One of the most hotly debated questions among marketers and company executives
is "How does my organization become a truly social business?" With more pressure
than ever to "engage" with customers, user-groups, influencers, etc. this question
is bubbling to the top of most executives' and technologists list. In my opinion,
the biggest obstacle for businesses is finding the right blend of content and
community in order to get true context and added value. Until now,
the answer (and solutions) to the "social business" question have offered limited
options: use traditional proprietary software with legacy licensing models, or
rely on unwieldy white label community management solutions that are often too
disconnected to help businesses meet their engagement objectives. In this article
I'll make a case for a third option: open source social publishing. Not only a
cost alternative but an innovation alternative to these other models, open source
is emerging as the viable answer to an organization's social business quandary.
Meeting the Social Business Imperative:
Whether you are a product company introducing a new consumer packaged goods
offering, a media publisher introducing a new artist or author, or a government
agency trying to improve citizen engagement, you must support this broad new
range of dynamic online interactions: you must become a "social publisher."
Furthermore, you must be able to respond to changes within your market quickly:
your social publishing platform must not impose technical barriers to the introduction
of new products, the launch of new micro sites, or the delivery of key information
to your users, customers, constituents, or competitors.
After a period of experimentation with a multitude of technologies and approaches
to social publishing, businesses are looking to one of three dominant approaches:
1. proprietary products, with perpetual license charges and maintenance fees
or per-user pricing models;
2. "white label" community platforms, where an organization decides
to outsource the development and ongoing management of their community to a
third-party agency; or
3. Open source solutions.
Businesses approaching the social business question from either of the first
two angles are going to find themselves falling short. On one hand, enterprises
are driven to create authoritative "groomed" or "controlled"
content- about their products, services, etc- in order to drive engagement.
They are investing in content management systems to track, manage and monitor
everything flowing through the repository. However, the downside is that these
large (often clunky systems) are designed with a command and control, workflow
mentality. They not designed to foster social interaction and cannot quickly
evolve to meet new social business needs. In order to counter this, business
turn to option #2- building third party communities such social networks, forums,
etc- to serve as social, user-driven channels. However these communities are
built around connections and networking rather than content, leaving visitors
with more "friends," but very little value for their time spent on
the community site. Additionally, these services are silos of interactivity,
disconnected from a business' core content or website.
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