Archive for the ‘White Label Social Network’ Category

The Unrecognizable Taglines of the Community Platform Space

Categories: Social Media, Web Marketing, White Label Social NetworkPosted on January 15th, 2009

Over the last year I’ve been trained to make my points not just with opinion but with data, so I’ve done just that with this experiment. In a crowded market (esp if you’ve 100 competitors) having an at-par product isn’t enough. Strategic market will out position your competitors and make sure you’re considered and then preferred over others. Sure some strong brands like GM don’t need a tagline, but others that have ingrained “just do it.” are now part of culture.

In a few short days I created, fielded and collected data from a small survey set of folks that read my blog and are connected to me on twitter, the results are below.

Data: Tag Line Recognition, all respondents
Out of a base of 60 respondents, which is on the smaller side, we could quickly see a trend on which taglines were the most recognizable.

90.00% were able to recognize Twitter’s “What are you doing?”

30.00% were able to recognize Kickapps’s “Social Networking Software Platform and Soical Media Community Building Applications”

28.33% were able to recognize Lithium’s “Successful Communities On-Demand”

25.00% were able to recognize Liveworld’s “Your Brand Lives in the Voice of Your Customers”

25.00% were able to recognize Jive’s “The Business Social Software Leader”

21.67% were able to recognize Mzinga’s “On-Demand Social Software Solutions for Marketing, Support and Learning”

21.67% were able to recognize Awareness’s “The Leader in Social Media Marketing”

18.33% were able to recognize Leverage Software’s “People-Centric Social Networking Solutions for Business”

16.67% were able to recognize Telligent’s “Enterprise Online Community”

15.00% were able to recognize Pluck’s “Leaders in Social Media”

Considerations
First of all, this isn’t a completely scientific study, with a small sample base, this isn’t a formal market research project that I do on the day job, but it is fun and does help me to make a point about marketing in a crowded pond.

Despite it being a small sample size, the audience reading this blog and those connected to me are certainly in the space. Since this was launched on my blog and twitter account, it is targeted in the social software space, this wasn’t a survey that went to grandmas in the congo.

I wanted to do a larger sample of taglines that spanned other vendors like Blogtronix, Neighborhood America, OneSite, HiveLive, and on on, but I realized I didn’t have enough bandwidth for this project –nor easy to use tools.

Findings

Most of the respondents were influencers or decision makers. 10 of respondents worked for community platforms, but only a half of them were the vendors listed above. 12 of the respondents replied they were a decision maker, I can see the emails and some work for large corporations. 27 said they were influencers. 5 were unsure what this market is, or were not involved with this market. the rest had misc write ins.

11 of the respondents already had a community platform, 20 of them had no need for a community platform, but about half of them worked at the vendors themselves. 8 were unsure and needed to learn more if they needed a community platform, 17 of the were researching this market, and 1 said they were ready to buy.

Even the most recognizable tagline by Kickapps (I’m not sure how anyone could recognize that beast) has nothing to be proud of, at best, less than one-third of the market could recognize it.

Some responded they worked at community platform vendors, and while they got their own company right (I misread the data before) they didn’t recognize the taglines of others.

I threw twitter in as the first question just to get people feeling good, and it’s somewhat of a control sample, they are clearly in this space. It is interesting that 90% of them clearly could recognize this call to action.

In a market this crowded (100 vendors) creating a tagline or brand that makes you standapart may be key. On the other hand vendors like Six Apart and Social Text (both long time recognizable) brands don’t have a tagline at all.

Although Pluck’s “Leaders in Social Media” and Awareness’s “The Leader in Social Media Marketing” are nearly identical, Awareness has a 5 point gain, why is that? I’ve often thought Jive’s enterprise octopus was fairly unique and fun, and told a story that other serious minded enterprise vendors failed to get.

Conclusions
The vendors in this space, at least by tagline are for the most part, indistinguishable, I can back this up with my frequent client calls of brands asking for vendor recommendations and general confusion on who does what –good thing we published a Wave report helping with that. While some of the vendors had more of a descriptor than a tagline, they were for the most part, not different from each other.

Doug Haslam writes that he found this experiment interesting, and although he’s in PR and covers this space, could only identify one tagline in the space.

Voices from the community
I asked the respondents what would they do if they were the CMO of these vendors, because of the large amount of text, I’ve moved them to a seperate page, but you should read some of the cherry insights they provided.

Thanks everyone for this quick and interesting experiment.

Here’s Doug’s Podcast discussing the topic, listen in.

Posted in Social Media, Web Marketing, White Label Social Network | 28 Comments »

Forrester Wave Report: The Leaders in Community Platforms for Marketers (Part 4/4)

Categories: Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social NetworkPosted on January 9th, 2009

Clients can access the full report The Forrester Wave™: Community Platforms, Q1 2009 on the Forrester site, however the high level findings are available below, as with all of our reports, we stand by our products.

Communities are a powerful way for businesses to grow
Used correctly, communities can impact the top and bottom line of company’s financials: from brands encouraging customers to self-support each other (reducing costs), to spreading word of mouth to each other (efficient marketing and increased sales) to crowd sourcing innovation (streamlining R&D) communities matter more than ever –especially during a recession.

What you must do before you select a vendor
Many of our clients follow the POST methdology, which is a framework for them to first understand the People they’re trying to reach, and how they use social technologies. Then to pick an Objective that aligns with their business, next, they will spend most of their time scoping out the Strategy, which includes internal processes, stakeholders, roles, budgets, empowerment, policy, and change management. Once you’ve done that, only then you’re ready to choose a vendor, which is the Technology. As a rule of thumb, successful brands focus about 80% of their efforts on the People, Objectives, and Strategy, and about 20% effort on Technologies –don’t get it backwards.

Over 100 vendors in this commodity market
Many an entrepreneur has realized this community opportunity, when I started to cover this market there were 8 vendors on my list, today the space now boasts 100 vendors and it continues to grow. Fortunately, the Forrester Wave reports are designed to segment crowded industries. It’s important that your realize this report is for interactive marketers at enterprise-class companies that are seeking to deploy customer communities –not for the internal intranet, collaboration, or insight community vendors.

Therefore brands seek solution partners–not technologists
Having spent my time as a community manager at Hitachi and coupled with research we know that successful community deployments are far more than forums, blogs, rss or other technologies. As a result, we applied over 60% of our weighted criteria based on what our clients tell us they want, a solutions partner that delivers strategy, education, services, community management, analytics and support. During a recession, brands want to be sure that vendors are around for the long term, so we also factored in leadership, executive team, client base, and of course, financial viability.

Key findings of the 9 vendors
What did we find? First of all, this is still a very young market, with the average tenure of a company being just a few years in community. Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings.

Next, a group of vendors ranked as strong performers: KickApps and Pluck enable large Web sites to quickly scale with social features. Also in the strong performer category, Awareness, Lithium Technologies, and Mzinga enable brands to build branded communities while LiveWorld offers brands agency-like services. While Leverage Software is not on par with the others in the category, they are ideal for medium-sized businesses and due to their cost-effective platform could have a strong position during this economic downturn.

Above Graphic: Forrester Wave™: Community Platforms, Q1 ’09

Customize the Wave report to your business needs
We don’t live in a world of absolutes, and we understand that the needs of one brand will differ from another, so clients that can access the report can also download the excel sheet. This detailed excel sheet for clients (which has scores, explanations, criteria, scoring criteria) has ‘sliders’ and ‘toggles’ that make it easy for brands to dial up or down specific criteria –creating a custom Wave report for their needs. Different business needs require different vendor offerings, so the Wave is flexible, you can make it your own.

A summary of the rigorous methodology:
I encourage our clients to be open and transparent about their products and services, in order to build trust with their market, so I’m holding myself to the same rigors, here’s a high level summary of the process:

First, we vetted the 100 vendors to submit to a vendor product catalog, over 50 submitted which we used the data to pair down who were appropriate for the Wave report.

Hands-on lab evaluations: I spent up to 6 hours with each vendor in a windowless room to evaluate their product live using common customer scenarios. I grilled the executive team, and discussed their strengths and weaknesses.

Product demos. We asked vendors to conduct demonstrations of their products’ functionality. We used findings from these product demos to validate details of each vendor’s product capabilities.

Customer reference calls. To validate product and vendor qualifications, Forrester also conducted reference calls with up to three of each vendor’s current customers for a total of up to 27 customer calls.

We collected hundreds of screenshots, presentations, samples, reports and all of this information was entered in a multi-tab spreadsheet that accounts for thousands of cells, scoring, and detailed explanations which clients can use to toggle up and down specific needs as in some cases, specific feature needs may need to be highlighted over others.

In the bottom links, I’ve made my research process very transparent, and have indicate the other three other blog posts documenting this laborious research effort.

The conversation is just starting
Although this report is a snapshot in time, and some vendors have expressed they’ve made some improvements to date, to keep this long process from going further, we have to put a cap on the updates. Therefore, I will continue to keep the market updated with the the social networking weekly digest just as I have for the past years. In the spirit of the community conversation, if you’re a vendor in this wave in this space, I encourage you to voice your opinion online, I’ll make sure the market sees it, I strive to be fair.

A very sincere public thanks to the team
This was the most difficult project I’ve had to do in a long time, and I’d like to thank Shar VanBoskirk (editor), Christine Spivey Overby (editor and my manager), Angie Polanco (Research Associate), Oliver Young (subject matter expert), Sarah Glass (who went beyond the call of duty as a Senior Research Associate), Zach Reiss-Davis (Research Associate), Megan Chromik (editing), and Josh Bernoff (moral support), I couldn’t have done it without you guys, I assure you, it was painful for them as well as me.

Helping decision makers to be successful
Yet the pain will pay off for our clients as brands can easily find vendors that will meet their specific needs. I’ve been passionate about the community market far before I became an industry analyst covering this space, and am glad to serve the industry. We went to great lengths to be objective, accurate, consistent, detailed, and fair and hope this accelerates your business. Thanks for your patience, and enjoy the Wave!

Related Resources
I’ll be updating this section as I see interesting voices from media, vendors, brands and customers.

Jive and Telligent have made the report available

Read Write Web: Report: Community Platforms Market Led by Jive Software and Telligent

Leverage Software CEO Mike Walsh (and other vendors) have responded in the comments

Josh Bernoff: Picking a community vendor? We’ve evaluated a bunch

Tom Humbarger: Questions if these vendors are eating their own dog food read Walking the “Social Media Walk”

Telligent’s corporate blog chimes in and makes the report available for you.

Connie Benson: Wave report showcases community platforms

Neighborhood America CEO, Kim Patrick Kobza: Forrester Wave Report Part 1

Forrester’s Interactive Marketing Blog: I’ve cross posted this same content on our blog for interactive marketers.

My follow up post: How we filtered 9 vendors out of 100 for the Community Platform Wave

Webinar: I’ll be conducting a teleconference on Feb 3rd, hope you can attend

Max Kalehoff discusses the wave and talks why he choose Telligent –and how they can improve.

Destination CRM: Forrester Waves to the Top Providers of Community Platforms

Barry Hurd: Corporate Social Media Platforms - great info to check out.

Mediapost: Ultimate Guide To Community Platform Technologies

Read more about this Wave Research project:

Part 1: Starting the Wave
Part 2: Data Collection Process
Part 3: The Analysis Process
Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the final report

Posted in Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social Network | 65 Comments »

Cisco launches Community Platform “EOS” and aims at Media Industry

Categories: Social Networking, White Label Social NetworkPosted on January 7th, 2009

Cisco launches “Entertainment Operating System” (EOS)
I spent the day with Cisco’s Eos team a few weeks ago in their shiny SF offices, and learned a great deal about their SaaS platform and intentions to provide a community platform to the media industry, much of my conversation is still under NDA, although they’ve already gone public with this announcement from CNET and WSJ. This project, while we certainly had our suspicions was kept very quiet, and even Cisco’s social media teams I’ve spoken to weren’t fully aware of the project.

Stemming from Community Experience at Five Across
In Feb 2007 (yes way back then) Cisco acquired community platform Five Across, and has since integrated the team with this media solutions business. Their goal? To provide a community platform to the media industry, of course eventually served up on Cisco’s infrastructure. This moves Cisco away from infrastructure (servers, networking, routers) and now to the application space, providing a broader offering to the large networks that don’t just want to put their videos on YouTube for Google to monetize.

New kid on the block will have some challenges
This doesn’t come without challenges for Cisco’s Eos team, as our research has indicated that community deployments are only 20% technology and the other 80% being process, roles, culture, measurement, and change management, this gives Cisco’s Eos a sharp learning curve, they’ll need to combat this with the success the team from Five Across and Tribe have gleaned over the years. Secondly, any new product is going to be plagued with areas to be tweaked, and some media brands may not want to be the early guinea pigs for such a deployment.

Takes aim at Kickapps and Pluck but backed by huge name
While there’s plenty of market share to go around during this growth period, this is a direct insertion into the deal flow of media focused vendors like Pluck and Kickapps, so you can expect brands to be sending RFPs to Cisco’s Eos team for evaluation. While the encumbants have a track record of success and Eos doesn’t have a folder filled with case studies, they do lead with Warner Music and have launched Laura Izibor and Sean Paul (I checked the code, it’s calling Cisco EOS code), they do have two strong things going for them: 1) Cisco’s existing footprint in the enterprise, 2) The thousands in the Cisco sales force and all of their contacts. and 3) Brand recognition from the big, safe, and profitable Cisco.

Over 100 vendors in this space
Exciting times ahead, I’ve just added Cisco to the ever growing list of community platforms –it’s over 100 vendors now.

Key Takeaways

Great move for Cisco as it puts more ‘bits in the pipe’, as online video increases demand for their networking gear.

Cisco EOS team will need to demonstrate they offer more than just technology to be successful, media companies need solution vendors –not technology vendors.

Competitors now have to compete against infrastructure play and big brand backing.

Cisco could drive down prices by offering Eos at bargain prices as a loss leader for other offerings.

Social Networking software is a cheap commodity and market is oversaturated, expect a shakeout during this recession.

Other large infrastructure players like Sun, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, and CMS vendors will eye the community platform space for buyout –yet startups will resist during periods of low valuation.

Update: Scott Brown from the EOS team has responded to me in the comments, and from the new EOS blog, he says my assessment was fair, which is of course one of the attributes I’m aiming for.

Posted in Social Networking, White Label Social Network | 24 Comments »

Untapped Community Platform Business Models

Categories: Community Marketing, White Label Social NetworkPosted on November 2nd, 2008

Given the state of the economy, monetization is at top of mind for this blooming social media industry, in fact, we’re not seeing a tremendous amount of it. I can see some entry level opportunities for community platforms, here’s some quick ideas that have been churning in my mind, I release them here in public and maybe someone will make something of it:

Hook then offer premium services
Like Yammer, create an easy to create community tool that allows any person in a company to quickly setup an enterprise class social network and start collaborating –sans the sales folks. Let it be rebrandable, but with features perhaps more robust than Ning or Yahoo groups, that tie into company confirmed email addresses. Then once you get 10% of the company hooked, you’re able to start to have an enterprise licensing discussion. I’m surprised no one has done this.

Go the consumer route –then build network
We’re seeing more of an influx from Liveworld’s features LiveBar that let an ’social media overlay’ quickly be plugged into any website, as well as Plum which offers features that can be quickly embedded into websites. The trick here is to gain mass consumer adoption, and then switch up business models away from premium instead to an advertising model, data collection, much how buzzlogic has morphed their business model.

Start em when they’re young
While there’s many social media tools for the classroom, I’ve yet to hear about a robust social media community platform that could be used for schools for the entire duration of a students enrollment at an education institution. While schools may be reluctant to pick up the tab, there’s ways to monetize that let parents purchase premium services, or education vendors like Scholastic, Kaplan, or other supplementary services.

Ideas are cheap, and I have no idea sharing these in public. What’s more important is prioritizing your feature roadmap based upon market needs. As a result lately, I’ve been doing strategy sessions with product teams at enterprise companies to discuss how their products can benefit from the social web. You’ll see some major products released from large companies in the coming quarters, some of them, I had a direct hand in shaping and molding.

Not all of the community platform plays need to be at enterprise level, there’s quite a few other untapped ways to monetize. Leave a comment if you’ve another idea, or see some of this in action.

Posted in Community Marketing, White Label Social Network | 11 Comments »

Status: Forrester Wave Report for Community Platforms, Analysis Process (Part 3/4)

Categories: Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social NetworkPosted on October 24th, 2008

Wave report to segment market leaders in a crowded industry
I’m over the hump of this laborious research project to determine which of the 90 community platform vendors are enterprise worthy for Fortune 5000 interactive marketers.

Enterprise brands seek ‘Community Solution Partner’
I firmly believe that technology is a commodity, that’s why there are 90 vendors in this crowded space. Brands have indicated that success is only 20% technology, and the majority is 80% is a combination of internal changes, services, and support.

One thing I heavily stressed in my research, isn’t a focus so much on the technology, but instead how the vendors could truly be ‘community solution partners’ to their clients. A true solution partner understands the business needs of their client, offers strategy, best practices, can assist with implementation, offers ongoing technical –but more importantly, community management, guidance, and recommendations.

The research methodology includes:
I’ve had to make sense of thousands of cells in multiple excel sheets, ensure each line is accurate and will enable our clients to make important decisions.

6-hour in person lab days with each of the 9 vendors
During the last few weeks, I spent 5-6 hours with each of the nine vendors, often in a windowless room where powerpoint, screenshots, and live testing of their software took place. Using Forrester’s 5 objectives of listening, talking, energizing, supporting, and embracing, I’ve found some key patterns to the strengths of vendors.

Up to 27 customer interviews
Surprisingly, vendors don’t know their own customers that well, in more than one occasion, customers poorly rated the vendors that suggested they participate as this ideal customer reference. I also cross references with vendors to see how well they could anticipate what their customers said about them –in some cases, vendors were completely unaware of the challenges that clients were having –a very bad sign.

Reviewed data submitted by vendors
Earlier, we issued a survey to vendors in this space, over 50 of them responded, and submitted around 50 or so fields of data. I factored in a great deal of this to perform market sizing and to complete comparative analysis.

Frequent discussion with clients
Perhaps the most important piece of data input is the constant discussion with my clients on inquiry calls. I hear from them what they want (demand side) as well as their experience with vendors (feedback). It’s interesting to find out that many brands are not happy with their platform vendors, and the vendors often don’t even know it!

Next Steps: Final Analysis, Preparing for Publication
Expect to see the published report in the coming weeks. Right now, the spreadsheets are being reviewed by vendors in the fact checking process, and I’ve already started to see some patterns in the data that will help to determine positioning. Thanks for your patience, between client duties and travel, getting all the pieces together for success requires some patience to ensure it will be done correctly.

If you’re a client and need advice now, you can schedule an inquiry call with me and I’ll be happy to discuss with you my current findings. I’ve already made some recommendations to clients based upon their specific needs and objectives.

I hope you find this transparency in the research methodology helpful in understanding our goals to make sure our clients make the right decisions to be successful.

Read more about this Wave Research project:

Part 1: Starting the Wave
Part 2: Data Collection Process
Part 3: The Analysis Process
Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the final report

Posted in Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social Network | 10 Comments »

Now nearly any website can now be “Social” with LiveBar

Categories: Social Networking, Web Tools, White Label Social NetworkPosted on September 16th, 2008

LiveWorld now introduces “LiveBar” and Mark Hendrickson from Techcrunch has a review showing now any static website that embeds this lightweight social script.

I first saw mockups of this product a few months ago from LiveWorld, and it seemed impressive, but unlike embedding chat, comments, forums, or blogs directly into the webpage, this is an ‘overlay’ that is quietly positioned at the bottom of any webpage.

What use cases could warrant this overlay experience versus an embed? Existing large websites with an inflexible CMS system that makes UI changes difficult. Companies that want to experiment with social on their websites but aren’t ready to dive in. Lastly, websites with heavy interactive marketing or content where community should take a back seat to what’s being shown. Expect to see competitors of Liveworld to develop their own versions of Livebar, allowing lightweight deployments of community features. Also, expect this to be a great ’sampler product’ for LiveWorld to demonstrate community to hesitant brands –much like the easy to deploy OpinionLab tools.

Looking forward, whether companies like it or not, the future holds that websites will be social, and it means that customer opinions (good and bad) will circumvent their marketing content. The LiveWorld folks also have launched a community site, where you can interact with them further.

I’m conducting a Wave report on this community platform, and it’s become very clear to me that the technology is a commodity (that’s why there are around 100 vendors) and what really is going to count is strategy, service, support, and knowhow.

Related Resources

Status Update 2: The Forrseter Wave Report

What Facebook Connect means to brands

Thinking Long Term: Google’s New Browser ‘Chrome’

Forrester Report: Online Community Best Practices

Posted in Social Networking, Web Tools, White Label Social Network | 9 Comments »

The Problem With SaaS: Lack of Flexibility

Categories: Challenges, Social Networking, White Label Social NetworkPosted on September 5th, 2008

I’m deep into the Wave research (read my latest status update) for nine community platforms (big list here), in fact, this week and next, I’m in 5 and a half to 6 hour meetings with vendors getting to know them very well. Of course, that’s just one side of the story, I’m interviewing up to 27 of their customers (brands) to get the ‘other’ side of the story. You’ll see me pop up online for “Twitter breaks” here and there, surfacing for air, then submerging back again.

I wasn’t surprised to hear from a few brands that not everyone is a fan of Software as a Service (Saas), in fact, for some, on-premise software makes a whole lot more sense. What exactly was the pain point with Saas?

Of course, the most obvious points continue to come to mind: conservative companies, or those with truly critical data wanted to have the data on site, or wanted to self-support their own architecture, or wanted to modify the software at their choosing, yet I learned about something that I hadn’t even considered:

Some brands felt that being tied to SaaS meant they were at the mercy of the vendor when it came to the software architecture. While this is certainly the case not just for SaaS but all non-opensource software, when a vendor would upgrade a version, some brands were forced to accept the changes. In some cases, some brands were not aware/prepared of some upcoming upgrades to the SaaS software and were blindsided to the changes.

Furthermore, these brands felt that the larger customers who wanted specific feature upgrades were able to influence the vendor through direct pressure or even fueling the R&D work through feature requests. What’s wrong with that? Alot, if the feature requests of the larger customer don’t reflect the needs of a smaller SMB customer. Since the software is delivered over the web, there was little recourse for the smaller brand to deny the changes, they pretty much had to suck it up.

Now you may ask, isn’t this a problem with all software, SaaS or on-premise? Yes but vendors are more likely to allow customers to use multiple versions of on-premise software, of course there’s a date when they will no longer support it. Yet vendors who provide SaaS are far more likely to provide only one version, forcing clients to swallow the changes on demand.

Have you had a bad experience with Software as a Service? Leave a comment, let’s explore this further.

Related reading: Community Platforms: Here comes the CIO.

Update: As usual, the conversation has also splintered into FriendFeed.

Posted in Challenges, Social Networking, White Label Social Network | 30 Comments »

Social Punishment: The “Bozo” Feature

Categories: Community Marketing, White Label Social NetworkPosted on September 1st, 2008

We’re all social creatures, and we thrive on the interactions of others, in fact, these interactions are the primary drivers for troublemakers in communities.

I’ve read stories about how babies that are given all the proper medical attention, food, shelter to deem them ‘healthy’ whither away to near death if they don’t get human contact and love and care. The same applies to prison, perhaps one of the more dreaded punishments is sending inmates to the ‘hole’ for isolation from all social contact. POWs can muster the strength to survive knowing that a series of Morse code taps can signal to fellow inmates that they’re ok and cared about. How does this apply to online communities?

[The 'Bozo' Feature renders the troublemakers' activities invisible to everyone else, naturally severing what they most crave from others --attention and reactions]

One of my primary coverage areas is on community platforms (also known as white label social networks) that are used by brands to deploy their own social features on their corporate domain. I’ve come across both Mzinga and Pluck that offer this feature, leave a comment below if you also have this feature.

Community managers have a few options when dealing with troublemakers, the first is to take them on head on, either in private or public, sometimes it leads them to banning them. Banning them (removing their account) often doesn’t solve many issues, instead they may choose to create new accounts, or figure out how to cause additional trouble in subvert ways.

Some community managers who can’t deal any further with these troublemakers are left to only one option, by rendering the troublemaker as a “Bozo” using the communtiy software. What’s the “Bozo” feature? It renders the troublemaker invisible to everyone else.

Troublemakers thrive on the attention they get from others and enjoy stirring up fights, but they won’t know that no one else can see them, and therefore assume everyone is ignoring them, or their ploys hold no weight. As a result, they’ll slowly move away, sometimes never realizing that they’ve been labeled a “Bozo”. This gives the community manager a way to defuse the situation, in a non-confrontational manner, allowing for the troublemaker to quietly move on their own.

Posted in Community Marketing, White Label Social Network | 53 Comments »

Community Platforms: Here Comes The CIO

Categories: Enterprise Web, Social Networking, White Label Social NetworkPosted on August 26th, 2008

I’m currently doing an intensive 3 month research project on the topic of Community Platforms, and it’s become very clear that by talking to many of the 27 brands, 9 vendors, and leaning on forecast data where many decisions are currently being made to purchase these enterprise software solutions. To start with, many solutions (define as a set of software, services, support) are being purchased by marketers who want to bring a social aspect to their corporate website.

These marketing folks, who may have worked with IT in the past to load CMS programs are bound by corporate red tape, de-prioritized by IT project management, or want to evade the rigors of legal and security and free to purchase community platforms using Software as a Service model (SaaS). Why is this beneficial? As they’ve only to rely on IT for single sign on (SSO) they often can handle the rest within the web marketing team, or lean on the services of the community vendor.

Yet, they aren’t the only buyers, HR departments are starting to become sponsors for enterprise social network platforms to improve internal knowledge transfers, collaboration, and developing specific programs for alumni, new hires, interns, and even women using pre-packaged use case features provided by these vendors.

You can see where this is headed right? IT departments realize that fragmented communtiy software is going to lead to a disparate mess to clean up, and many are starting to make recommendations for enterprise platforms that will span the usage of the whole company. Why? To reduce overall resources, ensure security, centralize data, and ensure, well that they are responsible and safe when it comes to their information.

I’ve only heard of a few instances from the marketers that I’ve interviewed where IT has thought of community platforms as an enterprise solution rather than a one-off by marketing.

Talking with many of these folks in this research project, I could make the case that in 12-24 months we’ll start to see CIOs start to initiate projects to deliver enterprise social networking mandates, take ownership over these disparate projects, and wake up and realize the importance of these tools beyond marketing and HR.

This yields all kinds of questions regarding: security, what does enterprise-class entail, how will Microsoft/SAP/IBM respond, will Saas or on-premise software be required, governance, flexibility, allowance of third-party widgets, and costs. More to come on this as I dive further into this research project.

It’s amazing it’s taken so many years for this to come around, I first started writing about this back in 2005 with Dennis McDonald.

Posted in Enterprise Web, Social Networking, White Label Social Network | 26 Comments »

Status: Forrester Wave Report for Community Platforms, Data Collection (Part 2/4)

Categories: Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social NetworkPosted on August 22nd, 2008

One of the ways I tell companies how they can best serve their market is to be transparent on how they build products. By doing so, it helps folks not only understand, but appreciate the level of effort that goes into creating a service or product. While analysts offer guidance and advisory sessions, we’re most known for the reports that we create, in fact, these are key products that help decision makers be successful.

Demand for community platforms, yet too many vendors
I’m asked a few times a week on which community vendor to choose, with a list of 80-120 vendors on my blog and a more refined catalog on the Forrester site, it’s very confusing for brands to determine who’s best. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know I’ve been watching the community platform (aka white label social network space) with great interest, even before I joined Forrester. A few weeks ago I announced my intention to start a Forrester Wave report, which will segment out nine vendors that will meet the needs of Interactive Marketers at Enterprise Class companies (companies with more than 1,000 employees).

The Forrester Wave Methdology
Using the refined Forrester Wave methodology that has been completed by many analysts before me, we’re nearly half way done with this 3 month research project to understand, and segment the community platform market. For this particular report, it doesn’t make sense to utilize crowd sourcing methods (although I’ve used crowd sourcing for other reports), the Wave method is already refined from the many analysts before me.

To date, we’ve created a detailed scorecard that involved a feedback loop with major brands who have recently deployed community software. This particular scorecard contains over 54 criteria that was assembled through client discussions, a panel of a trusted folks who have deployed communities, discussions with fellow analysts, and feedback from the vendors. Next, we collect data from the 9 vendors, each completing the scorecard for a total of 496 cells, then I create my own sheet of cells verifying what we found for a total of 992 cells of data collection.

Also, we’ve started interviewing and recording feedback from 27 brands that have deployed community software from these vendors, in order to find out what went right –and what could be improved from each of these nine vendors. Again, more spreadsheets and data collection.

Starting this week, we start a series of day-long labs with each of the vendors, where will be looking under the covers at the actual software, discuss their business strategy, and understand how their community offerings can best help marketers. We’re looking at the market from a variety of angles, to ensure that an accurate report is created.

Collaborative environment
At Forrester, an analyst never works in a vacuum, it’s collaborative and I’ve a lot of minds to lean on. It’s not just me alone, I’m getting help from analyst and my editor Shar Vanboskirk, analyst Oliver Young who knows the enterprise side of this space, analyst Suresh Vittal who’s completed many waves, analyst Laura Ramos, and constant support from research associate Sarah Glass (my guiding light, and detailed taskmaster) and research associate Zach Reiss-Davis. I’m under the guidance of my research director Christine Overby, and am in constant contact with our seasoned Josh Bernoff. Despite suggestions that some analyst firms do not have knowledge management strategies isn’t quite true. In fact, we retain the knowledge of our colleagues through tools like internal wikis, constant team communication, and most importantly knowledge and insights generated by reports will live on for colleagues and clients on the website.

Focusing in
That’s just the half way point: next I have to analyze, score, conduct follow ups to ensure all the data is correct, and begin the scoring process. You’re going to notice a decrease in my posting over the next few weeks, and my online activity start to wean off as I work hard to deliver a quality report later this fall that will help interactive marketers make the right decision.

Read more about this Wave Research project:

Part 1: Starting the Wave
Part 2: Data Collection Process
Part 3: The Analysis Process
Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the final report

Posted in Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social Network | 10 Comments »

Forrester Report: Vendor Product Catalog of Community Platforms For The Interactive Marketer

Categories: Forrester, Social Networking, White Label Social NetworkPosted on August 4th, 2008

A few months ago, I put a call out to the industry to submit to this catalog of the Community Platform space (also known as the White Label Social Network space), my interest in this space grew from a list I started over a year ago on my blog even before I was an analyst covering this space. The list continues to grow, as commodity software is fueled by market demand for brands to create their own hosted communities.

Forrester Report: Announcing Vendor Product Catalog of Community Platforms For The Interactive Marketer (part 1/2)
This report is the first of two, If you’re a client, you probably have access to the report, or you can purchase it on the site, we stand by our work and offer a money back guarantee if you’re not completely satisfied.

This Vendor Product Catalog which we’re launching today is more or less the “yellow pages” of the space, but unlike my generic list on my blog, the companies have been vetted and important information has been added such as:

Enterprise focus (percent of clients with more than 1000 employees)

SMB focus (percent of clients with less than 1000 employees)

Categorization of their business model (Breakdown of Hardware, Hosted Web Service, Services, Software, Support)

Top three industries the vendor is involved with

Focus on external/vs internal community deployment (customer/employee)

Brands should use this report to:
You should use this report to help narrow down specific needs and questions you have – given this is such a large industry, these key attributes will help you filter.

In the spirit of Social Computing, this report has rating and comment features, this way clients can rate and rank their experience with the vendors, much in the way CNET or Amazon.com does for consumer products. So if you’ve used these vendors –leave a comment and rank the experience.

There were almost 50 products submitted to this Vendor Product Catalog which is pretty amazing considering how young the market is. The data has helped us to select the vendors for my next report:

Vendors should use this report to:
If you didn’t initially submit to this catalog but feel you should be on it, you can submit their information online here and selecting ‘Community Platforms For The Interactive Marketer’ from the VPC topic drop down menu.

Underway: Wave Report on Community Platforms (part 2)
I recently announced my intent to complete a Forrester Wave report which will focus on the nine firms best suited for Fortune 5000 interactive marketers. This is currently underway. I’m gathering market requirements from clients and analysts to create a detailed and thorough scorecard which will be completed during in depth meetings with each of the nine final vendors. In order to keep the process simple, I won’t be disclosing who the nine vendors are until the report goes live in October. You can learn more about this and other Wave reports on the Forrester site.

In addition to thanking all the vendors who submitted, I’d like to recognize Sarah Glass who has been instrumental in getting this catalog done. Although you can’t often see, behind the scenes, there is a large research group here that supports the analysts – I’m grateful.

Posted in Forrester, Social Networking, White Label Social Network | 9 Comments »

Community Platform Pricing for New Clients

Categories: Social Networking, Web Marketing, White Label Social NetworkPosted on July 15th, 2008

If you’re a white label social network vendor, you’re likely getting many new clients at corporations that have special pricing needs, let’s discuss this scenario.

Yesterday, I spoke to a white label social network who had some challenges pricing their product for their corporate clients. I speak to both vendors and clients, so it’s interesting to hear from both ends about concerns, triggers, and final deals.

There are a few ways to approach pricing your social media product for corporate clients, you can do a fixed amount, a layered pricing model (buy as you need), variable on performance (pay as you consume) or a combination thereof.

I’ve found that for new programs (like social media) these are often experimental “new media” budgets and although these products and services tend to be inexpensive, there are still some pricing considerations you must be prepared for. Most corporations issue quarterly or annual budgets to business groups, often with a fixed amount. If you require additional funds, you’ll have to present a business case to management, which can also take some time, as well as be a headache to validate one’s new business programs.

One additional factor is that budgets that are not entirely used up, they get recaptured by the umbrella organization, and could be an indicator that the business group doesn’t need further funds, resulting in reduced budget the next quarter. There’s an inherent risk here as well, as if all of the budget is used up on primarily a single vendor, the ability to have flexible spending for other services is limited. I draw these factors from both my experience having a small budget for social media as well as speaking to many clients on a similar front.

In my vendor product catalog (which will publish soon), I can see that there are many different pricing models happening for the white label social network industry, while there are many different pricing styles, perhaps the most common is fixed band pricing (fixed monthly fee with low variable by user).

If you’re a white label social network and are getting push back from clients about pricing and you’re not sure why, you should examine your pricing offer. For situations like this, social media vendors should experiment with fixed price bands (rather than variable by usage) so that business groups confidently purchase and keep within their budget. Then, as the program grows, the client business group won’t have to go to management when costs exceed their budget in early stages of this program, and then having to demonstrate success.

Of course, when the community platform shows high degrees of success, the opportunity for increasing support, hosting and pipe capabilities, and other services (including pay as you use pricing). So in summary, keep it simple, when dealing with corporations who are just experimenting with community software, offer a set or fixed price, at least till the community is up and running.

I’d like to hear from you, are you a vendor or a client? What are effective pricing models for new business programs (esp social media)

Posted in Social Networking, Web Marketing, White Label Social Network | 13 Comments »

Starting the Forrester Wave: White Label Social Networks and Community Platforms (Part 1/4)

Categories: Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social NetworkPosted on July 4th, 2008

Blogging the status of my research agenda has become an efficient way for me to communicate with the market I cover, as well as signal to clients new areas of expertise.

Fortunately, much of the market I cover (or their PR firms) read this blog and my tweets (and vice versa), making my job as a researcher very, very efficient.

Many weeks ago, I made a call for the vendor product catalog in this market, (and via email and twitter) that document, is a detailed index of over 40 vendors in the space, (aprox 50% of the market) and will be available to Forrester clients and those who submitted to it in the coming days.

My research agenda for this quarter is to complete a Forrester Wave (learn more), which is a market segmentation and prioritization report that will help clients (Fortune 5000, Interactive Marketers) determine which vendor is right for them. (I get asked daily in one medium or another who to buy). The primary purpose of this report is to aid my clients to efficiently come to a short list or decision on who to buy. The lingering side effects could also signal to the VC space who to fund, as well as within the industry who will want to partner from a CMS, ERP, CRM, widget, services aspect.

Due to the rigorous methodology (there will be thousands of excel cells created, analyzed, and weighed among our team) The Wave will only include several vendors. During this 10 week process, I’ll be following the guidelines set before me (we’ve done many Wave reports) this consuming activity will meet my entire report coverage for the entire quarter. This coupled with the changes in our team, will keep me very busy, I hope it doesn’t impact my other duties, as well as blogging.

From time to time, I’ll post updates about where I am in developing this product (reports are one of our products), in that spirit, I’m now whittling down the big list to the core vendors that can stand the rigors of enterprise requirements (Fortune 5000) and are primarily suited for interactive marketers (mainly external deployments) who I serve.

If you’ve already submitted to the vendor product catalog, I’m already reviewing with the team. However, if you have an extensive track record for the Fortune 5000 interactive marketer (perhaps with references), and did not submit, you ought to let me know, email me at jowyang at forrester.com . I’ve already reached out to a few who I think could qualify.

You’ve already shown that you know what analysts do, but how we do it is a shrouded mystery, so now, you’re getting a behind the scenes tour as I trek forward –a little transparency should help you to better understand what we do.

Read more about this Wave Research project:

Part 1: Starting the Wave
Part 2: Data Collection Process
Part 3: The Analysis Process
Part 4: Announcing the Wave, the final report

Posted in Analyst, Forrester, White Label Social Network | 17 Comments »

The Social CMS Dilemma: Will they lead with Community or Publishing Features?

Categories: Content Management System, Social CMS, Social Media, White Label Social NetworkPosted on July 3rd, 2008

Apparently, a chord was struck in this recent post “Social Software: Here come the CMS Vendors“. In summary, the post indicuates that CMS vendors are sniffing the community space, and the comments lit up (you should read them) with vendors from both camps indicating this discussions are happening behind the curtains and hands are extending across the aisle. I also am getting more briefing requests from traditional CMS vendors, who are anxious to get my take on the many options I listed out.

There’s a few interesting discussions that spiraled off the post, and I’d like to highlight some of the interesting ones, there’s an interesting story developing, these stories segue nicely into each other.

Some enterprises may not be ready for social
First of all, Larry at ZDnet quickly picks up and covers the post: “Content management software vendors eye social networking“, and suggests that acquisitions (option two) for CMS vendors makes since. Larry adds a very important caveat, some organizations and members (internal or external) may not adopt social behaviors. Our social technographic research indicates that’s very much the truth, before any brand decide to use these tools, they should start with member behavior, we’ve already made some of this data available for free. Primarily, the main behavior is ‘joiner’ although depending on the deployment, it could also be ‘creator, critic,’ and certainly ’spectator’

Some CMS vendors may not be ready for open
To echo that very fine point, Steve, in his thought provoking post “Social Publishing Systems: What about We, the Participants?” asks if “we” are ready to take on more social websites, he then also turns the discussion toward the vendors, and asks if they are prepared to accept open technologies despite that they are from rigid command and control legacies. Steve asks: “Will they embrace OpenSocial? OpenID? Will a focused, open source Drupal vendor like Acquia” When you think about it, CMS systems are designed for management (control) of content and publishing. Social software, which may have guardrails, tends to focus on sharing, connecting, learning, and self-expression in a very large sandbox. Most brands will need both.

Existing fragmented social implementations to be a challenge
EMC’s Len Devanna adds more to the conversation “Social Software and CMS“, as you may know, Documentum, a CMS vendor was acquired by EMC a few years back, and makes sense for this IT behemoth. Naturally, social software has creeped into the employee base (a groundswell) even at this IT vendor shop and Len points out the need for both a mixture of social and CMS systems. The question remains: at what point to they integrate? Where will social stop and CMS begin? Len is out here in CA, and I look forward to seeing him more often to discuss this issue.

Some features will be bolted on
We think highly of the 451Group, (read comments) and their post confirms it “Social (Web) content management” they’ve been watching this from the CMS perspective for some time (and I’ve been watching from the white label sonet) and they suggested that some companies like Vignette and Clickability are further along than realized. It’s difficult to tell how truly robust some of those features are from those landing pages, but compared to the some of the advanced features I’m seeing out of other players, they could be ‘bolt on social’ features added to a platform, rather than a truly social experience. I’m quite positive a debate in our industry over ‘core social platform’ vs ‘bolt on social features’ will take place, I plan to participate.

The Big Question: Will they lead with Community or Publishing Features?
Thinking forward, this really is the crux of the issue that each vendor and industry will have to answer. What will CMS and White Label vendors lead with? Social features or Publishing Features?

Are brands going to be satisfied with CMS systems that “bolt on” social features such as ratings, comments, and discussion boards that are added to existing CMS modules?

Or, will they want fully robust community platforms with extensive profiles, people matching, discussion monitoring, member created on the fly modules that integrate CMS publishing modules?

Will CMS vendors “bolt on” these social features, or offer truly robust community platforms that integrate CMS features

As I get closer to this space, I’ll develop my answer, (read Tony’s at the CMS watch) but in the meantime, let’s hash it out in the comments below.

I’ve started some probes on where we could host a community not-for-profit meet & greet at a neutral location in Silicon Valley in a few months, stay tuned. Or, if you have a venue (you can’t be one of these vendors) and can hold a day event, please let me know via email.

Posted in Content Management System, Social CMS, Social Media, White Label Social Network | 17 Comments »

How Will You Stand Out From The Crowd?

Categories: Social Media, Web Marketing, White Label Social NetworkPosted on June 19th, 2008

When many things are equal: your features, your customers, your products, your product roadmap, it’s often hard to differentiate.

Often, I’m getting pitched during briefings by White Label Social Network vendors they’ll often advance to a quadrant slide (almost always in the first quarter of the deck) and their almost always on the right hand top quadrant, using parameters they’ve selected. I’ll frequently ask them to tell me ‘how they are different’, only then, does the conversation get interesting. Of course, I already see stratification in this industry, with differentiation on product offerings.

This is not an endorsement for Jive Software, I’m simply commenting on the marketing efforts that they deploy to stand out from the very crowded marketplace (80-100 competitors, with more on the way). It’s also only a reflection of my perspective, I’ve not done a formal survey to brands to ask them what they think.

With that said, if you take a look at how Jive has been marketing themselves, they clearly stand out. Their VP of Marketing blogs, he ’s part of the conversation in Twitter, and he tells stories that are intended to relate (whether they do or not is unknown) to corporate clients using imagery, storytelling, and icons.

But does it work? Maybe it gets attention, maybe it starts a conversation with those that are pained, but it doesn’t necessarily impact the product, service, and delivery of products. One thing is for sure, it’s significant enough to get me to tell you all about it.

When your market is one sea of gray, and underneath the corporate color scheme you’re all very similar, what are you going to do to standout? This applies to not just your company, but you as a future colleague or employee.

Posted in Social Media, Web Marketing, White Label Social Network | 9 Comments »

LiveBlog: What’s Wrong with the White Label Social Networking Industry?

Categories: Social Networking, White Label Social NetworkPosted on June 18th, 2008

This is really heaven for me, many of the vendors I cover such as SmallWorld labs, Jive, Telligent, Hivelive, Lithium, Webcrossing, Google all at the same table.

I’m here here at the Online Community Unconference at a session where we’re probing the problems with the White Label Social networking space. The question? Are social platforms shit? (I didn’t come up with, I’m just taking notes)

[The question posed to this roundtable of vendors, clients and analyst: "Are social platforms shit?"]

If you don’t know the value of white label social networking vendors are, many large brands and organizations are hiring them to build online communities for their customers and prospects. I get a few calls every week from clients to discuss this growing need.

What’s interesting is that all the folks at the table are collaborating (as one would expect from the community industry) to discuss pan-industry problems from clients, features, etc.

Who was here? A dozen folks, a majority are vendors, and a few community managers and strategists from brands and companies. Leading this session is Greg Biggers.

Challenges expressed by the table:

Lack of Interoperability within this fledging industry
Platforms don’t have interoperability, due to lack of standards. For example brands create a community for customers, while marketers launch a facebook campaign. Differences include objects, protocols, data types, login, profiles, news page data.

Community Managers don’t know what they want, so who should educate them.

Owners want to move data from one vendor to another. Some say that the database schema is very similar from some vendors, it wouldn’t be hard to develop a migrator.

One community manager from a large tech brand (she asked me not to blog her company) wants to expose and share CRM data.

Lack of Flexibility
Not having a standard supply of community feature ‘recipes’ are difficult, no cookie cutter approach.

Content and navigation is sometimes not organized in a way of the communities’ need.

Communities software need to be flexible to adapt to the communities needs. For example, if a ‘food’ community shifts their focus from recipes to menus or then to ingredients, the software needs to be able to adapt and change.

How can a platform adapt to emerging technologies, such as twitter.

Who is responsible for understanding the domain of the community.

Lack of User Experience too many community projects

Confusion around Measurement
Would like to have user behavior analytics, current metrics are not easy to use. Telligent showed off their product, right time at the right place.

Difficult to get customer data behavior.

Lack of standardization of community behavior, such as a standard support metric, standard growth metric, etc.

Behavorial metrics are easier to gather but tying back to ROI will be difficult.

Large communities cannot self-manage
Tools need to allow the community to manage it self, with the right features to remove, alert, reduce bad behavior.

High Performance issues rising
Having hosting services in multiple locations is a challenge for communities that need to scale for large enterprises that need high-availability. (Webcrossing and solutionset). Expect this to continue to be an issue as communities become a node in the enterprise software system.

Tagged #ocu2008

Update: Dennis McDonald suggests the solution could be process, not more technology.

Posted in Social Networking, White Label Social Network | 28 Comments »

When Social Media Marries CRM Systems

Categories: Enterprise Web, Social Media, White Label Social NetworkPosted on June 3rd, 2008

My main coverage area as an Analyst is focusing on Online Communities for Interactive Marketers, I was formerly an enterprise intranet manager at Hitachi Data Systems, so I see where this is heading.

I realize that we’re just at the early days, as many of these systems are deployed by marketing units with little interaction or support from IT. In many cases users are forced to create a new user ID, as these systems are not tied to existing enterprise software.

Thinking towards the future, I realize how important it will be for IT departments to think holistically about social media, especially large areas of customer and prospect congregation. For many marketers, they are graded (paid) based upon the amount of qualified leads that are generated for their efforts, online communities, blogs, and other tools are examples of this. I can already imagine the big consulting shops moving into Fortune 5000 companies with another Enterprise Resource Planning for Social Media projects underway (ERP-SM).

Exactly what would success look like? For one, brands will be able to track, manage, and monitor who enters the community, determine if they are a prospect, customer, partner, or even inactive. Secondly, brands will be able to develop intelligence on how effective communities are for bringing customers closer such as integrating existing social networks like LinkedIn to the corporate intranet. In a theoretical sense, brands could determine which customers have the best reputation, and how to keep and reward them. But perhaps, most importantly, customer experience will improve as companies now have a better understanding of them throughout their life cycle –and beyond.

Caveat: The key to success isn’t just about building systems to ‘capture’ customer registrations and information, it’s about building real relationships empowered by these tools. Any corporation who attempts to enter social media just for the sake of holistic data, or for lead generation only will fail –and perhaps become a case study analysts tout in our powerpoint decks. First recognize the power shift, then understand how this is different that other marketing activities.

The following is a list of companies or vendors that are starting to tie their social media software into CRM systems:

Leverage Software/SalesForce
CEO of Leverage Systems proclaims: mwalsh Leverage Software is integrated with Salesforce.com - has been for 2 years. The integration is currently light, but will deepen. June 3, 2008

SalesForce for Dell/Starbucks?
SalesForce offers IdeaExchange, which powers Dell Ideastorm and My StarbucksIdeas. Being that they are a CRM software vendor that now offers community insight tools, I can only assume that their data is being shared. this is just my assumption, they have not confirmed this for me. June 3, 2008

Hivelive for Serena
Serena’s Mashup Exchange (powered by HiveLive) is an online customer community that is being integrated with lead/CRM systems. Specifically, HiveLive’s LiveConnect Community Platform is integrated with MarketBright’s lead management system and Salesforce.com. Submitted, June 3, 2008 by HiveLive CEO John Kembel via comments

Submit in comments, provide links to qualify
Hoping to see an example of a company that has automated it’s community tools to tie with it’s CRM tools, I’m expecting you to link to a credible source of information, or identify yourself as an employee of a vendor or client. Leave a comment below, or email me if you want to stay confidential or anonymous.

At some point when this list becomes to difficult to manage, or this goes mainstream, we’ll just have to read the comments. If you know of a company that has integrated it’s social media data with a CRM system, please leave a comment.

Posted in Enterprise Web, Social Media, White Label Social Network | 28 Comments »

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