Community Management Tools At the Top of Strategic E2.0 Tools List
Dion Hinchcliffe writes about “Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch on his Enterprise 2.0 blog. Personally, I was excited to see Community Management Tools topping the list. Enterprise social computing can affect many business functions and can be the “glue” that makes businesses stick together. Collaborating, communicating, developing products or services, marketing those products and services, relating to customers, and plain running the business, all these activities have been touched by social means.
For enterprise-level community management, he lists tools such as eModeration - whose tagline is “Protecting your users and brand 24/7.” Sounds rather “command and control” oriented to me, but I think that in the Enterprise 2.0 space, protection and security are big selling points and essential aspects.
Other tools listed also come with a team that will moderate your brand. One of the points Hinchcliffe made in the post is that hiring a team helps you learn good practices from them, which is an excellent point. It’s not like you can just pick up a community management book and expect to be a successful community manager. Hands-on experience and apprenticeship are much better learning plans. Another tool, Rollstream, manages B2B communities with a toolset where compliance and confirmation for price list distribution, for example. This sounds unique to social computing for the enterprise so it’s a good find.
I do believe that tools for community moderation are emerging technologies, and 2010 may be the break-out year for many reasons. But I also observe that people are at the heart of some offered tool solutions. So it could be detrimental that tools become a focus. But, Hinchcliffe observes that in the last year, people are focusing less on the tool specifics and instead are driving adoption and measuring ROI. That observation shows more maturity this year, something I’m happy to hear.
The remaining items on the top ten list include open identity, microblogging, Social CRM, enterprise platforms, activity streams, social search, social workflow, automated compliance monitoring, and unified communication, to round out the list. He does an excellent job of explaining the place for each in the enterprise.
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