very frustrating. And frustration leads to a quick exit when the technically-adept have a bad experience. And who wants to miss out on a marketing opportunity? </