social software

The Social Software Value Matrix

By Bryan - Posted on 29 April 2009

SocialText Blog: "Companies are finally paying attention to how social media affects their business outside the company walls. They recognize the extent to which Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other mass-collaboration forums present both opportunities and risks. There is excellent thought leadership on the topic, including Wikinomics, Groundswell, and Jeremiah Owyang's blog, just to name a few.

Less well understood is the value of launching social software inside companies. Tapscott and Li/Bernoff each devote one chapter, late in their respective books, to "internal wikis" and the "internal groundswell". External collaboration seems to be the main course for them, while internal is only dessert."

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Elgg Powered Sites

By Bryan - Posted on 27 April 2009

I'm a big fan of Elgg, a free and open source social software that allows you to build your own social networks. So it is with great surprise to me that I haven't really covered a lot of news about Elgg here at CMSReport.com. Take a look at a recent post by Dave Tosh for some examples of the latest Elgg powered sites on the Web. If that's not enough for you to judge how well Elgg can run social media sites...than Dave has more examples of Elgg sites to show you.

Snapshot of Elgg.org

Elgg 1.5 is the latest version of the software with download links available at the official Elgg site. Hopefully, we'll find more time to cover Elgg in the coming months.

Blogging and Social Media Tips for Real Estate Market

By Bryan - Posted on 24 April 2009

Lorelle on Wordpress: "The Real Estate world has changed dramatically since I was directly involved. Then, social media meant being an active member in your community, going to social events, meeting people how and when you could, signing deals on the hoods of cars, chasing down every lead you could with phone calls, brochures, newsletters, signs, social meetings…I guess little has changed.

What is different is that while some of the old marketing techniques work, the web changes things..."

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Social Applications are Social Networks

By Bryan - Posted on 22 April 2009

20bits: "Are all social applications also social networks? Dave McClure made a passing reference to this a little over a year ago, saying “RockYou & Slide [are] arguably social networks of their own.”¹ I want to make the stronger claim: social applications are always social networks".

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Utilizing Web 2.0 in business

By Bryan - Posted on 01 April 2009

IBM developerWorks: "While Web 2.0 has been a huge hit with consumers, some businesses have been much slower to embrace it. Many companies, however, are now realizing the great potential of Web 2.0 and how Web 2.0 services such as YouTube, Twitter, and SlideShare can provide value to their organizations. See how businesses can exploit the power of Web 2.0 services while simultaneously improving workplace relationships. Empower your employees to share information that helps generate sales leads, aids in recruitment, and assists in strengthening your company's brand, image, and corporate identity. Explore business-oriented Web 2.0 tools such as LinkedIn and CrunchBase and the Web services and APIs that many of these tools offer, allowing their benefits to be incorporated into other applications."

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Two CMS Worlds on Twitter

By Bryan - Posted on 30 March 2009

Jon Marks, a technical analyst from the United Kingdom, posted an interesting article last week on his blog. In the post, The CMS Word on the Tweet, he discusses the difficulty of finding "his world" on Twitter when seeking conversations centered around content management system. Jon even uses CMSReport.com's CMS Focus as an example for showing what he observes as a large divide between open source Web content management systems and propriety enterprise software. A divide that many of us may already recognize but haven't quite put into words like Jon has.

To the Big Wide World (which includes Twitter, and all the sites I’ve mentioned above), CMS means “Free Open Source CMS with Low Cost of Ownership”. The commercial Open Source CMS solutions don’t make the cut either. Four of the five Open Source CMS products reviewed by CMS Watch (Drupal, Joomla!, Plone CMS and TYPO3) live in both worlds. Open CMS doesn’t as my feeling is it is a bit too complex. Alfresco, DotNetNuke and ez Publish made one of the lists above, but don’t really feature in the Tweetosphere.

I inhabit a world populated by analysts, commercial vendors, systems integrators, large agencies and other such creatures. I don’t believe we pay much attention to the other world until a product jumps the gap. And it seems difficult for a product that isn’t Java or Microsoft based to make it in to My World.

Jon asked me via Twitter to let him know what I thought of his article. I think Jon has done an excellent job of identifying the dichotomy found within CMS. It does seem that the enterprise often takes an approach to content management that differs greatly from open source projects. The approaches differ so much that the parties involved often end up defining what is a CMS in two different ways. The only thing I would like to comment on is that I unfortunately live on a third, yet unidentified, world that the other two worlds don't fully understand.

Intranet Governance and Social Media

By Bryan - Posted on 25 March 2009

Intranet Benchmarking Forum: "How to develop governance around social media – mitigating the risks and fostering user trust – was the subject of a recent briefing paper for IBF members, written by our director of intranet strategy & governance, John Baptista. In it he looks at the rise of social media behind the firewall and sets out a model of governance for the next-generation intranet."

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