{"id":2569,"date":"2008-06-18T15:00:40","date_gmt":"2008-06-18T22:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/18\/liveblog-whats-wrong-with-the-white-label-social-networking-industry\/"},"modified":"2008-06-20T07:07:38","modified_gmt":"2008-06-20T14:07:38","slug":"liveblog-whats-wrong-with-the-white-label-social-networking-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/18\/liveblog-whats-wrong-with-the-white-label-social-networking-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"LiveBlog: What’s Wrong with the White Label Social Networking Industry?"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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

<\/p>\n

[The question posed to this roundtable of vendors, clients and analyst: “Are social platforms shit?”]<\/center><\/h2>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Challenges expressed by the table: <\/strong><\/p>\n

\nLack of Interoperability within this fledging industry<\/strong>
\nPlatforms 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.<\/p>\n

Community Managers don’t know what they want, so who should educate them.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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

Lack of Flexibility<\/strong>
\nNot having a standard supply of community feature ‘recipes’ are difficult, no cookie cutter approach. <\/p>\n

Content and navigation is sometimes not organized in a way of the communities’ need.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

How can a platform adapt to emerging technologies, such as twitter.<\/p>\n

Who is responsible for understanding the domain of the community.<\/p>\n

Lack of User Experience too many community projects<\/p>\n

Confusion around Measurement<\/strong>
\nWould like to have user behavior analytics, current metrics are not easy to use. Telligent showed off their product, right time at the right place.<\/p>\n

Difficult to get customer data behavior.<\/p>\n

Lack of standardization of community behavior, such as a standard support metric, standard growth metric, etc.<\/p>\n

Behavorial metrics are easier to gather but tying back to ROI will be difficult.<\/p>\n

Large communities cannot self-manage<\/strong>
\nTools need to allow the community to manage it self, with the right features to remove, alert, reduce bad behavior.<\/p>\n

High Performance issues rising<\/strong>
\nHaving 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"06182008401\"<\/a>\"06182008395\"<\/a>\"06182008396\"<\/a>\"06182008397\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tagged #ocu2008<\/a><\/p>\n

Update: Dennis McDonald suggests the solution could be process, not more technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue readingLiveBlog: What’s Wrong with the White Label Social Networking Industry?<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-networking","category-white-label-social-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-strategist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}