Social Customer

Taming the Social Web

Integrated Services for Social Media Management, Monitoring, and Moderation 

By Matthew Lees

We all — both as individuals and as organizations — are still figuring out how to deal with social media…how to use it effectively both personally and professionally (without letting it become too much of a time sink), how to make it work hand-in-hand with the other things we do, how to know when there's something we should know about going on, how to know when just to listen and when (and how) to jump in, and how understand and (ideally) measure its effects.

To help with all this, a cottage industry has sprung up around social media management, monitoring, and moderation. It's part content management, part market research, and part CRM, but it's all about (1) helping organizations get a handle on what's happening throughout the social Web and (2) make it easier for them to deal with it.

The Social Web = social sites and networks throughout the Internet where your customers, prospective customers, users, subscribers, and others are = blogs + Twitter + Facebook + YouTube + MySpace + Technorati + Delicious + LinkedIn + …

Managing Communities and Social Content - Ingeniux Introduces Cartella

Seattle-based Ingeniux is new to our watch list, but not to software development. Founded in 1999, Ingeniux has been in business longer than almost all of the other companies we cover. For most of its 10 years, it has been squarely in the content management space. (Its Ingeniux CMS application has around 700 implementations.) The launch of its Cartella social content platform, released in May 2009, marked its entry into the world of social media and online communities.

Based on Ingeniux’s history and core competency, it’s no surprise that content management -- what Ingeniux is calling Social Content Management -- is Cartella’s key differentiator. Few of its community platform competitors have integrated content management capabilities into their platforms, at least not to such a substantial degree. Ingeniux recognizes that, in today’s wired and digital world, every company is in the publishing business and that forward-thinking organizations are enabling their employees, customers, and business partners to share their voices, too. So the company is looking to capitalize on this by providing a unified platform for managing all these forms of content.

Another advantage of 10 years of business experience is that Ingeniux knows how to develop and manage business partnerships. Its strategy of extending its reach by partnering with agencies and technical integrators isn’t a new one, but we like the way it is targeting mid-market .NET integrators, for example. This approach suggests a strong understanding of its product, its market (and, perhaps more importantly, what isn’t its market), as well as an understanding of how to connect the two.