Strategies for implementing social media tools depend on audience

Kathleen Reidy from the 451 Group gave a presentation at AIIM this week called The Next Wave of WCM: Social Web Content Management where she discussed the various options companies have when trying to implement social media tools inside an organization.

She broke down the issues a couple of different ways. First of all, she said you have to differentiate between internal and external social networks. Sometimes you may want tools to collaborate internally and this is a natural extension, she pointed out, from the collaboration tools web content management vendors have been creating for some time. In that sense, this is more evolutionary than revolutionary (but it still represents a very different way of sharing and collaborating than previous generations' tools).

When choosing a vendor to help you work externally with customers, partners and suppliers--perhaps building a community--it gets trickier, Reidy says. This is because you have two-way publishing. You can publish internally to the web, but your audience is also publishing content from outside the firewall onto your website.

She said that raises the question of who is best equipped to deal with these issues and there are no simple answers. You have web content management vendors of course, who may just be beginning to produce social media tools, but offer a fully integrated solution that enables you to manage the content easily, and you have the stand-alone social media tool vendors, who might not be very mature businesses (venture capital backed, shaky in the current economy and so forth) and who might have to build connectors to get the information from their tools into the CMS, but social media tools is all they do.

You have to think about these issues as you look to integrate social media tools into your organization and decide which approach is best for you and your requirements.

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