I’m currently attending the Gilbane Conference in Boston where I’m speaking on a panel about Social Media. I caught the red eye from San Diego and arrived at 6AM. Needless to say I’m a little groggy and thought it would behoove me to collect my thoughts on the topic I’m tasked with discussing publicly prior to going on stage. Fortunately for me, I have some “trigger questions” to prep me for the panel.

What is social media? How do I define it? What are some key capabilities customers should be looking for.

Social media are technologies that are globally persistent and collaborative or participatory in nature. I say globally persistent because for obvious reasons I want to exclude messaging technologies like email and instant messaging from the list. This includes: blogging, forums, social networking, wikis, video sharing and collaboration sites, etc….

Because the kind of social media technology that is deployed depends on the circumstances and needs to be assessed on a case by case basis I will focus on generalities. Customers should approach their assessment of social media with a critical eye to the following key factors. First, does the product or platform create lock-in? Does it adhere to open standards and can you take your data elsewhere should you later decide to? Can you extend the product easily as your needs evolve and can you do so in a manner that doesn’t “fork” the product forcing you to be the sole maintainer? Will the product scale? And last, but not least, is the user experience sufficiently polished for your audience?

Often when assessing social media it is only the last capability: user experience and the overall feature list that is evaluated. This is a mistake. One must also consider the former equally important capabilities as well: Standards compliancy, Extensibility, Scalability. Too often social media and enterprise 2.0 technologies are hack jobs tossed together hastily with inferior engineering and no attention to scale or extensibility. If you do not assess these three critically important capabilities I assure you will be cursing your decision a year or two later and likely calling on MindTouch for a migration.

In general, I find it more intelligent to deploy a platform that delivers value out of the box and that can also easily be massaged to suit your needs as they evolve, rather than deploying a “cute” point application that can not be extended or adapted easily. Also, I’m a big fan of end user mashup capabilities. This allows users to create their own metaphors for consuming information and allows them to provide new functionality by combining multiple services, applications and data sources.

What’s it going to take for social media to tip and become as ubiquitous as email for business communications? As ubiquitous as Web publishing for electronic information exchange?

Great question. When these tools facilitate real productivity and operational efficiency gains it will tip in the enterprise. I’m talking about business automation and we’re beginning to see this now with mashups of enterprise systems, web-services, legacy systems, databases, and consumer Web 2.0 applications. The vendors who focus solely on “webifying” old metaphors (operating system and applications) and/or delivering Facebook for the enterprise will be left in the wake of products/vendors that allow users to connect and “upgrade” their existing systems and easily create their own dynamically updated metaphors for consuming and sharing information. When users are enabled in this manner they dramatically improve how people access data, compile it into actionable information and share/collaborate; thereby improving business productivity.

Is social media going to help us keep up with the speed of business? What needs to happen?

Absolutely yes. Crowd sourcing incrementally improves the speed with which intelligence surfaces in organizations. But more importantly, enabling users to create their own metaphors for consuming and sharing information by enabling automation through mashups is, today, delivering huge productivity gains in business. There is a wealth of third party research that validates both these claims and MindTouch customers back up analyst reports as well:

• Bill Me Later (now owned by eBay) saw a 1,000 to 1 return on investment in the first 6 months of using MindTouch
• Red Mountain Retail Group saw a 25% increase in productivity across all departments in the first year of using MindTouch
• Fairway Technologies halved their time to market by developing on the MindTouch Deki platform

From my own perspectives, are particular verticals ahead in their use of social media? Which ones have the most potential?

MindTouch is seeing government trailblazing these technologies. Also, we see media companies and technology companies taking a lead.  Ultimately, I expect these kinds of technologies to permeate every business, small and large.

“And that’s all I have to say about that”.

I want to plug the Gilbane Group briefly. In general, I’ve found their analysis and research to be insightful, informative and more than other analysts this group has consistently foretold the future. Don’t let the gray hairs delude you, Gilbane is hip and up to date. The gray hair provides a refreshing conservatism and lack of sensationalism.