|
|
Ask a question or share an opinion.
What seems to be missing?
Posted by:
mserulnk@ix.netcom.com on
April 14, 2009 at
4:02AM AFT
I'm going to take a chance on revealing my ignorance with the following post but I can't help but think there are others in the same boat I'm in and if the cost of a good answer is a little public embarassment, then bring it on (but don't forget to answer also).
As I work with my clients to help them move their organizations forward with social media and social networking, I'm realizing that there's still a few missing pieces to the puzzle. The whole "social marketplace" shift is still too labor and services intensive for the mid-market organizations to do more than put a tentative toe in the water. More often than not, it's that not-quite-supported effort that leads to failure and sets us all back another year.
The challenge is two-fold. First, for organizations that need to share with their "customers" without losing control, there needs to be an easier way of integrating best-of-breed blogs, wikis, etc. into the organization's web sites so that they are searchable as part of the site and more importantly are presented as part of the site's narrative (I think the single biggest reason social media initiatives fail is because of a lack of understanding about how the tool works to further the organization's goals). Saas just won't do it for most of these organizations because of branding, control, integration, re-use and other issues.
The site owner needs to be able to present whatever story needs to be told with the best content available. What I'd like to see is an application based on web content management principles that enable non-technical site owners to insert the results of user-generated content (e.g. the title and text from a blog) along with the tool's controls if any, into any page on their site without causing branding issues. Does this exist?
The second challenge is supporting the various fan groups, channels and followers. And they must be supported and engaged or they will dry up and possibly worse, get diverted away from your goals and messaging. Can there be a way to have the organization's staff create content (video, text, whatever), manage it and easily and automatically publish it to a set of targets (including RSS, etc.) with meta-data. Again I'd like to see an application based on WCM that will do this. This sounds like it might require a standards-based approach but who knows. Is anyone doing this?
I hope my questions and descriptions aren't too off-the-wall. It's the ability to use social media and social networking tools in our day-to-day lives that make it powerful. If a marketing assistant can't make use of the tool as part of today's campaign without asking for IT intervention, then it won't get used. It's that ease-of-use barrier that I think is causing many social media efforts to die of neglect.
(1) Answers
|
Your questions definitely don’t reflect ignorance…you are asking very important questions. I completely understand your perspective on this, and I have, in the past, shared in the same concerns. However, I think I have some good news for you…if I understand you correctly, I believe there are a few solutions out there that address many of the gaps you see!
The more labor and services intensive any software solution is, to your point, at some point (typically all-too-quickly) becomes too costly and painful to manage, let alone see a return on the investment. I would also venture to say that many organizations haven’t truly embraced social media and social networking as true strategic capital investments, and therefore have often underestimated the depth and breadth of its impact on and benefit to their organization…this, too, leads to failure and sets the industry back.
The crux is as you mention…being clear on the organization’s strategy, and clarifying the objectives that the extended branded site can bring in marketing communications tools through social acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Social clearly needs to be seen and managed as an extension of the brand and an enabler to furthering and accelerating achievement of the organizations’ goals.
So…to your two challenges…
Control is an interesting dialogue that requires more conversation (text-based conversation can’t do this justice)…but in short, it is a balance about maintaining control (seeding the community, guiding the interaction / tone / conversation, keeping it safe and relevant, etc.) while also empowering your constituents (people, businesses, and other social entities) to share their voice (bringing new relevance through the power of network influence, subject matter expertise, and fresh / vibrant activity).
Exposing the brand is often scary to organizations, but to be honest the exposure is already there (e.g. Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Twitter activity, the Blogosphere, etc.)…the art and science is bringing the dialogue within the brand so that it is visible to the organization and can be influenced or leveraged.
To your point…integration is key…
It is critical to truly leverage the assets of the organization. There is no benefit (and in fact a huge detriment) to ignoring what you already have in place & have as organizational capabilities, and trying to reinvent the wheel and separate your existing assets (brand, audience, web presence, content, data, experienced staff, domain knowledge, business relationships – advertisers, sponsors, etc.) from the new social assets you get from your partner. Equal pain arises if you can’t make use of the growing assets out in the world-wide-web as a whole that bring fresh and relevant information that is valuable to your constituents, or that reinforces positions your organization holds, etc.
There are a select few SaaS white-label social media providers are providing platforms that after an initial configuration are truly geared toward enabling non-technical staff to seed and nurture a vibrant and fruitful online brand presence.
Integrations with your social provider should include consistent look & feel and integrated navigation, inclusion of your analytics script, complete single signon (shared login / registration / logout and shared profile updates) between your identity master and social solutions (or ability to turn over identity master to the social solution & leverage reverse authentication API’s), RSS syndication of content, script-based integration (your ads, widgets, feeds, polls, etc.), imports (users, forums, comments, etc.) or other data (businesses, restaurants, course descriptions, etc.) into the social solution, exports of user and other social entity data out of the social solution into your CRM solution (it’s your data…not the social solution providers’ data!), etc.
These platforms also provide javascript and web service solutions to be added to your own pages…including enabling users to comment on any uniquely identifiable content (text / articles, photos, videos, podcasts, etc.) within your CMS, and dropping content modules to expose dynamic activity from within the community (latest and most popular members and UGC, or feed rolls, etc.).
Further, the social platform should bring forward WYSIWYG blogs (mini-CMS platforms) for content authors/editors/publishers, feed-driven blogs to enable external blogs to be managed where they are / but syndicate that same content within the featured bloggers of the brand, “featured” UGC from staff or users, RSS to enable syndication of content from the CMS throughout the social pages and RSS syndication of social content to CMS and other websites & social destination sites, enabling enterprise content search so that all content types and whether internal or externally-sourced are searchable from one interface element, full admin control (assignable through permissions to staff, volunteers, or even trusted users) like WCM tools for branding and page design, user management, content management, and providing sophisticated dirty-word filters, moderation, report abuse by users, administrative banning by user & IP, speed bump and captcha to prevent bots and spam, etc.
Finally, widget and feed aggregators should continually pull content from internal and external sources and be leveraged into a personalized reader, while also publishing these pages for viral sharing of that personal domain expertise, making that exportable to other websites, etc.
Through these efforts of hosting the infrastructure and providing seamless updates, deep integration of internal and external assets, provision of data, and simplification of the community management and moderation through easy-to-use administrative panels and WYSIWYG user interface administrative controls…a select few SaaS social media and networking providers are surfacing to the top of the food chain because they bring real value in furthering and accelerating achievement of the organizations’ goals.
ThePort Network is definitely one of the providers that offers the above functionality-feature-sets.
|
|
|
