19 Replies to “The Social CMS Dilemma: Will they lead with Community or Publishing Features?”

  1. Jeremiah, thanks for this erudite analysis of the CMS/social space, and your ongoing discussion in your blog.

    You’re right, it’s going to be a significant area for discussion in the near term. If we look at how many platforms are available, we see a plethora of different interfaces, with a variety of management solutions on the backend.

    The question is, when are customers going to start demanding turnkey apps that can meet their social needs within their management and budget constraints, and how will CMS vendors step up to the plate?

  2. Thanks Jeremiah for opening this conversation.

    I guess the main problem CMS vendors will face is that they basically propose a multi-purpose tool for publishers.

    Managing Communities need specialised, dedicated products that will emphasized best-of-breed social media technologies on the front-end, and allow to enforce entreprise-class processes on the back-end.

    As usual, focused vendors will have a lead over generalists for some time, until community features become commoditized.

    Great fight ahead, users will choose, brands will follow.

  3. Stephane, there isn’t a huge difference is how CMS companies manage both corporate generated and community generated content. The basic concepts are nearly identical. Many CMS vendors already have added basic community features to their CMS yet the dedicated “white label” providers still dominate most corporate communities. Why? Because as Jeremiah points out, it’s more of a people problem than a technology problem.

  4. Tom

    I think there is some feature differentiation between social and publishing that need to be considered.

    Why? the use cases are far different, from community created content (which can be very unstructured) to content created by a brand/CMS (structured).

    CMS content can often be rigorously reviewed, edited, and vetted, where social content may have one approval –if that.

    As such the features of the product (what appears on the site, and backend management) could be very different.

    You’re right however, the biggest change is process, people, and skills.

    Launching a successful community is more akin to sociology, psychology than web publishing that’s magazine-like.

  5. Jeremiah, Tom,

    I agree with both of you, I responded on the feature side, there is of course the people (and marketing) side which are prevalent.

    You have to be a social animal to build a community platform, you also have to incorporate relationship values and principles in your tool, transform best practices in usability, suggest new processes, while understanding technology challenges (cf twitter)… it’s a very demanding task.

    Of course UGC is unstructured, but you must help the brand to find structure and make decisions.

    So you need two brains : one for the community, the other for the brand, and that will a main issue for vendors in that space.

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  10. This is a very interesting article. We believe that choice and simplicity should allow the “publisher” to choose their own medium and use new technology to “join the dots”, but centralised and coherent.

    We’re developing (and already using) a social platform that allows companies to manage their online properties (whatever they are) through a completely open system.

    We’ve plugged in our own CMS, along with other 3rd party CMS and e-commerce solutions with more to come soon as we get closer to a public launch.

    Like many popular social networks, we’ve already noticed MSG, stickyness, with clients.

  11. Users should not expect 1st generation social content management platforms to fully deliver on their requirements.

    As the lead architect on one of the original Social Content Management platforms (the Affino eBusiness Suite), which has been evolved extensively to meet real-world needs for multiple industries and business scenarios, the answer to the question of content or networking is both, and … media, promotion and commerce.

    We have seen a big rise in the requirements of companies looking for single platform solutions for running their eBusiensses and it is in the synergies that you get from combining content and networking and commerce that allow companies to maximise their return on investment.

    Although there is value to be gained from bolting on social capabilities, the downfall is usually the customer experience, the ability to monitor and tailor the social experience and the ability to monetise user content and interactions.

    The biggest headache for companies usually comes in the form of how can they rapidly evolve their online experience to take advantage of trends and revenue opportunities (and identify them in the first place), and how to manage tens or hundreds of thousands of community members and their content without having to have large community management teams.

    We’ve had to roll out thousands of enhancements that allow our customers to fine-tune their communities and automate (and self regulate) community moderation. We’ve already rolled out three major iterations for the social content management publishing interfaces and workflows to meet the rapidly maturing requirements of our client’s communities, and it’s clear that other vendors will need to be equally fast at iterating their products.

  12. Stephane, there isn't a huge difference is how CMS companies manage both corporate generated and community generated content. The basic concepts are nearly identical. Many CMS vendors already have added basic community features to their CMS yet the dedicated “white label” providers still dominate most corporate communities. Why? Because as Jeremiah points out, it's more of a people problem than a technology problem.

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