7.3.1 | Blogs
July 14, 2008 | What is Social Media?
By Mark Ouyang
Comments (3)
Recently we had a discussion on social media. It was a heated discussion. Underlying this question were important issues – where is the market headed, what capabilities do we consider to be core to our web publishing platform, and what is the best way to serve our customers (buy, build, or partner)?
One of the first things we discovered: It’s difficult to define social media. It means different things to different people. We found that some customers considered social media to be something as simple as allowing readers to comment on articles, respond to polls and surveys, and otherwise interact with content. These are things Clickability has been doing for awhile without labeling it “social media”.
Other capabilities such as allowing readers to create their own profiles, and post blogs, photos, audio recordings to a website can also be done on our platform today. Granted, implementing these capabilities requires more thought and planning by those managing the website. It certainly requires more effort and participation by the user.
We’ve also heard requests for allowing users to rate/vote on content, set up events and calendars, send private messages to other members, and track/preserve conversations using message boards/forums. On the analytics side, one must be able to track user participation on all these things.
Complicating matters is an expectation that social media capabilities can be delivered as an application right out of the box, much in the way Pluck or Kickapps does. This raised the question, “Is social media an application? Or a selected set of these features built into a website and customized for a specific purpose?”
We would like to know what you think. Are there features or issues we left out? With your feedback we will explore these issues together and create some useful ways to think about social media and develop a better understanding of what it can (and cannot) do for you.
Comments
Sean, Thanks for your note. I think that is a great insight. Getting content "socialized" and distributed to other channels for the purposes of building your brand is important.
Posted by Mark Ouyang | 29 July 2008 at 1:52PM
I agree that all of the features you listed are important but I think there are some important features missing from this list: As a content producer, I want to see my content distributed as widely as possible. To this end, I would like to see tools for building distribution vehicles - widgets for letting readers access my content from off-site. This could take the form of some sort of "widget builder" to quickly create canned tools for common social platforms or it could be a suite of programming functions to create our own mini-API for readers to access our content. This approach could be used on a more personal level, too - giving us tools to let users distribute a custom clipping service or photo album of our coverage of them or their family. "Social" is a broad term, no? Another feature I'd like to see is the ability to hook into popular social platforms and contribute to a reader's personal news feed or lifestream. Commenting, rating, contributing, or selecting content as a favorite are all social activities and we'd like to allow our readers to note their behavoir in their existing lifestream and contribute to their social graph. I suspect these are all features that customers could develop on their own but then, so are comments, ratings, and membership. If Clickability is looking to add high-value features to its social media platform that put it ahead of the competition, then I think providing a robust, but easy, suite of tools to help me stay competitive is the way to do it.
Posted by Seth Long | 28 July 2008 at 11:53PM
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- THINKstrategies White Paper - Maximizing the Business Benefits of On Demand Web Content Management Systems
- Buyer Beware: The Top Ten Things to Look for in A Web Content Management Platform
- Getting Started Right: The Clickability Implementation Process, by Julia Banks, Senior Director, Client Services
interact with content. These are things Clickability has been doing for awhile without labeling it “social media”. Pluck or Kickapps (A.presence)
Posted by SUSAN HUROWITZ | 10 September 2008 at 8:07AM