Input Requested!

 

All of you out there who have great ideas and have no one to share them with.. well.. here is the place to do it! Have you ever wished our product had a cool feature or integrated somehow with something else? Put your thinking caps on.. the striped ones with the little yarn balls on the end... and submit the next great idea! (You can remove the cap after the idea is submitted.)

Good concept here, however many people don't know what they don't know. How about we ask for what they are currently using (CRM, ERP, Email, IntraNets, etc) and where they spend the most money, time in interacting. Then let's do the work and suggest some helpful solutions for them.

Clearly it is important to put the narrative into everything that we do. Video and other forms of content, without narrative, will not tell a story. Stories are what create social interest and social attention. Is it more valuable for instance to see a quantitative measurement of a recommendation - a ranking, or is it more important to listen to the story of how someone used a product or service, and why they rank it the way that they do? Two different things. So all product and solution development in social media needs to recognize that. Important.

My post may not seem like a good segue based on the other responses. But, the purpose of this group is to obtain ideas to improve our solutions. This is more of a challenge than one may first realize. Inventions are nothing but someone's great idea that has not yet been verbalized or that someone had not realized was lacking before. Think about the sticky notes that we take for granted now. It was an accidental invention! The challenge seems to be, how can we provide something that someone doesn't know is lacking? Not just follow the crowd... but come up with a unique way of looking at a problem, perhaps not yet realized or verbalized, that will enrich the social networking space(s). That being said, what I often wonder is, with yammer, twitter, myspace, facebook, and the other social networking opportunities and websites that people have the ability to connect with today, is there a way to integrate these different modes or methods into something meaningful and time-saving for everyone? How can one sift through the many ways of connecting without being overwhelmed with connections? How can we add something onto our offerings that will aid them in being both socially networked *AND* organized ... and instead of adding to the chaos, our solution allows them to organize their selections of social networking tools better and in a more manageable way?

Here is a post about salesforce.com integrating twitter in its application. This is the kind of thing that will enable people to continue using their current methods of doing business, but with the added benefit of social networking. The opportunities here are endless, if we can only imagine the next level!
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/161746/salesforce_integrates_service_cloud_with_twitter.html




This post edited by HeidiAraya on 03-24-2009, 11:24 AM EST

Coming from a newspaper background, I think NA can help newspapers become more local, relevant and generate new revenues by creating special interest online communities (boaters, individual neighborhoods or housing developments within cities, high school sports teams, etc...).

To expose the best opportunities newspapers can use your "Reveal" product to solicit from their customers the most needed/desired online communities. NA staff can help crystallize the strongest ideas thus generating prof services revenue. NA's "Converge" and "Capture" solutions bring the communities to life. The last piece of this equation is to reverse publish member contributed content back to the newspaper for inclusion into their existing print products. This also creates an opportunity to start new and highly targeted print products (supporting the online community) and generate new local advertising revenue -- a source newspapers are missing out on right now.

I would love to be part of this on an ongoing basis.

Wow.. what a great idea! I will pass along your suggestion to the appropriate people and maybe we can keep a dialogue going here.

Heidi, Please take a look at the Forum post I just posted about adding Private Groups (Converge) and Private Campaigns (Reveal).

Nice post Rick. I didn't see that before, I posted a simalar idea in another thread. That is the key. There is currently a wall still between social networking portions of a site, be it media, or government targeted, and the main operations of that site. Far too many are using the concepts of Social Networking as more of an extension of advertising/campaigning on the topics that the company or government orginization currently finds important.

They usually do this by posting an article, or link with the moderator or company's thoughts, then allow the public to comment or rate content. The current method of doing this is a step in the right direction, however leaves much to be desired.

Social Networking features on a site are not simply for the public, and clients to easily share information with others, and discuss it amongst themselves. A move towards having true transparent role of public members is the next step. As users find that what they do and say actually has a large impact on the actions and content of the media, or government orginization or official of whom's site they are using, they will feel more inclined to be involved.

As things currently stand, to be noticed on such sites requires a large amount of time and energy. The average user does not have that availble, and thusly can tend to see the effort not worth the time.

The issues come in on how to go about architecting such a solution, that is flexible enough to be cusomized for targeted deployment and customized to fit the client's needs, yet still be timely and solid structurly in both performance, usablity, and overall customization(branding etc) and deployment time.

The other issues include how to weed out potential accounts that are being used soley for hijacking a free advertising medium for another company, and/or fradulent boosting were the method of choosing which user created content were to be choosen to be featured over others be an organic decision method. However, there is a fine line where too much control can cause the system to shy away from the intended purpose, and users are likely to be discouraged by this as well.These are some of the issues that come into play when content is not chosen by a moderator, but rather by non-employee users for public facing sites. Legal issues can also become a factor.


This post edited by wseward25 on 02-18-2010, 1:40 PM EST