Given the focus on social media over the last few years it’s no surprise that a number of existing and new companies have started putting together solid offerings to capitalize in this burgeoning market. There are over 90 different vendors in this space and I’m sure many more by year end.

So, if you are on the lookout for a platform that offers you all that you are need ( and more ) it can be a rather onerous task. To help with this dilemma Forrester rolled out an interesting report earlier in the year with a focus on figuring out where some of these players stand and how much “bang” you get for your buck.

They evaluated 9 of these vendors after carefully selecting them based on the following criteria.

1. At least 40% of the vendor’s clients have 1,000 employees or more.
2. At least 50% of the vendor’s client deployments are external communities.
3. Vendors were selected based on client demand from inquiries and input from three analysts.
4. Vendor’s 2007 revenues were greater than $4 million.
5. Vendor’s average deal sizes are more than $50,000.

This is how they stack up :

In the Leader segment you have Jive Software and Telligent Systems. The biggest card both of these vendors hold is the fact that their platforms are easy to deploy and use ( a huge positive given that this is a social application ).  If you delve a little deeper you realize that Jive’s intuitive user interface and Telligents analytics probably tips the scales in their favour.

In the mid-field you have the Strong Performers with companies like PLuck, KickApps, Lithium, LiveWorld, Awareness and Mzinga. The focus here is on the ability to provide strong solution to manage communities.

Leverage brings up the rear in the Contenders section. While it doesn’t have the features that the large products bring to the game it might be a logical choice for budget conscious shoppers.

Source : Forrester

Evaluation was also done on a number of different criteria before arriving at an overall score for each contender.

• Breadth of the Offering
• Platform Features
• Data
• Integration
• Services
• Social Features
• Pricing
• Leadership
• Internal Resources
• Financial Viability
• Clients

Which goes to show that having a great looking product isn’t enough.

If you’ve implemented any of the above platforms I’d love to hear about your experiences.

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An interesting take on describing Social Media today.

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An interesting article I came across on consumer perception about twitter.

Though Twitter is currently in the spotlight as a media darling, only 8% of advertisers and consumers think it’s a very effective promotion tool, according to (pdf)  results from a LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Poll.

The study also found that advertisers are more likely than consumers to know about Twitter and are more likely to believe in the microblogging tool’s future power to help promote products and services.

Twitter Awareness and Sentiment

The research, which included surveys of both advertisers and the US public at large, revealed that just less than half of advertisers (45%) think Twitter is in its infancy and its use will grow significantly over the next few years. In contrast, 21% believe Twitter will not move into the mainstream and it will remain something mostly young people and the media will use.

At the same time, just under one in five advertisers (17%) believe Twitter’s five minutes of fame are already over and it’s time to find the next big thing, while 17% of advertisers say they don’t know enough about Twitter to have an opinion on it.

Among consumers, the study found a different picture, especially in terms of awareness. A large majority (69%) say they do not know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about it, 12% think it’s in its infancy, 12% say it is just something that young people and the media use and 8% say it is already over.

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I’ve been working on the business end of Share Point for the last few years and have seen a number of clients opt for this application when faced with a choice of solutions.The news article that I came across speaks to the success of this platform.

Hang around at Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters for five or ten minutes and someone dressed in khaki pants and a blue shirt is bound to tell you about the wonders of SharePoint — one of the company’s most successful and increasingly controversial lines of software.

Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too.

Microsoft wraps all of this software up into a package and sells the bundle at a reasonable price. In fact, the total cost of the bundle often comes in below what specialist companies would charge for a single application in, say, the business intelligence or corporate search fields.

It can’t do everything. Executives at Microsoft will readily admit that the bits and pieces of SharePoint lack the more sophisticated features found in products from specialist software makers.

“We don’t claim we do everything,” said Chris Capossela, a senior vice president at Microsoft. “If we do 50 percent of the functions that these other companies do, but they’re the ones customers really want, that’s fine. The magic is that end users actually like to use the software.”

This strategy seems to have worked even during the recession.

While Microsoft’s Windows sales fell for the first time in history this year, its SharePoint sales have gone up. Microsoft declines to break out the exact sales figures for the software but said that SharePoint broke the $1 billion revenue mark last year and continued to rise past that total this year, making it the hottest selling server-side product ever for the company.

Companies like Ferrari, Starbucks and Viacom have used SharePoint to create their public-facing Web sites and for various other tasks. All told, more than 17,000 customers use SharePoint.

In many ways, SharePoint mimics the strategy Microsoft took with Office by linking together numerous applications into a single unit. This approach appeals to customers looking to save money and also represents a real threat to a variety of business software makers.

Many of these specialists like Cognos, a business intelligence software maker, and Documentum, a content management software maker, have been gobbled up by larger players looking to create their own suites. I.B.M., for example, bought Cognos, while EMC bought Documentum. Other companies like Autonomy, a maker of top-of-the-line corporate search software, remain independent.

Read the entire article here..

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The big question. Why use Social Media?

If your companies answer is “because everyone else does it”, chances are they haven’t really thought this through. So what’s the first step? Go back to the drawing board and get an understanding of what it has to offer, its pro’s and cons.

There are a number of reasons why you want to embark on this journey and listed below are just a few of them.

1. Reach out to existing customers
2. Tap into new customers
3. Promote your brand
4. Recruit new talent
5. Be “Cool”

While I’m sure there are a number of other reasons you can add l’d like to focus on just these for a now.  Building brand loyalty and awareness can be done rather well using a well thought out social media strategy.

Reaching out to existing customers : The voice of your customer is probably the most important thing you have and creating a solution that allows them to constantly give you feedback is probably a smart thing to invest in.

Tap into new customers: A social platform loaded with content and interactivity is a great way to attract new customers to your product and services as well as give them an idea of what other customers think about it.

Promote your brand : Social Media gives you a long lasting and interesting channel to promote your brand.

Recruit new Talent : Social media platforms are a great way to attract talent to your organization as it allows them to get a better understanding of your company and the way you do business .

Be “Cool” : Let’s face it, with social media being leveraged successfully by a number of organizations there is pressure to adopt it and not be left  behind.

Choose your medium : This would probably be one of the most important decisions you’ll make. The fact that you have an endless list of tools at your disposal really doesn’t help. ( This is where putting together a strategy helps )

The most popular of these are of course:

1. Blogs
2. Micro blogging tools ( twitter )
3. Collaboration tools  (wiki’s )
4. Multimedia ( You tube, Flickr )
5. Podcasts

What makes this work investing in?

1. Reach : The volumes of people you can reach if you use this medium are mind boggling, you even pull in people that might not be part of your key demographic.
2. Usability : Using social media tools has become second nature to most of your customers out there ( if they’ve been on the web for a while ).
3. Cost effective : As mentioned before the return on something like this far exceeds that of traditional media channels.
4. Permanence : Traditional media cannot be altered, a social media platform is a living, constantly evolving platform that allows you to connect with customers constantly.
5. Recency :  One of the biggest advantages is of course sending messages and information almost instantly to user already tapped into the system.
6. Analytics : Modern Social Media Platforms allow you to generate the kind of analytics you can only dream of in traditional media.

Advantages

The biggest advantage over standard mediums of communication is the ability to connect with your consumers and users and get feedback. Its a bidirectional flow of information that will get scary at times if you don’t understand it or be proactive in dealing with issues that will most certainly crop up.

It’s cheap!! ( well cheaper, than alternative means of communication )

There is a sense of transparency with social media, essentially because people are free to say what they want without the fear of being  gagged. Your consumers will open up to you more and you’ll get a whole lot more honest feedback. Just be very careful you do not violate this trust by being too controlling, this goes against the very nature or social media tools.

Tackling issues before they snowball, Catching something when its still a minor irritant for one consumer is worth its weight in gold before it spiral out of control on the world wide web.

These are just some of the thoughts I had around this topic, feel free to add you own or disagree.

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Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2009
From: Tony Hsieh (CEO - Zappos.com)
To: All Zappos Employees
Subject: Zappos and Amazon

Please set aside 20 minutes to carefully read this entire email. (My apologies for the occasional use of formal-sounding language, as parts of it are written in a particular way for legal reasons.)

Today is a big day in Zappos history.

This morning, our board approved and we signed what’s known as a “definitive agreement”, in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock.

Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say “Amazon acquires Zappos” or “Zappos sells to Amazon”. While those headlines are technically correct, they don’t really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline “Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…”)

We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have always run Zappos — continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our business. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are switching out our current shareholders and board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different.

We think that now is the right time to join forces with Amazon because there is a huge opportunity to leverage each other’s strengths and move even faster towards our long term vision. For Zappos, our vision remains the same: delivering happiness to customers, employees, and vendors. We just want to get there faster.

Read the entire letter here….

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