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.
Update: Dennis McDonald suggests the solution could be process, not more technology.
I’ve worked for a couple vendors as part of the Professional Services and Consulting teams. I find that one of the biggest challenges for vendors is to find a balance between doing what they like (create and sell software)and helping customers know how to use it. It’s very hard for someone trying to sell software to tell a customer that they aren’t prepared to buy it. A big percentage of enterprise networks and online communities end up in a continuous pilot mode or run out of steam because neither the customer nor the vendor planned and managed the community. Of course the vendor is simply doing their job, by providing a great platform and great technical support for it.
The questions of who educates the customers is key. Customers needs to realize that vendors either don’t have the expertise, the motivation or the resources to nurture and manage every community implementation. It would be unrealistic and unfair to expect vendors to turn unprepared customers down. My previous employers both did their best to prepare customers for the road ahead, but the bottom line was of course if the customer wanted to buy they were going to sell.
As customer awareness increases, they will realize that it takes more than a platform to build a community. The options are: 1. Purchase their white label network as a true SAAS model; 2. Purchase platform from vendor + Seek third party expertise from social media consultants or 3. Purchase platform from vendor + Internally staff community planning and management roles.
Thanks for the summary!
I™m always so impressed by the commenters
Exceptions to every rule. 😉
But on topic, you can’t apply vague generic solutions, for something that really needs to be internally customized, as the law of unintended consequences is always king, and then, add in a lack of results and no real effective metrics, companies will just end up throwing money away at whatever is the hot buzz of the moment. Flipping a coin would work just as well.
It™s very hard for someone trying to sell software to tell a customer that they aren™t prepared to buy it.
If you can’t make it easy or workable enough for them, you aren’t prepared to SELL it. Don’t make the software fit your needs and then go all blame-the-customer, you-aren’t-ready.
I’m not really impressed by any of the commenters.
Hi Christopher, maybe you can share a bit of your solution with us. I’m not aware of any community platforms which can simply be turned on and gurantee a vibrant community. If there are, we certainly are wasting a lot of time learning about social media strategy, management and dynamics.
My comment regarding customers not being prepared to buy does not come from a technology perspective. Certainly you shouldn’t make a product, which is so hard to implement, that it needs to wrapped with consulting before it can be launched. My point was actually about community building and adoption having two components (or two costs, as Dennis points out); 1. the software 2. the process. Vendors can provide the software, and perhaps some of the process. Customers are not ready to buy, when they don’t understand the process or they don’t have resources to manage it. You can launch a Blog in hours, but unless there is a strategy, content, monitoring, etc.. in place, you really haven’t gotten very far.
I Love Triumph the Insult Dog! Hey, I think challenges just make you think harder about what you were really trying to say. I probably would have chosen a different way, but in the end I’m just happy someone read my comment 🙂
Community isn’t software, nor even process, it’s relational. You can’t flow-chart Six Sigma people into some sort of community process, people aren’t cattle. Processes only work with enforcement action, real community is absurd, chaotic, and unmanageable, the minute you try and “manage it”, it ceases to even be community.
If you force it’s creation, it’s not even real. Just make great products, let the community take care of itself, planned economies never work out well, history is filled with such examples.
PS – My solution is that there is no solution.
because it makes its money on the quality of the service
Quality of the service, price/quality of the goods, portions of the goods, wine selection, overall atmosphere, location and ease of parking, placement of the clientele (Odorfific Car Mechanics not near the Suits). time to wait, cleanliness of restrooms, general politeness of the staff, following instructions and cooking to your preferences, having a certain ‘brand’ universally liked (i.e. corn feed Midwestern quality beef over leather chew-toy West Coast beef). But even if the restaurant does everything right, having some crying kid at the next table can ruin it all. Like everything in life, it’s complex, and differing for every person, fingerprints really.