We did an internal exercise recently that produced a list of the advanced features we think are crucial for a successful enterprise social media platform. The idea is that functionality for user participation across every owned venue should draw upon a central system, enabling a multifaceted approach to CRM, data analysis, reporting—and ultimately leveraging distributed corporate efforts to generate enterprise business intelligence.
I’ll share the results of that exercise here, with the caveat that this is undoubtedly a partial list only. Your comments and suggestions are welcome, of course!
I helped think through this some of this stuff, but the bulk of the credit (including for the writing) goes to my ZAAZ colleague Ariel van Spronsen. We also had input from another longtime friend and colleague of mine, Gary Carlson, an expert on enterprise metadata management. Enjoy:
Reputation (authority systems)
When properly implemented, reputation systems are excellent for creating trust and motivating users to participate at greater and greater levels of engagement. When implemented poorly, High volume of participation or seniority are rewarded—the key to getting reputation right is to focus on the quality of the contribution, not the amount of it.
In implementations where credibility matters, reputation is critical. See this great presentation from Bryce Glass of Yahoo for more detail.
User management
The platform provides the opportunity for centralized management of user data and permissions, including authentication, account management, personalization, segmentation, and behavioral targeting.
User data can provide the connective link among multiple social networking implementations (personal, business group). Content owned by a user can be shared among these via permissions or syndication.
Identity services
A unified data repository means an individual user can centrally manage her public-facing identity, and also create a more robust data picture for the business .
Interfaces from the platform access custom degrees of information contained in the central identity.
Quality algorithms
User-generated ratings have important utility, but translating them directly to measure “quality” is fallible. Ratings are opinion-driven and the ability to control input is minimal. However, combined with analytics data using weighted algorithms quality becomes a more stable and useful metric that both users and business can trust.
Recommendation engine
An important use for user-generated data and analytics is the ability to enrich experiences with recommendations, prompting discovery and deeper engagement. A centralized social networking platform is primed to leverage this functionality.
Taxonomy-driven folksonomy
Tags are a powerful way to augment search and increase information “find-ability”. They also give the business a powerful view into how people are thinking about the tagged content.
A purely user-generated tag set (a “folksonomy “) has issues such as misspellings, tense shifts, and count (singular vs.. plural). A taxonomy-driven folksonomy maps user tags to a controlled vocabulary authority to allow for specific schema analysis.
Video, audio, and photo streams
A significant part of the communication among social networks will be in multimedia forms. Easy uploading, tagging, and sharing features will create a robust social media environment, greater user satisfaction, and increased engagement.
Mobile
The demand for social media in the mobile space is undeniable. Application development for a new breed of smartphones is rapidly increasing as the ability to manage social networking functions becomes a key differentiator for users. The platform should provide for mobile implementation as well as web and API calls, and it should support both content consumption and content production via mobile.
Custom syndication
Custom syndication allows users to filter and process feeds in ways that are meaningful to their specific information needs. Yahoo! Pipes is an example of a custom syndication mechanism.
Custom syndication can augment other elements of a social networking system, especially for a user group that is highly specialized in goal and purpose.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking functions promote the development of shared information collections among networked groups.
Collaborative filtration
Collaborative filtration gives users the ability to vote submissions (bookmarks, feeds, entries, etc.) up or down. A popular feed-based example of this is Digg. In the marketing realm, Dell’s IdeaStorm lets users identify the best ideas for product development.
Private groups
Ad hoc, user-created groups for sharing or collaboration can support communities of practice and leverage user data management features.
Microblogging
Twitter is perhaps the most ubiquitous example of microblogging, which invites low-threshold, stream-of-thought information sharing and ambient connection among networked groups. Link sharing, whether to photos or other assets, is pervasive in microblogging, creating connections that can be used in many ways.
Marketplace
A social networking platform could provide functionality for connecting people to products or services, offered by the company or by one another. Examples are Craigslist, eBay, and Xbox Live Marketplace. Marketplace connections give a strong view into communities’ product needs, and they also support, to varying degrees, the purchase process itself.
Chat
Instant communication among community members creates a synchronous communication layer that can be particularly useful within a collaborative environment for communities of practice.
Moderation Tools
Property owners need tools to support management of their users and communities, along with the structures to support governance and workflow at distributed and global levels.
I’m sure there are other ideas out there. and for that matter lots of ways to slice and dice what constitutes a “feature.” For example, is blogging a feature, or is discussion? Or are those both higher-order uses supported by features like WYSIWYG publishing, commenting, etc?
I don’t really want to get into an argument about that stuff, but I am very interested in what kind of emerging capabilities corporations need to support in order to realize the full promise of engaging with their constituencies online.
Do share!
A very good post. The challenge of course is that there needs to be active users and good content to show the value of these features. At Kinetic enterprise social platform (www.areyoukinetic.com), we focus on knoweledge sharing via social messaging and include most of the features listed above.
Posted by: Babar Bhatti | May 25, 2009 at 11:06 PM