Axero Pulse » features

Selecting A Social Software Platform? Determining Core Features

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:00:01 +0000

Solving Business Challenges With The Right Social Software

We’ve discussed in previous posts how social software for business and enterprise can be customized to fulfill a very specific requirement or solve a business challenge. By leveraging the strengths and right features a good social software solution can be adapted to various business processes from marketing, training and development, collaboration, project management, HR Intranets, customer service, support and even product development. Selecting the core features and building a solution for a specific process is important and with all the various options out there, it can be confusing.

Bernd Appelhans recently designed and published a social software classification chart in a blog post which really helps puts these different software into perspective alongside their category and the kind of activity/interaction they invoke from users.

When it comes to a more comprehensive enterprise social software platform that encompass all these as features, the problem is not really selecting one or more features but deciding how to customize the platform to bring the right features to the forefront. While all the features may be activated, it’s good to be able to highlight some of the core features needed on the main community to move towards the objective whether its social marketing, customer support or any other function. Businesses across the board have been able to take the same base platform and transform them to make it their own and solve their own challenges and a chart like this can really help identify those challenges and requirements.

For example if you’re looking towards social software to build a better customer support solution, discussing, talking and communicating will be important activities. Information and to an extent files will be key categories for providing support and also creating a self service resource for customers to find solutions to their issues. So, to develop a good solution for customer support, forums, groups, articles, documents and file sharing will be central. If the objective is to build a collaboration platform or project management solution, features like Wiki s, messaging, document sharing and groups become central to it.

Identify the objectives, the core requirements and then the social software features that could help enable them. If these features are at the core of your solution and the platform is built around it, it will invoke the right activity / interaction and create a more efficient process around your organizational objective. What are the activities that you need to invoke from your users?

Social And Community Software Platforms – When Time Is Money

Tim Eisenhauer — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:20:28 +0000

Developing Social Software Sites & Portals – From Concept To Launch At Light-speed

Several months ago, I had a phone conversation with an entrepreneur who was in the process of developing a portal specifically targeted at providing help and resources for women professionals who have just had a first child and trying to balance work and life. In terms of what the portal would need, everything was clear. From the technical side of things, the plan was to build a Web 2.0 community portal with social networking style usability as well as features like blogs, file sharing, instant messaging, and forums, which are central to building a web portal of this type. It was decided that the site would be developed from scratch so that it could be built exactly as envisioned. A small team of developers were contracted and the work began. And just recently, I had a chance to catch up with her to see how things had progressed with the portal. It turns out, the development process was still underway and there were at least several more months before even a beta launch could be done.

Whether it’s an entrepreneur looking to build a new Web 2.0 portal, a business looking to launch a community, or an enterprise creating a collaboration portal, time to market is a key consideration — there are plenty of advantages in being able to get your projects online and launched as quickly as possible. Getting projects online quicker by building your social network on top of an existing social software or community platform doesn’t necessarily translate into compromising on quality and your exact vision of how the site should turn out. A good social software platform will let you customize and incorporate all the features you need, and yet, give you the ability to greatly reduce the time to market. The architecture for social networking software is not always as simple as it may seem, and building a social site from the ground up can be quite challenging, even for the most experienced development team. It’s easy to overlook many development obstacles, testing time, and bugs, which is why development times for such sites often overshoot their expected time line by several weeks and many times even months. While building from scratch can give you exactly what you envisioned, the time, as well as the total cost of ownership in developing from scratch could end up being considerably higher than budgeted — which is an extremely important factor while deciding between building on an existing community / social platform or developing your own platform.

In today’s context, when so many business software initiatives rely on Web 2.0 and social software components that allow for communication and collaboration, it could make good business sense buying or investing in a strong platform that provides the base features to get your projects from concept to launch in the shortest possible time.

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Social Business Collaboration Software

Tim Eisenhauer — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:51:19 +0000

Business Collaboration & Idea Sharing — The Social Networking Way

There are some businesses that do it well and some that just don’t seem to be cut out for it. We are talking about business collaboration — collective development and fostering a business environment that encourages idea sharing. Some companies have this built into their process and daily functioning so well, they are great examples of how a business can grow by putting their minds together and working as a unit. There have been many great ideas put into practice to encourage this kind of an environment. There are brainstorming sessions, rooms dedicated to thinking and ideas, team building sessions and workshops, events and social gatherings, and other carefully thought out programs that instill the habit of collaborating and working as a team to innovate and move ahead.

Then, there is the social networking platform — which is one of the most natural tools to foster a collaborative environment.

For example — if a business decides to do a team building workshop, or maybe a meeting to brainstorm ideas on what they can do to improve the next version of their product, they will need to organize an event and then persuade employees to attend through an email, phone call, fax, etc. However, if the company had an online collaboration / social networking platform and started a discussion topic around the subject, employees would more likely pitch their ideas and participate. To most of us ‘Internet- capable’ people, it comes quite naturally to participate in online discussions, share or post interesting photos or video, or collaborate with others online. Recently, someone posted a business question on popular business networking site LinkedIn asking others’ advice on that topic and whether they had any experience that could help. Instantly, there were replies, experiences, advice, and ideas on how she could move ahead with her dilemma — from not just one person, but from several others who could help her. I’m sure that this saved her a lot of time and money — simply because she had a platform to collaborate with others and leverage the community’s expertise.

However, in order to achieve that level of communication, businesses first have to provide the social networking platform to their employees. You can build a social networking platform into your own business website and make it the core platform for everyone involved to get together online. Once the platform is provided, people will get involved with blogging, discussing problems or topics, collaborating on projects, sharing ideas through blogs and forums, collecting consensus through polls and using all the other features available to them. When people collaborate online, things often translate into offline actions automatically. Having the technology infrastructure internally to build a social network within the business encourages everyone to participate in the business actively, and promotes the work environment as well as a constant learning environment that so many businesses are still seeking. The right technology platform is one great step ahead towards getting there so go ahead and encourage business collaboration the social way.

Social Networking Platform – Blog Features

Tim Eisenhauer — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:04:17 +0000

Communifire, our social networking platform in ASP. NET, contains a ton of functionality…including forums, events, friending, article management, internal messaging, photo sharing, video sharing, blogs, and much more. In addition to the functionality I just briefly listed out, Communifire contains a very extensive and feature rich blogging system. Here is a rundown of a list that I wrote up to share those features with you…

Communifire Blog features

Communifire Blogs is a simple, yet powerful blogging system designed to increase the interaction between the community members and engage your readers and customers.

Publishing features

Multi-author support – Every user in the community gets a blog to publish their content and thoughts on for the community to read.
RSS feeds for all blogs – Each blog is syndicated using RSS / XML feeds. Your users can subscribe to your RSS Feeds using their feed readers to stay updated when new posts are made.
Advanced commenting system – Comments are a very important aspect of a blog. Strike up conversation and allow readers to comment on all blog posts. Add unlimited comments to each blog post. Blog authors can enable or disable comments, can mark comments as spam, or delete them using a very user friendly interface. Administrators have full control of how the comments are managed; choosing whether they are automatically published or you can choose to moderate them before appearing publically.
WYSIWYG Editor – The article manager contains one of the most well known and most used rich text editors. There is no need to know HTML to format your articles – just use the built in editor.

Images, Media, Files

Upload attachments – Upload an unlimited number of images or file attachments to each blog post. You can display the images anywhere within your blog posts.
Image resizing – You set the size of the images that are uploaded. If the images exceed the size you set, they will be automatically resized.
Image thumbnails – Whenever you upload an image, a thumbnail is automatically generated for you to display as teaser image next to your blog post title.
Embed videos – Easily embed YouTube, MySpace, Google, or any other types of videos into your articles. It’s as easy as copying and pasting the video code into your article.

Public features

Blog homepage – The blog homepage shows a list of all user blogs, a list of blog archives by month, and a list of the most recently published posts. Each post item contains an excerpt of the post and also a teaser image that you are able to upload when publishing. Clicking on a user filters the list of blog posts to display only those published by that user. Clicking on a blog archive month displays only those blog posts published during that month. You can also filter the blog posts per user and per monthly archive.
Blog post page – The blog post page displays an individual blog post, the bio of the user who made the posting, and provides a number of different functionalities to benefit the end user, including:
- Print – The print option displays a printer friendly version of the post, making it simple for your customer to print your blog posts.
- Email / Share with a friend – This option allows your readers to forward blog posts to their friends or colleagues by email. The emails that are entered are automatically saved to a database so you know where your blog posts are being distributed.
- Ratings – Get instant feedback on blog posts. Members of your community can rate each blog post indicating whether they found the post helpful or not. Ratings help to improve content quality, remove confusing content, and filter the wheat from the chafe.
- Change text size - Users can conveniently use this feature to increase the text size of the blog post for easier reading. User can increase or decrease the text size three times.
- Latest blog posts – The sidebar contains a list of the users’ latest blog posts as well as a list of the latest blog posts made by the entire community. This helps to increase readership and the time spent on the website by providing options for users to read additional content.

Search engine optimization features

SEO optimized out of the box – We spent a great deal of time optimizing the layout of the HTML and using the proper HTML tags to help search engines index and understand your content.
Keyword friendly URL’s – Create keyword friendly URL’s for your blog posts. URL’s that contain keywords are often given higher rankings in search results because they appear to be more relevant.
Customizable H1 tag – You can create a custom H1 tag for each blog posts you publish. H1 tags are known as heading tags that describe the content on the page. Search engines are known to give emphasis to those pages with highly relevant H1 tags.
Custom Page Titles – You can create your own optimized page title for each blog post. Search engines have been known to favor pages with relevant page titles. If you don’t want to create a custom page title, the blog platform will use the post title.
Custom Meta Descriptions and keywords – The blog platform allows you to create custom Meta description and keywords for each and every post that is published. Search engines often use the Meta description and keywords to describe your website within search results. Provide an optimized custom description to entice users to click through to your blog posts.

Administration features

Moderation - With our advanced moderation tools, you can remove obscene or inappropriate content quickly and easily.
Management - All blogs, posts, and comments can be fully managed by an administrator

Ok, so there you have it — a listing of (most of) the features of the blogging functionality in the Communifire Social Networking Platform. And if you’re interested in checking out a live social network running on Communifire, you can check out CodeAsp.Net – an ASP.NET Community. You can click here to see the blogs.

And to learn more about Communifire, click here to read the Social Networking Platform in ASP. NET.