community software management

community software applications

Business Development Ideas

Community Software Solutions

jim wilde — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:38:16 +0000

Understanding online communities, social media, social media tools, and social commerce are important to your business, and you need to spend some quality time using them to really get what they're all about. The power of user-driven tools lies in the using. Just reading about them, or spending an hour or two playing with them, doesn't do them justice; you've got to go hands-on to appreciate their power. Start a project, reap the benefits.

Social media tools generate increasing value (online sales and productivity) as the number of participants expands. They offer benefits that traditional business strategies, rigid IT software, and static web sites fail to address. Stay connected - RSS Feeds/Site Map

Business Social Media Solutions:

Social Network Software - Expertise Locator - Collaboration Platform - Knowledge Management - Community Software - Interactive Portals - Content and User Management - Open Innovation Platform - Classification Bookmarking - Idea Management - Multi-site Platform.

Contact us for demo information or call 973.433.4007. The demo is of a comprehensive online business community software solution. One with a tightly integrated set of publishing, communication, and networking features that support and enable a new type of productivity. Members can connect, create, and share their content (video, text, images), spur mashups, in a multitude of ways to achieve greater performance.

Business Development Ideas -- Organizations of all sizes are using Social Media Tools - Community Solutions to leverage information in new ways and to discover new ways of doing business.

From IDC, "...self-service applications [social software] used by groups and marketing campaign teams; brand applications that focus on persistent customer engagement; and enterprise applications that provide more effective ways of working with customers, partners, and other external parties"

Give us a call, 973.433.4007, to learn how corporate social networking applications and community software solutions can help your business become more productive, connected, and engaging.

Image from Kathy Sierra,"User Community and ROI. Think about all the things a strong user community can do for you: tech support, user training, marketing (evangelism, word of mouth), third-party add-ons, even new product ideas. And that's not including any extra sales you might make on community/tribe items..."

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Business Development Ideas

Using social software to collaborate and connect

jim wilde — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:37:18 +0000

"The good and bad Of Web 2.0 tools", By J. Nicholas, IT News

It once bet its collaboration strategy on Microsoft tools. It's expanded to consider more Web 2.0 tools, but getting them implemented and used is far from easy.

Ever since A.G. Lafley be-came CEO of Procter & Gamble in 2000, he has pushed employees to improve how they collaborate with one another and with partners in order to develop new products faster. With a supportive CEO and today's myriad Web 2.0 options, what possible problems could face Joe Schueller, who's driving P&G's adoption of new collaboration tools? How about e-mail, which Schueller describes as the biggest barrier to employee use of more interactive and effective tools.

I blogged about the "The First Principle of Social Web Apps". It goes like this... "For each Ã¢â‚¬Ëœcomplete' user interaction ... the user must perceive they have received more value than the energy (and attention) expended to complete the task."

So, how do you compete against email when it is soooooooo dam easy to broardcast a message to select users? In my mind this is easy since the tools in social software provide contextual dynamics for broadcasting a message. Think about it. A blog post can be targeted to selected users, tagged, linked, promoted as well as support threaded comments.

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collaborative software

Community 2.0 - We are smarter than me

jim wilde — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 11:54:08 +0000

We use open source software, Drupal, and participate in the Drupal community. We have learned much from the wisdom of crowds in that community.

Although the Wharton experiment is on "wisdom of crowds" ideas for business management, those same ideas (woc) have been rocking in oss communities for years. A simple look at sourceforge.net (Registered Projects: 138,299, Registered Users: 1,474,747) will yield volumes of actionable insights about community development, management, and woc.

Promotion from Wharton Publishing

"We Are Smarter Than Me"

We would like to invite you to participate in a novel experiment Ã¢â‚¬ leveraging the knowledge and experience of the Informit newsletter subscribers to write a book together (yes, together), to be published in 2007 by Wharton School Publishing.

The - wisdom of crowds is by now a well-understood phenomenon, made popular by a recent book of the same name. Examples abound: a minor-league baseball team is being managed by its fans, who decide the starting lineup, batting order and pitching rotation. Underwriting decisions are being made by - the community, who assess the risk of loans and bid directly on offers to lend money. Companies are asking their customers to develop and film their own commercial for their favorite products, using the best to promote their products and services.

While much has been written about these new initiatives, less thought has been put into how companies should harness the trend. The focus of our new book, tentatively titled We Are Smarter Than Me, is just that: a guide to the landscape of community knowledge and the identification of key principles to harness it. Organized initially around the major business functions and processes, the book will contain case studies of successes and failures, and commentary on the lessons learned.

But most importantly, this book will (we hope) be written by hundreds or thousands of people, each listed as an author. Using wiki technology, the purpose of our experiment is to determine whether a community approach applies to book-writing, and to harness the knowledge of the community to advance the state of management. You can learn more about how this will work by visiting www.WeAreSmarter.com.

To ensure the success of the venture, we've enlisted some additional resources to provide support. We're forming an advisory committee of faculty and industry experts, led by Thomas Malone, a senior faculty member at MIT Sloan, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and author of The Future of Work, an earlier book about the themes we hope to tackle here. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has agreed to serve as a member of the Advisory Board as well. And we have recruited Donna Carpenter, a writer who has helped pen bestsellers for Jim Champy, Michael Hammer, Tom Peters and Senator John Kerry, to ensure the final manuscript is of high quality.

Well, this s/b an interesting experiment. Of course, we've been setting up social network software apps (community 2.0 systems to capture the wisdom of crowds) for organizations over the last few years. Most of them are walled gardens (not available to the public) so they lack some of the finer points of "the wisdom of crowds - mainly diversity.) What we've learned is that they work great for connecting (people, places and things), collaborating and creating once egos are put to the side.

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community 2.0

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social network software

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Community software and better tacit interactions

jim wilde — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 14:43:51 +0000

We develop online communities that run on intranets using Drupal - an open source web application framework.

I received an email from McKinsey, "Ten trends to watch in 2006". One of those trends is about the economics of knowledge. We help organizations use Drupal to create community software applications for employees, customers, suppliers, etc. What I find fascinating about all this community talk is that it all started in the open source software communities where it continues to flourish. Most of what we apply to developing and managing communities for customers is what we learned directly participating in open source software communities.

Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge. Knowledge is increasingly available and, at the same time, increasingly specialized. The most obvious manifestation of this trend is the rise of search engines (such as Google), which make an almost infinite amount of information available instantaneously. Access to knowledge has become almost universal. Yet the transformation is much more profound than simply broad access.
New models of knowledge production, access, distribution, and ownership are emerging. We are seeing the rise of open-source approaches to knowledge development as communities, not individuals, become responsible for innovations.

In a related McKinsey article, "Competitive advantage from better interactions" the authors write...

Many of the technologies and tools, social networking software and community software solutions that tacit workers are going to use will promote the collaborative and dynamic pursuit, capture, and sharing of knowledge and will allow for more video, audio, and graphics to facilitate remote interactions and broader access to scarce expertise. Tools based on search capacities, collaborative approaches to capturing and organizing knowledge, and new digital-learning channels are likely to emerge.

Executives will have to focus on deploying work-group-centric tools that are easy to set up and tear down as projects and strategic experiments come and go. They will also have to find ways of connecting these tools easily to preexisting interaction platforms.

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enterrprise mashups

drupal

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community software applications

From Community 2.0 Conference.

Community Development and Management

jim wilde — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 19:30:54 +0000

Community sites are simply not appropriate for some businesses.

If you are unable to attend this conference, check out our blog to learn more about social network software and community 2.0 for the enterprise. Here's a good blog post to start with, Community software and better tacit interactions.

Here's a podcast about community 2.0. Of course, most of the podcast is old news if you've been keeping up with our blog over the last three years.

Learn how leading companies are building communities to improve their business.

Community 2.0 is the inaugural event for forward-thinking organizations that recognize the need of harnessing the network effect of community to make smarter, faster, and better business decisions.

This conference will offer an illuminating look at how community and social networks radically change the performance of companies in the areas of:

Marketing- Find out how companies are harnessing the power of community to create two-way dialogues with their customers that ultimately deepen relationships and improve their bottom line.
Product Innovation- Share ideas with industry thought leaders on how community interaction is shortening product development cycles and creating new product opportunities.
Customer Service- Learn how best practice companies are leveraging their customers to - self-service and respond faster and more intelligently to company questions.

What's your purpose for setting up a community driven system? Identity creation? Content creation? To learn? To collaborate? Knowing the answer determines how the system is configured, how it flows, and how well it succeeds.

Community Driven Sites Are Unpredictable.

How important is it to know what employees, customers, suppliers, stakeholders, et al., have to say? Do you really want all of these people connecting and sharing ideas, information, knowledge?

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social networking software

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Web 2.0 and Social Networking to the Classroom

jim wilde — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:08:24 +0000

From IBM, "IBM and The University of Arizona Bring Web 2.0 and Social Networking to the Classroom ".

The analyst firm Gartner Group predicts that by 2008, the majority of Global 1,000 companies will quickly adopt several technology-related aspects of Web 2.0 to advance their businesses. As companies increase their reliance on new Web-based technologies to capitalize on new business opportunities, the industry is showing greater demand for technology experts who can build and manage Web 2.0 resources including wikis, blogs, user groups and forums.

The growing use of social and community systems in businesses to support customers, users, and the general public, is creating a demand for the job role of a "community manager."

Advancing Insights is way ahead of the curve in providing social networking software tools and services.

We Provide Professional Services and Social Software Tools:

Community Building with an emphasis on connecting people, collaboration among members, and creating mashups of people/ideas/things), as well as achieving adoption, and community management. See Community Management.
Improving Business Processes - We use Open API's and web services to connect to other applications (sales, marketing, HR, call-center, R&D, etc., and other social networks) These API's and services are extremely important. They provide the glue, scale, reach, and flexibility that extend applications (call them mashups) well beyond closed, walled-gardens.
Social Network Analysis, (integrated module that uses user stats),
Software customization,
Training and education - Blogging, Tagging, Bookmarking, RSS - how people work, how work is organized, how work flows.
Site infrastructure, software support (maintenance and upgrades).
Migrating Content, Classification, and Microformats.

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orchestrating resources

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enterprise blogging systems

Government Blogging and Citizen Influence

jim wilde — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 13:59:26 +0000

"Government Blogging" by Shel Israel on red couch.

"The simple answer is to be closer with their constituents.

In government, it may be starting from the top down, but it is starting. I think it will be most valuable, when the middle of government services& mdash;people like Nadia—start to blog, but some like Miliband are demonstrating that a blog is like an old fashioned town meeting, where impassioned community members get to stand up and speak and be heard in front of the elected officials who are entrusted to serve them.

Finally, there is another reason why government will be joining the conversation. Citizen groups are blogging and in some cases starting to gain the same influence as local lobbying groups."

Shel's last point is a good one. We've been working with an engineering/architectural firm that provides services to governments on a local/state/federal level as well an on an international one. The firm is seeing more and more citizen groups blogging. What's intersting is that the firm has traditionally ignored citizen groups. However, the firm now gets it that these groups have real influence and need to be part of the process for winning and sustaining contracts.

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Communications Scale with Social Networks

jim wilde — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:33:29 +0000

Most social network platforms we set-up and run are for business organizations. Organizations that want to connect people, ideas and information - mashups - so they can improve decision making and performance amongst employees, customers, suppliers, etc. But some of the ideas Mr. Young writes about, scaling self-expression, reach of distribution, and decentralizing the ecosystem apply to what we enable inside businesses.

"Social Networks are the NewMedia", posted by Robert Young.

"It’s crucial to understand that social networks are architected to help scale self-expression to new heights, both in terms of the extent of self-expression as well as the reach of distribution (e.g. number of “friends” and the effects of the whole six degrees of separation thing). A simple example… a person on MySpace can have thousands upon thousands of friends. This was not possible before the Internet, and even prior online communications and community innovations like email, chat/forums, and IM didn’t truly enable this kind of scale. Moreover, a person can now express him/herself with multidimensional, multimedia depth via text, photos, audio and video… again, to a degree that was not really possible before.

To some extent, self-expression should be viewed as a new industry, one that will co-exist alongside other traditional media industries like movies, TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. But in this new industry, the raw materials for the “products” are the people… or as Marshall McLuhan might say, “the people are the message” when it comes to social networks. So for any player who seeks to enter this industry and become the next social networking phenom, the key is to look at self-expression and social networks as a new medium and to view the audience itself as a new generation of “cultural products”.

In the past century, the creation of cultural products was centered in Hollywood. Now, social networks are broadening the scope of cultural media to include “identity production” (a very appropriate term coined by danah boyd), all the while decentralizing the ecosystem out to the edges. For traditional media companies that are seeking to enter this space (e.g. MTV, Martha Stewart, etc.), it’s critical to follow the audience into the development of this new market by re-focusing core assets that have the capability to deepen the level, and heighten the production value, of self-expression."

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corporate social networks

Social networking for the enterprise

jim wilde — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 06:31:18 +0000

I've gathered together a few posts about enterprise social networking software applications.

"Social networking makes a play for the enterprise,

Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe - ZDNET

"Social networking has clearly hit the big time and is demonstrating both the widespread interest, and the possibilities, of online social communities where people come together to exchange information, develop interpersonal relationships, and build long-term social networks.

This is certainly part of the promise of Web 2.0; a two-way Web powered by people and the information they bring to the table (this latter piece is something I like to call BYOC, or bring-your-own-content.)

However, a very real problem is that many of these things are often an actual distractionfrom the work that people are supposed to be conducting in the workplace; the very last thing that enterprises want these days is a MySpace-style time waster that disrupts business.

And that's where corporate version of social networks will have to tread a careful line. For example, Visible Path doesn't allow the creation of home pages or user profiles and instead builds networks out of existing business artifacts, like e-mails and other information sources. In this way, social networks are constructed out of the very fabric of the business instead of things that might take away from it, like a blog, chat room, or interest group."

Learn about our solutions, or read our blog or, check out this enterprise 2.0 demo of a social networking application.

Dion, "But an important challenge that social networking is that minimizing the personal aspects of corporate social networks will also end up limiting their usefulness. Good social networks provide ways for people to create just the sort of information to create useful affinities or ways to find the people you're interested in networking with.This is something I call the social surface area (see visualization below) but I think the potential for this in the enterprise are clearly still there, once initial concerns are overcome. Thus, the social media companies that find good ways to increase a user's social surface area without disrupting the business itself will tend to be most successful."

"MySpace for the Office," By Steve Rosenbush, Business Week

"Make no mistake: Young people love to socialize on the Web. Tens of millions of teens and young adults use sites like News Corp.'s MySpace or Facebook to trade messages on home pages loaded with blogs, photos, and music."

"Web 2.0 meets the enterprise", By Martin LaMonica Staff Writer, CNET News.com

"New ideas in consumer technology are rapidly creeping into the design and marketing of software aimed at corporations. For example, Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and AJAX are starting to show their potential behind corporate firewalls, analysts said."

Read more about social network software in the enterprise here.

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social media tools

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social productivity

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Developing Social Networks and On-line Communities

jim wilde — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:47:28 +0000

Here's a podcast for anybody wanting to understand the basics of developing an on-line community or social networking or web 2.0 application. Covers both technical, rss and tagging, and the social aspects, trust and participation.

From Knowledge at Wharton, Podcast: What Makes an Online Community Tick? Ask Craigslist, Yahoo and Pheedo. (registration required)

"On-line communities, [social networks and web 2.0 applications] have become not just a major social force, but a significant driver of business activity both online and offline. Facilitating, nurturing and benefiting from those communities, however, is not a simple task. To explore what makes these communities tick, Kevin Werbach, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Wharton, spoke with Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com, Julie Herendeen, vice president of Network Products at Yahoo and William Flitter, CEO of Pheedo. All three are involved with successful online communities and efforts to leverage and facilitate online communities, but in very different ways."

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RETAIL REVOLUTION - PUTTING YOUR CUSTOMERS TO WORK WITH SOCIAL NETWORKS

jim wilde — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 16:21:27 +0000

With web 2.0 tools and social software applications, retailers and marketers are using customer feedback to improver products and services.

Retail Revolution - Fortune by Oliver Ryan.

"EVER SINCE the first book review was written on Amazon.com in 1995, online shoppers have relied on one another for product intelligence. Whether it's a flat-screen TV or a Crock-Pot, someone somewhere has reviewed it, often in frightening detail. But despite Amazon's success, few other retailers have embraced reviews on their sites."

"Every year it came up, and every year we nixed it," says PETCO's vice president of e-commerce, John Lazarchic. The problem? "We had no knowledge of what the return on investment would be." Retailers of all stripes have been scared off by the cost of managing an online review community, not to mention the prospect of negative reviews and unforeseen legal liabilities.

"Harnessing the seemingly inexhaustible spirit of volunteerism that has powered MySpace and Wikipedia, the budding industry has the promise to affect inventory management, marketing, and consumer service."

Last year, I wrote about Amazon and their social network system here.

"One of the startups charges as much as $8,000 a month to handle everything from designing the review area on a retail's site to moderating discussions and analyzing user comments.

CompUSA, reports that reviews which show up on search engine result pages drew 20,000 additional visitors to its site in December. What's more, those visitors were 50% more likely to buy. PETCO has found another benefit: using customer product reviews in its advertising copy. Increased traffic is nice, but the big opportunity for retailers is to mine this new customer feedback."

A focus group can cost $5,000 to $10,000 for 20 people, but a social network system to support thousands of customers can cost under 10k in many cases.

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