Social CRM

Web 2.0 has made content easily available via wikis, blogs, RSS, podcasts, social networks and more. While it’s great to have so much content easily available it can be overwhelming. How can I get to relevant content without wasting hours looking for it?

While its only part of the solution, social metadata can help organize and navigate to relevant content. In this context, social metadata is data added to content by people other than the content creator, such as tags, ratings, votes, comments, etc. Examples can be found everywhere on the web; ratings and comments on amazon.com, tagging in digg.com.

In the past accessing data in an enterprise application was controlled by an engineer who developed a predefined path through the application. An example I remember using was to display a list of available content or links to the user. The list could be narrowed by selecting one keyword from a drop down box. Keywords were typically created by the team implementing the system and didn't always represent the way the users would describe the content.

Now, our social applications are taking advantage of social metadata so that a user can dynamically create a navigational link to content. For example, I can tag a presentation that is relevant to me and choose the tags I believe best describe that presentation. The keywords I choose help organize and categorize the content in a way that’s meaningful to me. Later I or my colleagues can use those tags to locate data using meaningful keywords.

Using social metadata in a social network with a focused purpose (be it a product, team or region) can help users navigate to relevent content even quicker because members can use social metadata to provide context and relevant description to the content.

This is my first blog, and I had a hard time thinking of what I should write about. I have never blogged before because I am not sure what is there I can bring value to. At the same time, I’m looking at the social networking sites that I participate in, and what value do I get out of it. I do not have time to search for what I need or read a lot of information. So what value does social networks bring?

Obviously, social networking have different values to different people. So how can a social network bring value to the masses so that more people will join and participate.

I look at how I use social networks. I think the key is to not target the masses but to target only those that brings value to them. I look at how I use LinkedIn. It is a great network but what do I do after adding these contacts to my contact list and joining social groups. For me, I didn’t find much use for it as an engineer. After awhile, I have stopped checking it or updating it. But for another friend who’s business is in consulting and trying to grow his business, it became a valuable tool for him to try to network his way into a company. He has gotten some business from networking with different people.

For me, a social network will bring value when it can aggregate all the information to me and forecast what I will like to know based upon my interests. Bringing attention to news or information that I would be interested in learning. Show me all the topics, blogs and etc that most interest me daily and refresh it based upon my participation during the previous week. In other words, push the data to me so I don’t have to mine it in the networks. I would like a social network that will help me find connections, interests, information that is relevant for me instead of me having to mine that data.

The value of social networking is to help find data that interest me the most and constantly keep me up to date on the latest changes that is of value to me. Social networks should be able to adopt to different ways that the users uses the network. It should provide multi-dimensional interaction instead of a contact list. I want to be able to network with people outside of my network, outside the country that I live in and speaking a language that I can’t understand.

What else do I look for in a social network? I look for the one that is easy to use. That provide good search capability so I can easily find information that I need. I am not interested in contact networking, but more of mining data from the network. I look for the ones with cool interface that keeps me intrigued and a mobile application is a plus.

So how does it keep me in and not lose me? Continuous innovation with new capabilities, more topics, integration to other networks. Find it all in one place so I keep coming back to it as a starting point.

At the end of the day, it is the people and content that makes a social network successful. So an innovative network that provides tools to help bring knowledgeable experts to the network and retain them to actively participate in the network.

There are different schools of thought on what makes a true SaaS provider. Some believe that the first level of multi-tenancy where all the customers reside on a single instance down to the database schema level is the real SaaS provider. Others believe in a more hybrid approach that allows the customer to choose whether they want to reside in the same instance as other customers or prefer to have their own instance. At the end of the day, if I am a customer do I really care which SaaS model is implemented by the provider as long as the provider secures my data and ensures system uptime and performance that my business demands. Of course, there might be exceptions where for privacy reasons a customer might want his own instance.

This leads to the other point, which is if I am starting a SaaS company, what would be my strategy. Should I take a top down approach and build the applications to SaaS standards or should I take a bottoms-up approach and design my SaaS foundation/infrastructure first and then design my apps to run on this foundation. I would think the latter would be more beneficial since once you lay your foundation, it’s more difficult to change. The level of abstraction as one move up the stack to the applications makes it easier to change.

So, then the real debate about who is a true SaaS provider should not be about the level of multi-tenancy but more about which provider can give me the uptime, performance, security and application functionality . Not that the multi-tenancy debate is less interesting or compelling but all it does is make for a good discussion.

That brings us to the core of SaaS which is the foundation as I call it. The foundation constitutes not just the infrastructure but also the shared components that are built on top of the infrastructure which the applications can consume. I will delve on the layers of SaaS foundation in my next blog. Until then, be safe, be SaaS-y.