Ten leading platforms for creating online communities

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=195&tag=rbxccnbzd1

Creating online communities of customers and workers has been one of the hotter topics in business and technology this year. Whether you’re on the business side, in IT, or are just trying to build virtual teams around shared goals, online communities are rapidly becoming a popular way to organize people and accomplish work in a highly collaborative manner.

Learning how to design an effective community is something we’re all going have to get better at in coming years.It’s beginning to be understood that communities aren’t just for socializing but for getting things done.

The open source world has been using vast collaborative online communities to develop complex software products successfully for nigh unto a decade. That communities produce robust results is hardly news to them. So too with other early examples of community like some newsgroups and wikis, particularly Wikipedia. The rise of social networking and fundamentally user-powered Web 2.0 applications as a common daily activity has further helped move online communities into a mainstream business topic this year. Social media — and blogs in particular — are also helping raise awareness of the power and reach of community-based communication and collaboration.

Like many technology advances, network-based communities are taking a while to trickle down to the business trenches in a meaningful way, but it is now clearly getting there.

I covered some compelling examples of online customer communities in my recent best practices post and by all accounts, too many online communities today exhibit worst practices such as lack of sustained community management, a tendency to use communities for “push marketing”, cross wiring business and consumer motivations, and lastly, starting with the technology first. Part of this is that we’re in the early days yet and online communities are a new discipline for most of us, having only recently begun a large-scale move form the edge of the network and more into the center of our daily work.

That most of us are not fluent community facilitators is something that will almost certainly be addressed as a vital new workplace ability and one that we will have to acquire diligently to work effectively in the future. Those that can reach out, engage, and elicit useful participation over the network will increasingly have the advantage when it comes to achieving directed, collaborative problem solving, often known as tacit interactions.

Note that this also informs the Enterprise 2.0 story since community is a particularly important issue when we talk about the success of social software in the workplace. This is because community forms the foundation and virtual tent within which network-based collaboration occurs.

community_membership_lifecycle.jpg

Learning how to design an effective community, whether it’s on-the-fly for a small, ad hoc team effort on an upcoming project or a large-scale, long-term customer community of millions of users, is something we’re all going have to get better at in coming years. A good place to start to see the type of subject matter we have to master is the online community entry on Wikipedia. This means delving into academic subjects such community membership lifecycles (show in diagram above), Kollock’s Framework, the diffusion model of user adoption, and other esoterica.

One can also just dive into a community and learn the ropes with direct experience. However, as is typical with so many aspects of software and process, there are points of leverage that — if isolated and optimized for — can produce the best results for the least effort. Consequently, the best source of knowledge is likely some hands-on experience combined with some distilled formal knowledge, after which only then is one ready to tackle the technology side of community.
Community platforms: Technology enablers of social computing

So, once you’ve done your homework and you have a good sense of how communities work, have established clear goals, assigned capable talent as well as made a commitment of time and energy, and began to understand what your community is about and what it would like ot do, you’re now just getting ready to get a sense of the technology landscape. I’ve made a point to put this community knowledge pre-amble in front the platforms list since we have learned from recent case studies that technology decisions should come towards the end of a community. Otherwise the vagaries of the platform itself tends to shape the community effort too the extent that the community design is beholden to technology decisions made too early.

Which platform a community effort should use is much better driven by the high-level goals and a co-developed design, with the technology subsequently selected to support them. However, it’s also naive to think that most organizations don’t already have a preference for a certain technology stack or even a specific community platform, which they may have already acquired or used previously. In general, however, we are learning from this year’s studies that when technology drives the community, the outcome tends to suffer. Lastly, shaping the community design too much in a vacuum is also a common antipattern. As always with modern development processes, involve users as early as possible and often.

In preparing this list, I encountered literally hundreds of content management (CMS) and portal products across a great swath of maturity and capability levels. Along the way, it became very clear that extending the CMS and portal worlds into the community product space is a natural evolution that many vendors and open source projects have made, if not often achieved with great effect or distinction. However, a few products stood out head and shoulders from the rest, old players and new alike, with a couple of surprises. I also attempted, to the extent possible, to remove bias with an objective scoring system based on a number of external criteria. That being said, this is my own list, and I’m certain others will have a different list. To those, I ask that you please add your own picks in TalkBack below.

The list below is in rough order of general industry popularity.
Ten leading platforms for online communities

Joomla Logo 1. Open source, based on PHP, and a fork of the Mambo project, Joomla is one of the most widely used content management systems and community platforms. It includes the usual page posting, discussion, blogs, polls, etc. Joomla has an extensive community of its own and the number of 3rd party plug-ins is very extensive, with over 3,700 currently listed, making it one of the richest community ecosystems in existence.

Drupal Logo 2. Drupal is one of the darlings of the community world and would come first on this list for many in the community business. It’s a highly capable, mature, and extremely popular community platform that includes the usual features as well as a workflow subsystem, support for OpenID, granular user security, and much more. Drupal is developed in PHP, is open source, and has several thousand 3rd party modules available for it as well.

PHP-Nuke Logo 3. One of the older CMS/community platforms, PHP-Nuke doesn’t have the flair of the first two on this list but is still one of the most widely used community applications available. PHP-Nuke is eponymously named after the language it uses, is open source, and have several hundred add-ons available for it. Despite being one of the older and more traditional community platforms, PHP-Nuke continues to grow marketshare rapidly.

Zikula Logo 4. The platform formerly known as PostNuke is now called Zikula and is a fork of PHP-Nuke 5.0. Rounding out the top four, Zikula is one of the older, more established offerings. It is also open source and developed in PHP.

Sharepoint Logo 5. Microsoft’s Sharepoint is the first commercial product to make the list and is also one of the most mature and popular. Though Sharepoint can be used to develop collaborative environments that have few community features, the most recent emphasis and the majority of uses I encounter are for community-style deployments. With the advent of the Community Kit for Sharepoint which adds “best practices, templates, Web Parts, tools, and source code“, the product is now a capable contender in this space. Sharepoint has very extensive enterprise penetration and will be on the short list for many organizations given that they often already own it, though the warning above about “technology first” should apply.

Lithium Logo 6. The first SaaS community platform to make the list is Lithium, an innovative and fast-growing solution for customer communities that is seeing broad uptake according to my metrics. One of the advantages of Lithium is the extensive support around community developers and managers that it provides. One of the disadvantages is that it does not have an open source ecosystem so the the amount of extensions and plug-ins available for Lithium is limited to standard Web widgets.

DotNetNuke Logo 7. The second .NET plaform (after Sharepoint) and the first open source .NET community platform on this list, the capable DotNetNuke has been going through extensive maturation over the last year. Written in VB .NET, DotNetNuke has an extensive set of 3rd party modules through its Marketplace service, which enables for-pay modules to be developed and sold, resulting in some high-quality offerings.

Community Server Logo 8. One of the few .NET blog platforms has evolved into a full-blown community product. Community Server is now aimed squarely at the enterprise and has been used in very large scale, for example, it is currently used to operate MySpace’s customer forums for over 70 million users.

KickApps Logo 9. KickApps is a relatively new up-and-comer that is getting wide distribution in a relatively short time period including major wins with large public Web sites for ABC and the BBC. KickApps is a SaaS-based solution like Lithium that is extensively widgetized for maximum integration flexibility into existing Web sites.

Jive Software Logo 10. ClearSpace Community from Jive Software has been getting a lot of attention lately, particularly with its popularity in the enterprise space. Over 15% of the Fortune 500 currently use it and while it’s highly likely that the open source products at the top of this list have higher penetration, Jive has consistently focused strengths in areas where open source products tend to be weaker, particularly on enterprise issues around security, integration, and customizability.

It was interesting to see how the technologies and platforms shaped up in terms of open source and commercial software as well as software packages vs SaaS. We’re seeing a healthy mixture of options available for just about any requirements, though the open source options tend to be richer because of their extensible nature and the large number of contributors building plug-ins and add-ons.

A number of interesting offerings didn’t make this top 10 cut and so I thought it would also be worthwhile to include the next 15 candidates since we are likely to see them more often in the near future. They made the list due to overall popularity, innovative features, early groundswell, or a combination thereof:

11. Mambo - Popular, old school PHP community-platform.

12. Lotus SameTime and Lotus Connections - IBM’s answers to community with many integrated capabilities.

13. OneSite - White label, on-demand social network and community.

14. BoonEx - SaaS community that is extensively widget-based with many features and capabilities.

15. Crowdvine - Used to power the community for the popular Web 2.0 Expo conferences, Crowdvine has full community, content management, and external site integration.

16. Facebook Open Platform - Use the Facebook platform for your community with the open source version of the platform.

17. Mzinga - A solution designed for industry verticals such as HR and marketing, Mzinga is seeing strong uptake.

18. Leverage Software

19. HiveLive

20. SocialGo - On-demand SaaS community service.

21. IglooSoftware - A relatively new entry, Igloo is focusing on the enterprise user with ease-of-use and simplicity as a top feature.

22. GroupSwim

23. SocialCast

24. Tomoye

25. Pinax - Brand new and feature rich. Pinax is getting considerable early adopter interest. Based on Python, Pinax is open source.

As always, please add your own in TalkBack below.

Twelve best practices for online customer communities

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=190

One of the more significant Web 2.0 trends in business this year has been the advent of the Web-based customer community, where groups of like-minded individuals focus around a brand or a set of product and services come together and interact online. Far from the cynical marketing ploy that it can sometimes seem, customer communities often sprout up on the initiative of passionate customers. Successful examples of this include XMFan around XM Radio, HDTalking for Harley-Davidson, and IKEAFANS on IKEA products.

It’s imporant to note that the communities above are vibrant, active, and absolutely not affiliated with the businesses that the communities are focused on. As a result, business are increasingly realizing they can reap benefits by attempting to foster these communities themselves, rather than hoping that a group of users will do it on their own. While this can be a risky proposition — garnering an active community of users successfully is still more art than science at the moment — the rewards are increasingly clear for those that are successful.

Numerous studies over the years have underscored the benefits of customer communities, ranging from the 2001 McKinsey-Jupiter Media Metrix showing that “customers of web community features generate two-thirds of sales despite accounting for only one-third of a site’s visitors” to the brand new Deloitte study recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal that showed that over a quarter of community initiatives increased sales even while most business-sponsored customer communities struggled to achieve critical mass in terms of users.

Some Common Types of Online Community

Despite the growing body of research and studies, exact numbers for customer communities are still pretty hard to come by yet it’s clear from a number of sources that business are beginning to get community religion en masse. A couple of recent examples that demonstrate the kind of customer community initiatives that are emerging include Hyatt’s new Yatt’it community for frequent travelers and the decidedly back-from-near-death Member’s Project by American Express. Both are highly produced and attractive-looking communities, especially compared with the three successful grassroots communities I listed at the beginning of this post, but are struggling for customer engagement and participation nonetheless.

Deloitte’s Tribalization of Business customer community study is getting a lot of attention. View a Slideshare summary of the findings.

What then is the secret formula for building successful communities for your customers? Certainly there are well known success stories to examine for clues. One good example is Dell’s online community which it famously used for a corporate image turnaround last year and remains one of the most highly regarded and highly trafficked customer community properties. Another is SAP’s various customer communities, with over a million registered business and technical users and a high degree of participation.

What can we learn from these success stories and a rapidly emerging set of business practices? Quite a bit as it turns out. I’ve taken as as many lessons learned as possible from the available outcomes of customer community efforts, as well as my hands-on experiences, and the synthesis forms the list that you see below. Please note that like any of my lists, it’s not exhaustive, and you are welcome to add your own in Talkback below.
Best Practices for Online Customer Communities

1. Put the needs of the community first. Communities exist to serve the needs of their members, and in customer communities businesses can elect to become close-knit participants in good standing or keep the community at arm’s length. The most vibrant communities such as Dell’s or XMFan have a good relationship with at least a few key leaders in the sponsoring organization. But making sure the community has truly free rein to serve itself — even if it ends up recommending competitor’s products in some cases or becoming a venting zone for customer’s complaints — is essential for the community to thrive through open conversation, honesty, trust, and candor. This back-seat position can be a very difficult thing for some organizations to accept, much less encourage but the best organizations manage to do this with humility and a sense of mutual respect.

2. Community is mostly not a technology problem. There are literally dozens of capable community platforms in existence today. Almost all of them can be used to create a compelling community with the features that users will need to discuss, share ideas, brainstorm, complain, support, and moderate each other. I’ll do a round-up of these in an upcoming post, but whether you use Drupal, Joomla, or DotNetNuke (to name just three leading example), it’s safe to say that the biggest challenges you will have will be around the business challenges and social architecture of your customer community and not the technology, with the possible exception of emerging community architecture standards such as OpenSocial and DataPortability.org.

3. Active community management is essential. When Josh Catone recently analyzed some of the findings of the new Deloitte community study, he noted that one of the big takeaways was that most customer communities lack proper management. Communities are indeed self-organizing, but like community of any kind they require active administration, management, and moderation or the community will devolve into a least common denominator environment where abuse, spam, neglect, inactivity, and poor behavior of a few go unaddressed and drive away productive participants.

The most successful community management also is very proactive and goes out the way to draw in the best new participants and contributions to ensure the community has a substantial foundation that will hold on to members long enough for it to form a cohesive identity and a strong network of relationships amongst its members. This is one of the most consistent observations in the online community world: well-resourced community management is apparent in every one of the successful online communities I’ve come across.

4. Measuring success with community requires new yardsticks. Unique visitors is one often cited community metric that I’ve come across numerous times. Experience share is another, probably more relevant measurement that cited more often these days. But communities offer much better benefits far beyond the sheer visitor count or community size. Often the most influential members of an organization’s customer base will be active in online communities, both forming a draw for other members but also shaping community and public opinion in a forum that is mutually vouched for by the community and its sponsoring organization.

Beyond just behind home for influencers, communities form a qualitatively new type of relationship with a customer base and it’s interesting to note that while Dell does cite page views as part of its community success, it also cites the large number of new ideas that customers have submitted, the value which can’t possibly be measured in terms of traditional Web analytics. While many customer community budgets will continue to be approved on the basis of very Web 1.0 metrics, pushing hard for new ways of measure value will be essential, particularly has communities will interface with organizations across just about every major business function sooner or later, and not just marketing and PR, even though that’s where many sponsored customer communities start life.

5. Consumer social networks, grassroots customer communities, and business-initiated customer communities are closely related yet very different creatures. A quick glance at a few of the customer communities listed above as well as some of the larger, more active customer groups in Facebook, shows how different they can be. Primark (a U.K. retailer) probably has the largest existing commercial Facebook group, with over 94,000 members and a level of participation that would make it the envy of most customer community efforts. The unforced and natural user experience of grassroots communities such as XMFan and HDTalking is also probably not coincidental in their success, most likely making it seem a less-corporate and more relaxed setting for participation. The lesson here is that customer communities come in many forms and understanding the motivations, expectations, participation styles, conversational modes, and desired user experience will be required learning as we undestand what our customers are really seeking from online communities based on interest in products and services.

6. Customer communities do work as a marketing channel, just not in the traditional way. It’s probably safe to say that customer communities are a solid marketing channel for an organization. The recent Deloitte study mengtioned above confirmed that fact consistently in a number of ways. But the benefits often come in unexpected ways include the community becoming a place where the latest “unofficial” news is exchanged or leaked, where visitors can expect to have non-hierarchical contact with an organization’s employee, with the attendant increased flow of oft-unapproved information, and other communication is conducted, both subversive and otherwise. Customer communities tend to project customer influence and demands deeper into an organization and create more sustained contact. And the reverse is also true, with the result being outcomes which don’t appear so much as marketing but as cooperation, mutual brainstorming, and co-development of ideas and outcomes.

7. The more the business is integrated, the better the community will work. One of my favorite stories was of a community manager informing the organization that on day one, the community will be “90% us and 10% them. Give me your involvement, and a year from now it’ll be 90% them and 10% us” and this result was borne out. Customer communities in reality are joint communities of the business and the customer both. Deep involvement by both as early as possible and from many parts of the organization will create the early critical mass that can avoid the low-levels of participation seen in many organization-initiated customer communities.

8. Growth will come, but not until a community finds its identity. To expect something based on social dynamics as much as community is to be predictable and grow linearly just doesn’t reflect reality. Many communities struggle for a while until they catch their stride when they reach the right participants, or offer the right means of engagement such as using a different model such as a social network instead of discussion forums (or vice versa.) While pilots can help find some good models early on, only sustained contact with customers will find out what they really need in a community. The first community may be the on that provides the necessary input to create the “real” community. Such organic growth models can be hard to embrace from a process and expectations standpoint, but are more likely to return meaningful results in the medium to long term.

9. Mutual ownership and control of communities enables trust and involvement. Like so many things in the Web 2.0 era, giving up some control of the community to the community itself is the surest way to get buy-in and to make sure that the participants in the community can make it into what they want it to be. As with Enterprise 2.0, communities are excellent change catalysts, as long as you allow them to be.

10. Most communities are highly social entities, and the rules of social engagement apply. Certain general rules seem to apply to communities, such as allowing like-minded individuals to self-organize into sub-groups, protecting conversations from scale, rewarding members that do good works, and so on. Imposing artificial rules that are counter to natural social inclinations are likely to invoke dissonance and prevent natural communities from forming as they should. The basic rules of social media apply here.

11. Going to the community, instead of making it come to you, is a risky but increasingly viable strategy. I’ve heard and been involved in a lot of discussion about social networking and community fatigue and how users are more likely to be comfortable using their existing social sites for customer interaction. The jury is still out on this despite the fact that initaitives like OpenSocial are indeed likely to make it cost effective to go to the customer across hundreds of open social networks in a single act. However despite the risk, the relative ease of doing so makes the risk and investment likely worth it in many cases. That doesn’t mean such community channels don’t bring with them major restrictions in control, governance, and data ownership. Use with care, but at the very least such “go to the user” strategy can be an important plank in driving membership and participation.

12. Connect the community with the other CRM-related aspects of the organization. Customer communities have been used successfully for customer service, the generation of innovation, trend spotting, marketing, lead generation and many other activities. In the future, it’s likely that many customer communities will blur extensively with the organizations they are associated with and become more and more closely involved with their customers in a wide variety of activities. Those organizations that can do this successfully will likely reap rewards of efficiency, innovation, producticity increases and others, while assuming some of the risks involved in any sort of crowdsourcing activity.

Recently, I’ve been seeing tremendous interest in community aspects to almost all customer-facing online activities. And by the very nature of community, this will have varying levels of success based on whether the community is already thriving to how well its integrated into the activity and if it provides sufficient motivation from the customer. I made point #1 the first because of the most common attitudes is an overriding “What’s in in for us” view towards investing in community efforts. While this is clearly tied up in entirely valid ROI discussions, the bottom line is that if customers needs are put first, the value will quickly emerge. Just ask those with successful communities whether it was worth the investment. The answer I’ve always received has been enthusiastically in the affirmative.

web 2.0, 在件體使用者的角度

http://wakoopa.com/
http://playpcesor.blogspot.com/2008/09/wakoopa.html

Wakoopa基本上很容易理解，總之你就是在網站上註冊一個帳號，然後下載安裝它的「Wakoopa Tracker」軟體（有Windows和Mac OS X版本），這個小工具會常駐在你的電腦中，閒置時大約佔用2mb左右的記憶體，我在最低單核心1.8GHz CPU，和1GB記憶體的XP長期使用的經驗是：對電腦效能並不會有讓你感覺到的影響。然後這個小工具會記錄、追蹤你用了哪些軟體，然後把軟體名稱、使用時間等資料上傳到Wakoopa你的專屬頁面中，一方面你可以作為自己的電腦使用分析，另一方面你也可以參觀其他Wakoopa用戶的軟體應用方式。

Wakoopa的首頁就揭示了這個網站的四大目標：追蹤你的軟體使用、發現新的軟體、分享你的應用方式、得知朋友或工作夥伴用了什麼軟體。在首頁的中央點選﹝Sigh up﹞註冊，依序輸入你的帳號名稱、密碼和電子郵件信箱即可。

Open social

Offical site
http://code.google.com/intl/zh-TW/apis/opensocial/container.html

Apache base, Open social container impl. ref.
http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/
- which is a reference impl for Open social, and with a out of the box example.

Microsoft new search engine

bing.com