The market is flooded with a number of enterprise social solutions, and most of them do a great job at one thing: creating a place where employees and customers can interact and share information. The problem is that's ALL they do.
These tools isolate social conversations from the rest of the business in their own silos. To make social products operate with the rest of your business, it requires the creation of custom integrations that have to be supported forever, which means considerable money and time investments.
Needless to say, a better option is a Web content management system (CMS) that fully integrates social tools and functionality with the rest of the offering. Social CMS makes good business sense for a number of reasons.
To start, your website is already the hub of your business. Integrating social conversations with your most important business assets built on a Web-based CMS provides opportunities for better communication, collaboration and engagement. Sharing content becomes a whole lot easier.
After all, social conversations are essentially just another form of content that include shared documents, images and videos, and managing content is what a CMS does best. If you take this approach, social content can be woven into the fabric of your site seamlessly and to the maximum benefit of your customers.
Most importantly, no expensive customizations are needed, so your social site can be up-and-running in days, not months, and it can be tailored with off-the-shelf modules and designs, cutting even more of the time and cost associated with implementation. Plus, essential features like robust permissions models are built-in, making the social CMS solution scalable for a wide range of user roles.
One of the more socially active CMS platforms available actually comes from Drupal, which has options that allow users to create social networking and/or social media sites. There's also Pligg, a free CMS that provides a social networking software that encourages users to register to your website to submit content and connect with other users. And for WordPress users, they can check out BuddyPress, an installation that turns a WordPress site into a social network with profiles, messaging, friends, activity streams, forums and much more.
Finding a CMS that blends social features into its core offering is a great way to increase your company's productivity, improve communication and collaboration, engage your customers and share content, among other things. So don't build social silos that limit the depth and value of the conversations you can have, both within your company and with your customers; finding a CMS with social capabilities allows you to take advantage of that those interactions and conversations to better your business on the increasingly social Web.
