NewsSocial Q&A Goes Local With Crowdbeacon’s iPhone AppErick SchonfeldSocial Q&A services are springing up everywhere because often search is too cumbersome or imprecise to answer our questions. This is especially true on mobile phones. A new iPhone app called Crowdbeacon attempts to answer your questions with a local twist. It is designed to answer questions about restaurants, shopping, services, and activities in your immediate vicinity. The answers come from other users, local experts, and business owners, as well as Foursquare tips and Yelp reviews. *** Top 20 Apps For Managing Social MediaAlison Diana 11/27/2010Social media from Twitter to Facebook, LinkedIn to YouTube creates opportunities for building relationships, cultivating customers and promoting business, but the sea of updates and input awash with data both important and consequential can drown all but the most dogged of users. Fortunately, app developers have created more than a few devices to make keeping afloat in the social media waters manageable, sane and even productive. Yet even the tools intended to help users navigate social media are so numerous that culling through them can be overwhelming. That's why we've plucked out 20 of the best third-party apps to power up your social networking. Many are fee and many of the pay-to-play options offer free trials or stripped down versions at no charge so you can try them before you buy. *** 5 Trends to Watch in the Enterprise, Part 1By Alex Williams / November 12, 2010 12:40 PM /People need easy ways to access information but within the constraints of an enterprise and the policies it sets forth. In that context, here are five trends to watch in 2011 and beyond. We'll follow up next week with five more to round it out. 1. Marketplaces Will Continue to Grow 2. Analytics are Needed to Manage the Data 3. Data Portability 4. Application Developer Platforms 5. The Social Layer and Web Oriented Architecture *** The New Small Business Onramp to Social CRMBy Brent Leary There's one company that looks to be creating a platform small businesses can use to turn a variety of online interactions into stronger customer relationships -- and it's not even a CRM company, in the traditional sense. It's Google. So Google is building an interaction-based platform on the bedrock of Gmail. And as you exchange emails, you can grow the relationship wider by engaging across apps like Reader and Youtube. You can also deepen the engagement with real-time collaborative interactions via Google Docs, Sheets and Sites. *** Six Social Business Trends To WatchBy Dion Hinchcliffe on August 4, 20104. Business engagement driven by social analytics. Any
business processes that runs without a closed feedback loop is almost
always going to underperform. It’s only through sustained contact and
understanding of the marketplace that engagement can succeed. Much of
the world has now migrated from the familiar, well-known places to
interact and gone elsewhere, to new social environments. There are
hundreds of social networks with a combined audience of over 1 billion
users today. Beyond the Internet, there are many private social
environments that exist within most organizations today (even if it’s
just local e-mail.) Given that social networks are increasingly open
and, well, social, and you have the unique, generational opportunity to
actually understand what’s happening, what’s known, and who knows it,
all in near real-time. How can this accumulated knowledge be used to
drive business goals? Without tapping into what we would call the dynamic signal,
there’s no way to know. Mining the collective intelligence of the
social Web or an enterprise network is a tall order but there have long
been concerted efforts to do so, with a growing number providing
meaningful, actionable approaches. Whether it’s finding new ideas,
identifying important trends, measuring sentiment, supporting customers,
or whatever it is that needs to be done, keeping track of the galactic
conversation still isn’t easy. However, the good news this year is that
the tools and techniques of social analytics that deliver results are
emerging, such as WebTrends’ Social Measurement capabilities, Infegy’s Social Radar, or the growing interest in enterprise social analytics for performance management,
as just three examples of many. Starting now, businesses must deeply
access, understand, and react intelligently to all the important
currents of activity that affect them across the social universe. 5. Engagement strategies that scale across all important social channels. Listening to the social universe, both outside as well as within the enterprise, and then developing a desired response can be readily achieved by most organizations today. But effective delivery of that response across the myriad social channels that exist is another challenge entirely. Fortunately, we are beginning to see approaches that can aggregate and scale out to the large number of channels and people in today’s massive social environments. For example, companies like Radian6 and GetSatisfaction are already providing some of the capabilities to scale social media engagement and community management as widely and deeply as it must be done today. Scale has become the signature business challenge of social media and will be for the foreseeable future, whether that is the explosion of knowledge when workers engage in Enterprise 2.0-style activities or being a part of the hundreds of millions of daily social media conversations taking place on the Internet. Creating strategies, infrastructure, and processes to deal with this is what I am seeing organizations working on around the world this year. *** UC pros lukewarm to social media plug-ins for collaboration platforms By Jessica Scarpati, News Writer22 Jul 2010 | SearchUnifiedCommunications.com Successful corporate marketing campaigns through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have helped validate business-to-consumer (B2C) social networking. But unified communications (UC) professionals aren't swayed by the recent push from vendors to embed consumer social networking feeds into enterprise UC and collaboration platforms with social media plug-ins. "We are trying to figure out how those apps are being used for business purposes and how many people are just going to Farmville," said Michael Bialas, senior ITS administrator for a large Texas energy company, which he declined to identify. "We don't have any defined business processes that require Twitter or Facebook. That's in nobody's job description." Enterprises still seeking social tools for collaboration platforms Instead of embedding consumer sites into collaboration platforms, UC pros say they are looking for stronger enterprise social software offerings from their vendors. *** Extreme CRM Makeover, Open Source Edition - Episode 2, Sweet is SugarSugarCRM has staked its claim as more than the leading open source CRM solution, it is a CRM solution that competes with the biggest and best. In the cloud, behind the firewall, even on mobile devicesBy Alan Shimel on Tue, 07/13/10 - 10:19am. In Oram's mind all of this defocuses Salesforce on the core mission, which for SugarCRM is clear. CRM. At the end of the day Sugar is all about CRM. Oram says the next big thing on the horizon of CRM is social CRM. Whether on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or some other network, allowing the customer to chose the means of communication while still managing the customer's information is the Sugar way. To meet the needs of companies like American Bancard, Sugar offers their open source product (It is not open core per say at all. If you buy the professional version you get full source code to the professional version) in a variety of ways. They can host it for you on their own infrastructure. You can host it yourself or through a variety of partners on other cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services EC2 or you can host it yourself in your own data center, behind your own firewall. No matter which way you choose, you still get the source code and all the same functionality. Today the split is roughly equal a third of their customers have Sugar hosting, a third host somewhere else and a third host it themselves. Another key part of the Sugar formula and frankly something that has been very attractive to the American Bancard folks is the large number of 3rd party developers who have integrated with Sugar. Oram says that integration with Sugar is often tighter than with others such as Salesforce. The secret is open source. Instead of giving 3rd party developers API's to write to, the 3rd parties actually have the source code to the product and can really stretch the envelope on what they can do. This gives the Sugar developer community a real advantage. *** No One-Stop Shop for SocialInfo-Tech
Research Group evaluates the incumbent players and outlines
opportunities surrounding the convergence of CRM and social media.
By Lauren McKay
Posted Jun 11, 2010 Info-Tech separates social CRM vendors into three categories:
Increasingly, Hickernell says, different tools from the three areas are being brought together to construct a cohesive social CRM platform. In other words, there is no one-stop shop for social. Out of the CRM vendors incorporating social into their offerings, Hickernell names Oracle and Salesforce.com as the current leaders. "Linking social media to existing [CRM] solutions can improve information accuracy, reduce manual effort, and provide more in-depth customer insights," the report states. To that end, Info-Tech provides the following recommendations for organizations moving forward with social CRM:
*** Building a “smart” extended enterprisePosted by: Adam Miller in Best PracticesWed, Jun 2, 2010 10:21 EDT Building “smart” networks to reach extended enterprise stakeholders can facilitate top-line revenue and bottom-line results Today, forward-thinking organizations are finding a fertile area for new growth in effectively reaching out to their extended network of customers, partners and members to develop new profit centers, increase sales, cut support costs and boost channel productivity. Key to driving value from your “extended enterprise” is taking advantage of learning and social media technology solutions to engage, educate and certify your customers and partners. *** Google launches business-app platform with VMwareMay 19, 2010 | Anthony HaGoogle is expanding the reach today of App Engine, its platform for Web applications. It’s announcing a new version called App Engine for Business, where big companies can build applications for use by their employees. Eric Tholome, director of product management for Google’s developer tools, said App Engine for Business provides the infrastructure for “traditional internal horizontal apps” used by enterprise workforces. By using the cloud, applications will only take up the resources that they need, and IT administrators don’t need to worry about unexpected spikes in usage. To make that App Engine ready for business, Google will include new features like SQL databases, a console for managing all of your company’s apps, SSL security for remote access, and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. *** Social CRM software ranges from cheap to freeBy Sue Hildreth, Contributor, 15 Apr 2010 | SearchCRM.comImplementing a social CRM campaign can be a time-consuming and expensive project. But it can also be extremely cheap, if the business is willing to go with open source and freeware versions of commercial products. Aside from the fact that nearly all of the social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others are free or have basic memberships that are free, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of cheap tools for creating, managing, monitoring and promoting a social CRM effort. *** Aggregating Some Random Pieces: The Social CRM “Industry”by PGreenblogThere are a substantial number of documents that have appeared in the last few months on Social CRM and social business that are notable – either because they had buzz – or because they were good – or both. *** Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship ManagementAltimeter Group, March 5, 2010Social CRM does not replace existing CRM efforts – instead it adds more value. In fact, Social CRM augments social networking to serve as a new channel within existing end-to-end CRM processes and investments. Social CRM enhances the relationship aspect of CRM and builds on improving the relationships with more meaningful interactions. Social CRM programs may start at the departmental level, but over time, must gain corporate buy in to transcend functional fiefdoms in sales, marketing, service, etc. Most organizations start their initiatives by building out the “5M’s” and deploying a customer insight program. From there, organizations should focus on business values across the seven categories of Social CRM use cases. Each of the 18 use cases can be prioritized by both market demand and technology maturity. With defined metrics in place, organizations can then begin the journey of bringing social networks back into their CRM systems. *** Swimming Upstream: 'Salmon,' Google's Open Source Social Web Aggregatorby Laurie Sullivan, Yesterday, 9:55 PMGoogle engineers and the open source community have begun laying the groundwork to support an open social Web. The group has been working on a protocol that would aggregate conversations at the source, bring them back to any Web site related to the stream, and avoid spam and duplicate posts as well. The Salmon protocol aims to connect social networks that today cannot share posts and information. The goal to syndicate and aggregate conversations related to the original post that live in silos across the Internet would create what Google calls a social graph. *** The Facebook imperative for enterprise softwarePosted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 6:57 pm February 28th, 2010Based on what we can see today, adding social to enterprise IT in a strategic way can have the following outcomes:
*** Gartner: Key CRM Predictions for 2010Published on March 1, 2010Social Media
Digital Marketing
General Marketing
About the data: Findings are from two Gartner reports, including Predicts 2010: CRM Marketing Is Building Demand on a Limited Budget and Predicts 2010: Customer Service Meets Social CRM. *** Alert: What's Coming for Open Source CMS in March 2010By Dee-Ann LeBlanc | Published Feb 25, 2010Welcome to the March installment of our what's coming from the open source CMS projects in the next month. If you're looking through here and feel that your project was left out, we invite you to send us an email at pr@cmswire.com with a pointer to who we should contact at your project for updates. *** Social CRM to soar, says Gartner22 February 2010 Daniel ShaneOver 80% of growth in enterprise use of social networking tools will be driven by customer engagement projects, analyst forecasts Enterprise adoption of social media will occur primarily in the context of customer relationship management (CRM), according to Gartner. The analyst has predicted that 80% of all market growth in 2010 will come in this field, as organisations struggle to find a clear business case for leveraging social media as a tool for internal communication and collaboration *** Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watchPosted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:43 amTwo significant and closely related trends in enterprise computing this year are the growth of Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and social computing. By most accounts, both are gaining ground quite rapidly while still not being used for core business functions or mission critical applications in most large firms, at least not yet. The reality is that broader social and cloud computing trends continue to evolve faster than most enterprises are able to absorb. It may be years before many organizations are comfortable with and ready to adopt either of these technologies strategically despite apparent benefits. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s not important for organizations to closely track both of these leading computing trends (both have solid double digit industry growth) and understand the emerging technologies that are likely to shape their use in key business functions in the near future. In fact, quite the contrary, particularly when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. For organizations looking to keep current, both good timing and judicious application of new Enterprise 2.0 technologies will be needed as organizations increasingly look at their future in terms of a social computing driven knowledge economy. To do this though, we have to put them in the context of the big picture.
*** New Branded Apps Struggle To Break Out of the PackFeb 21, 2010 - Noreen O'LearyThat didn’t take long. It hasn’t even been 18 months since the first iPhone app launched, and now with more than 140,000 of them, marketers are finding it tougher and more expensive to get their branded apps in wide circulation. More competition means apps require a lot more downloads just to land in the same spot in Apple’s 100 most-popular rankings than they needed a year ago. Making the list often means the difference between success and failure. A high-ranking slot becomes self-reinforcing as customers often download those apps out of curiosity.  “Marketers
have to spend more to get the same result,” said Jason Spero, vp
and managing director, North America, for AdMob, the mobile
advertising network Google is in the process of trying to acquire.
Spero added that the upside is that apps that do break through have
a larger base of customers—30 million versus 15 million a year ago.Apple lists 20 categories on the App Store, and another way developers can grab more attention is to be creative about selecting the category in which their apps are ranked. Willner says his company focuses on “refreshable” content-—which attracts consumers who go back to the apps more frequently for updates—than the kind of static content found in app games. For instance, Zumobi listed Motor Trend in the news category rather than automotive. Another way to think about which category to list: Smaller ones give an app a better shot at a higher ranking. *** Salesforce Rolls Out a Facebook for BusinessesAbout 1 day ago Christina Warren At the Dreamforce Conference in November, Salesforce.com officially announced Salesforce Chatter, which is basically “Facebook for the Enterprise.”Today Salesforce.com has announced the private beta for Chatter, which will be rolling out to 100 companies now before officially launching later this year. I had a chance to talk to Salesforce.com and get a demonstration of how Chatter works. For businesses looking for a collaboration solution, this could be a big winner. ***Google Buzz in Enterprise - Will Need to Overcome Google Apps LimitationsWritten by Alex Williams / February 9, 2010 10:30 PM Google Buzz is headed for the enterprise. According to the Google Enterprise blog, Google Buzz will become a part of Google Apps within the next few months. Google Buzz applies as much to the enterprise as it does to the consumer market. The real-time application creates an extension for communication that adds a threaded context to a conversation, a critical component for an enterprise application. Google Apps has it own faults to work out, before Google Buzz can even be considered a viable service for the enterprise. The Google Buzz open architecture may be the difference though, creating real opportunities for customers to pull external data into its real-time environment. *** SAP's 12Sprints joins the social enterprise bandwagonPosted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 7:23 am February 4th, 2010Make no mistake, 12Sprints shows its SAP heritage and comes across as a sober-minded business tool, even if it’s not necessarily an enterprise-wide solution. It joins the ranks of a growing number of new next-generation enterprise collaboration efforts from major vendors that take social computing and Enterprise 2.0 seriously, including IBM’s new Project Vulcan, Google Wave, Salesforce Chatter, TIBCO’s Tibbr, and arguably Microsoft SharePoint 2010.
*** Is Business Intelligence Too Boring for Social Media?Posted by Ann All Feb 2, 2010 9:39:33 AMIs applying business intelligence to data generated by social channels such as Twitter about to become the "next big thing" in enterprise BI? Some folks seem to think so. Earlier this month Dyke Henson, chief marketing officer for BI provider PivotLink, told IT Business Edge's Mike Vizard companies will want to analyze metadata from social networks in much the same way they now analyze Web site traffic, to determine what is happening in real time and to analyze trends over time. PivotLink CEO Quentin Gallivan recently wrote on the company blog that applying BI to social media will be one of five trends that will shape the business-Intelligence-as-a-service market this year. *** The Birth of the Virtual AssistantAbout 21 hours ago from Mashable, Dag KittlausIn the near future, anyone who lives a connected lifestyle will be able to delegate their everyday tasks to intelligent virtual assistants that will coordinate, execute and simplify users’ lives. We will look back on these days and ask ourselves how we ever got by without our trusted assistants, the same way my kids ask in amazement about how we ever got things done before laptops and the Internet. *** How Text Analytics Drive Customer InsightBy David Stodder InformationWeekJanuary 30, 2010 12:01 AM (From the February 1, 2010 issue) Companies such as JetBlue have used it to mine e-mails and other customer feedback for insight. JetBlue Airways uses Satmetrix's Net Promoter metrics, which gives JetBlue a score based on the percentage of customers classified as "detractors," "neutrals," or "promoters." That score is useful because it's clear, simple feedback everyone in the company understands. By using Attensity to match specific comments and comment patterns with structured data such as arrival times, fares, crews, and gates, the airline thinks it can solve problems more rapidly. Customers today aren't just customers--they're influencers and social networkers. Across the Web at any hour, they're sharing observations about your company's products and services, and those of your competitors. Customers amplify their single voices when they blog, write online comments and reviews, and participate in communities such as Facebook and Twitter. These new modes of customer behavior make it essential for companies to move beyond traditional ways of gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer information. Customers also continue to reach out in conventional ways, such as feedback surveys and letters to the company. But the big difference today is that those surveys are often digital and the "letters" are e-mail--meaning it's in a digital form that should be easier to analyze. In most organizations, transaction data is still the raw material of customer intelligence, and advances in the depth, breadth, and timeliness of transaction data analysis can help companies deliver competitive advantages. However, what's firing the imagination in many organizations these days is the potential to apply analytics to search results, text, and social network content to better understand customers and predict their behavior. *** BI Pros Not Yet Convinced of Value of Social Databy Ann All, IT Business Edge, Jan 29, 2010 11:27:02 AMEarlier this month, Kognitio released a new survey of business intelligence practitioners. It revealed a majority of them expect the use of BI at their organizations to grow at a steady pace in 2010. Historically the first thing they took in and analyzed was financial data, which is well structured, well understood, with a lot of metadata and a lot of definitions. The next thing was sales and marketing information, which is still very well understood. When you look at social media information, a lot of it is just the chattering masses. How do you take 140 characters of what Tim and Donna said, put it in a database and run a trend line on it? Google Social Search Arrives to Challenge FacebookBy: Clint Boulton 2010-01-28 from eWeeGoogle Jan. 27 said it is taking its Google Social Search project to its core search engine with new features, a move to challenge Facebook in the battle for more users. Google Social Search drops content from searchers' contacts directly into search results. In the next few days, users of the English language version of Google.com who are signed into their Google account will automatically begin seeing Google Social Search results for Google Images, displaying pictures friends have published to Yahoo's Flickr or Google's own Picasa Web Albums. Social Search also features two new links for "My social circle" and "My social content." Adding A Social Layer To Gmail Just Became A SocialWok In The Park by Leena Rao on January 22, 2010 from TechCrunch At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok  made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. Today, the startup is launching a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.*** CRM Watchlist 2010 Part IIIB Posted by Paul GreenbergThe Concept - Social CRM and Channels.Part I - The Big 4 - Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com Part IIA - CRM Companies - NetSuite, Sage, RightNow Part IIB - CRM Companies - Cognizant, Eloqua, Sword-Ciboodle, SAS, SugarCRM, Helpstream, Aplicor Part IIIA - Social Companies - Lithium, Jive, INgage Networks, InsideView, Radian6 *** IBM Launches LotusLive Labs; Opens Up Collaboration Platform’s API To Partnersby Leena Rao on January 18, 2010At IBM’s annual conference, Lotusphere, Big Blue has announced innovations to its cloud-based collaboration platform, LotusLive.
LotusLive provides enterprise users with online email, web
conferencing, social network and collaboration applications within the
cloud.While this coup strengthens IBM’s place in the collaboration suite cloud, Microsoft is also aggressively pursuing the cloud, with a recent $250 million cloud computing deal with HP. And Microsoft is pushing its collaboration offerings online with Office 2010. As more and more businesses look to the cloud for collaboration and productivity suites, the landscape to provide these services is becoming extremely competitive. Google is also a strong competitor in the space with its Google Apps enterprise offering, and VMware just upped its stake with the acquisition of Zimbra from Yahoo. Startup Zoho, is also growing at a rapid pace. *** Google Brings Friend Connect, Social Features to Drupal & JoomlaWritten by Jolie O'Dell / January 11, 2010 9:15 PM Google has just announced that its powerfully social Friend Connect features are now available for open-source content management systems Drupal and Joomla. Google Friend Connect (GFC) allows sites with these CMSes to integrate many social features without having to write any code. Friend Connect essentially allows site visitors to become site members by using profile information from services such as Google, Yahoo!, Twitter and more. With user accounts authenticated via OpenID, site administrators can add Friend Connect's social bar, a site members gadget, the Friend Connect comments gadget or recommendations in any part of the site they choose. In addition to adding social gadgets, Friend Connect also allows site admins to conduct polls, monitor community growth, create and distribute email newsletters, run ads through AdSense, export user data for a site's entire community (as XML or JSON) or create their own apps using the GFC APIs. *** CRM Social Networking with Salesforce.com « ConvertivSearch, monitor and Tweet directly from your Saleforce customer support screens. Easily track. service tickets and conversations initiated from Twitter outreach. Adwords – Essential application for any Salesforce customer who invests in Google Adwords. ... Salesforce Chatter: Scheduled to be released in 4/2010, gives Salesforce a tremendous opportunity to be the default private social network for the enterprise. *** Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010 from TechcunchRealtime Search: After licensing realtime data streams from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others, Google and Bing are quickly ramping up their realtime search. But realtime search is still treated as a silo, and is not regularly surfaced in the main search results page. In 2010, I expect that to change as the search engines learn for what types of searches it makes sense to show Tweets and other realtime updates. In the meantime, a gaggle of realtime search startups such as Collecta, OneRiot, and Topsy will continue to push the ball forward on the realtime search experience. Realtime search will also become a form of navigation, especially on Twitter and Facebook. The key will be to combine realtime search with realtime filters so that people are delivered not only the most recent information but the most relevant and authoritative as well. Social CRM: We’ve seen the rise of Twitter and Facebook as social communication tools. This year, those modes of realtime communication will find their way deeper into the enterprise. Salesforce.com is set to launch Chatter, it’s realtime stream of enterprise data which interfaces with Twitter and Facebook and turn them into business tools. Startups like Yammer and Bantam Live are also making business more social. *** WSO2 Launches Business Activity Monitor The open source monitor provides visibility into services oriented architectures through the customizable WSO2 Gadget Server dashboard. *** 5 Enterprise Trends to Watch in 2010: Part 1 Written by Alex Williams / December 10, 2009Mashups: Mashups are going through a renaissance thanks to the incredible power of cloud computing. Collaboration: Real-Time Enterprise: Email overload is perhaps one of the most common issues we hear about. It's part of the data silo conundrum that plague companies. The real question is how real-time technologies will evolve in the year ahead to help make information more transparent. We are already seeing its evolution. Tibbr is Tibco's new real-time technology. It is defined more by subject than following people. That's in contrast to Salesforce Chatter which serves as an internal social network, aggregating data from Facebook and Twitter. We expect real-time services to deepen in the enterprise with some really interesting potentials for its integration with business intelligence technologies. For instance, the ability to use predictive analytics to notify people in a real-time stream of trends to watch. Think of the financial services world as an example. Data aggregated in the cloud, mashed up and delivered in a real-time stream. That's powerful stuff. The Mobile Enterprise: We posted today about IDC's forecast that 1 billion mobile devices will be connected to the Internet by 2013. Software-as-a-Service Integrations: *** 5 Enterprise Trends To Watch in 2010: Part 2 Written by Alex Williams / December 30, 2009API's: The use of API's will come on strong in 2010 as more companies adopt web-oriented architectures that reflect the growing importance of using social technologies as communication and productivity applications.For instance. you may know OpenSocial as a consumer-facing service for Google gadgets to integrate with Ning, MySpace and LinkedIn. But its true potential may be in the enterprise. Just before Christmas, OpenSocial announced it had written a white paper on a number of enterprise vendors. The paper lays the framework for an API infrastructure that customers may use for integrating Google gadgets. Companies participating in the effort include Atlassian, SocialText, CubeTree, Cisco, IBM, SAP, eXo Platform, Alfresco and of course, Google. We'll be watching companies like Sonoa Systems and Mashery as barometers for API adoption in the enterprise. Web Oriented Architecture: . Dion Hinchliffe recently wrote a WOA "un-manifesto," detailing the 17 principles that guide it. As he always does, Dion Hinchliffe accurately illustrates the concept:
Community Management: Social media has to be one of the most over-used phrases of the year but it should not reflect on the increasing need for community management practices within the enterprise. VoIP: VoIP will move deeper into the enterprise. The days of closed, siloed telephony systems are coming to an end. The freedom of web-based communications will be far more clear to the enterprise customer this year as the sheer volume of applications and features enter the market. The Big Sync: Finally, cloud computing will continue its pace as a trend to watch. But with it will come a battle that will leave some players bruised and battered. Open socialgoogle whitepaper: http://www.opensocial.org/page/enterprise-opensocial OpenSocial Architectural Concepts Broadly speaking, OpenSocial defines two concepts. The first is gadgets, a component model based upon HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScriptTM, that describes how content gets managed and rendered inside a Web browser. If you use sites like iGoogle, then you are already familiar with gadgets. The second is a set of APIs for accessing and working with social data. These APIs define how you access information about a person, their relationships, and their activities. These APIs are made available for use in gadgets, via a set of JavaScript APIs, as well as programmatically via REST. OpenSocial applications can take the form of gadgets that can be embedded into any container that supports the OpenSocial specification or traditional SOA services for integration. Taken together, the gadget component model, social APIs, and REST interfaces, provide a programming model that enables the creation of standards-based social applications. Architecturally, OpenSocial enables this social graph by providing a set of social APIs that enable communication between people in three core areas: People - allows for the retrieval of connected people from a specific person's point of view. For example this allows you to fetch a list of friends (connected people) of a specific person. Activities - allows for the passing of small messages to connected people. A common example is a status update. Data - is a multipurpose data API that allows for the sharing of data between connected people. Although OpenSocial has primarily targeted consumer social networks like Ning and MySpace, it holds great promise for accelerating social application development behind the firewall. As OpenSocial is adopted by enterprise software vendors and incorporated in to their product offerings, it will accelerate the development of social features within individual enterprise applications, and improve interoperability of profile, activity and gadget data between other OpenSocial-compliant application containers. How is OpenSocial being used today in the enterprise? Because of OpenSocial's value as an infrastructure that provides social capabilities and improves interoperability through a "gadget" standard, to date it is mostly being used by enterprise software companies as a way to extend their products, add new social capabilities, and improve interoperability between their own portfolios and the portfolios of other enterprise technology companies. However, enterprises themselves are beginning to work with the standard to build bespoke applications — social intranets, portals, dashboards — in advance of commercial offerings, or because they prefer to build it themselves. A few examples are provided below: Companies participating in the effort include Atlassian, SocialText, CubeTree, Cisco, IBM, SAP, eXo Platform, Alfresco and of course, Google. Apache Shindig - An OpenSocial Reference Implementation Complementing the community that defines the specifications are several open source projects. The most notable one is Apache Shindig, which serves as a runnable reference implementation of the OpenSocial specification. At its core, Apache Shindig is compromised of several components that enable gadget rendering as well as people and social data management. Shindig is currently an incubator project governed under the Apache Software Foundation and although it serves as a code foundation to numerous commercial social networking sites, it has its own distinct development process, membership requirements, and software licenses. OpenSocial Client Libraries Another important set of complementary libraries is the OpenSocial client libraries. It supports the REST protocol and greatly simplifies the coding required to fully utilize these protocols. The libraries are currently available in multiple languages including Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Objective-C. They are hosted at multiple locations for each language and typically follow the pattern: http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-<language>-client/, e.g. http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-php-client/, http://code.google.com/p/opensocial-java-client/ and so on. OpenSocial Tooling The OpenSocial Development Environment (OSDE) is an Eclipse project created to help developers quickly and easily build and test social applications. The OSDE includes a form based editor for creating gadgets and an "individual SNS [Social Network Site]" that is used for unit testing new gadgets. This tooling includes not only the ability to create and edit gadgets, but also integrates the Java client libraries to enable developers to build OpenSocial client applications. This project represents the first, and so far only, IDE that tries to create the end-to-end tooling solution. | Social Web Information (SWI) Server for your OrganizationFirst Google App for Monitoring Social Media: Realmon9Real time monitoring of social media topicsSoftware ToolsSocial CRM
Intelligence, recommendation:
Collaboration:
Content Management system:
Open Source and Standards
Featured Blogs/ArticlesSocial CRM: The New Rules of Relationship ManagementJeremiah Owyang, 3 days ago The Facebook imperative for enterprise software Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 6:57 pm February 28th, 2010 Gartner’s Top 5 CRM Predictions For 2010, Social Apps are Key By David Roe | Published Feb 23, 2010 Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service Report from Accenture, 2/2010 Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 10:43 am Jeremiah Owyang: List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings Posted on December 8th, 2009 Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace in 2009: Robust and crowded Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe @ 3:29 pm July 29th, 2009 The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration by Brian Solis Case StudiesHow Comcast Approaches Social CRM February 9th, 2010 |
