Unique Sitecore Module Enables Marketers to Gain Extensive Understanding of Twitter and Facebook Social Media Campaigns While Saving Time and Effort
social software
A couple new features in Elgg 1.7.4
Brett Profitt just announced the release of Elgg 1.7.4 via the Elgg blogs. While the majority of changes in this release are bugfixes, there are two notable changes in Elgg 1.7.4 related to Twitter and user validation.
Brett writes about the new features:
- Twitter Services has been upgrade to use oAuth and extended for easier support of 3rd party plugins. For users, this means The Wire will post to Twitter again. For developers, this means you can easily integrate Twitter in your plugins. Because of changes to Twitter's API, this requires additional configuration for both the admins and users. This API was originally a 1.8 feature so documentation is still sparse, but watch the blog for a post on how to write plugins that can tweet!
- Added a new admin section to manage unvalidated users. A very common problem for new users on Elgg sites is validating their account through email. To help with this we've added a admin section so admin users can manually validate accounts, delete accounts, or resend the validation links.
The latest version of Elgg is available from Elgg's download page.
Elgg 1.7.2 has been released
Elgg 1.7.2 was released this week and it is primarily a bugfix release. I usually don't post stories about web application releases that add no new features but felt inclined to do so this morning. Elgg is one of those social media applications that I've always wanted to use for a project but never got around to using. If I can't find the right project to need Elgg then at least I can talk about it and keep it in my thoughts.
Some of the more significant bug fixes in this release include:
- Saving drafts and previewing blogs works as expected.
- Page titles can now be edited in the Pages plugin.
- Group names no long show up in Friends Collections.
- Added a group member listing page.
- Group forum topics can be edited.
- User data for usernames with UTF8 characters are correctly migrated to the new data scheme.
See Brett Profitt's post for additional details about Elgg 1.7.2.
The Social Software Value Matrix
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.
Elgg Powered Sites
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
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..."
Social Applications are Social Networks
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".
Utilizing Web 2.0 in business
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.
Two CMS Worlds on Twitter
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
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.
Google Apps missing enterprise social-networking
ComputerWorld: "By now, many collaboration software providers consider it a must to have an enterprise social-networking component in their suites. But Google, which shook up this market with its Web-hosted Apps product in 2006, stands out for lacking this capability."
The problem is bigger than SharePoint
Last week, Socialtext's Eugene Lee forwarded a link on Twitter with SharePoint as the focus of the article. The SharePoint article is titled, SharePoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise Social Tools and the author discusses the frustration enterprises and site developers have with the Microsoft product. There is some truth in the article as I've heard from many people discussing their concerns about SharePoint lacking quality Enterprise 2.0 features or causing vendor lock for their organization. However, the article borders slightly on the side of a rant on SharePoint and I've allowed it remain in a tab on my browser for quite awhile while I pondered what I wanted to take from the article.
I think the frustrations the author describes about SharePoint isn't a SharePoint problem. And the author describes the issue very well without recognizing it's just not SharePoint that drives organizations crazy.
SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focussed on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organization have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.
This older, prescribed category of enterprise tool needs is where we have been in the past, but this is not where organizations are moving to and trying to get to with Enterprise 2.0 mindsets and tools. The new approach is toward embracing the shift toward horizontal organizations, open sharing, self-organizing groups around subjects that matter to individuals as well as the organization. These new approaches are filling gaps that have long existed and need resolution.
The problems identified with SharePoint can easily be said about many enterprise applications out there. Many of the enterprise suites provided to the market traditionally offered turn-key solutions in an effort to deliver a single integrated solution for the customer. These integrated suites can and do create "vendor lock" but that isn't the sole goal of enterprise products being delivered by such companies as Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle. The customers asked for efficient and effective enterprise solutions and the big software companies responded by providing the expected tightly controlled software platforms (historically a good thing) along with terms of licensing, predictable pricing, training, and infrastructure support.
Emojo delivers greater agility with Affino 5.5 eBusiness Suite
The new Affino 5.5 eBusiness Suite release has been engineered to
allow online enterprises to respond more rapidly to changing market
conditions and fluctuations in consumer behaviour.
Behind the Firewall: Content management and Collaboration on the Intranet
Away from this blog, I've been putting a lot of energy into how best to work with social software in larger organizations (Enterprise 2.0) behind the firewall. My professional attention has been shifting away from using Web content management systems, social publishing systems, and other collaboration tools on the Internet. I really think the next big advancements and challenges for web technologies will not be on the World Wide Web,
but the less explored intranet ran by medium and larger size organizations.
In one form or another, I've been involved on both sides of the
firewall in my organization. Ten years ago it was a huge challenge for
organizations and businesses to figure out how best to utilize the
Internet to meet their business needs. As challenging as I saw the Internet for
my own organization, I'm convinced there are greater challenges on the intranet side of the house. For the most part, we all can see
what the others are doing with their Internet Web servers, but
few of us get to see what other organizations do with Enterprise 2.0
behind their own firewalls.
Company of the future
Silicon.com: "This will be quite a turnaround. How many companies do you know that are supposedly involved in high-tech services yet ban their employees from using social networks, podcasts or blogs? How do they think people share information these days?
I still remember the days before email, when a memo would go around with a stapled distribution list. This is the distant past now for anyone under 30. If people organise their own life around networks of contacts then isn't it obvious that companies will have to?"
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