Connecting Social Networking and Social Bookmarking

According to many surveys, including the Forrester report I recently commented on, social networking is on the rise within the enterprise. I will continue to discuss our new directions on this blog, as well as general thoughts on our industry, but before going on, I want to share our fundamental belief about how to make social networking effective within the enterprise. It has to be built around business information access and discovery. This is why we integrated social networking and social bookmarking within Connectbeam from the start. As we mention on our web site, our goal is to connect people with ideas. We do this through four interrelated approaches: social bookmarking and tagging that leads to information discovery: social networking that leads to people discovery: expertise location that leads to communities of interest; and collective intelligence that provides the most relevant search results and their social context. We see these connections helping people within our clients to solve their business problems. We have found that Connectbeam spreads virally across an enterprise as people see the results of connecting the information and social sides of search. It makes enterprise 2.0 concrete without referring to the term or needing to propose the concept in the abstract.

We work in a standalone mode or integrated with other enterprise applications such as Portals like Sharepoint, Enterprise Search sytems like Google Search Appliance, FAST, and more, to add social context to search and allow for more social networking around search for information. I have covered the Sharepoint integration elsewhere. We also connect with Google Search Appliance, and FAST to provide additional ranking based on number of times tagged. This Enterprise Search Integration also offers related tags, related users, and related communities right within these enterprise search application front-ends. You are able to see who else did the same search, what they found, what they thought about it, and are provided with the ability to contact this person with a similar interest. Just as with our Sharepoint integration, our Google and FAST integration takes the Google Search Appliance and FAST even deeper into enterprise 2.0.This Enterprise Search connection not only integrates social bookmarking with social networking, but it also integrates social networking with search. These are just two examples of how we integrate with existing IT applications. I will cover the full spectrum of our integration with spans beyond portals and enterprise search into additional enterprise IT applications in subsequent posts.

We also wanted to take a novel approach to implementation to be more competitive with the large players entering this space. With a rapidly changing technology, we did not want clients to have to deal with implementation and deployment (getting the application up and running) concerns and face any issues with upgrades. This is why we created a hardware and software solution combined, packaged and delivered as a turn key Appliance that allows for a real plug and play solution to get things not only inside the firewall but also inside the box. It also enables one click back up and restores, one click upgrades, and automatic authentication to your enterprise directory services. We have been pleased that a number of the very large enterprises have adopted Connectbeam. Given their respective markets, these clients have appreciated the security, control, and flexibility around deep IT integration that the box offers, as well as our basic social software functionality.

Comments

[Inbound Call Centers]

This post was well worth the read. Indeed it is rather interesting for me to read this article. Thank you for it! Social networking and bookmarking are the best ways to get your site or product noticed by people and search engines. This is a phenomenon that is defined by linking people to each other in some way. If you think about it, there are thousands, if not millions of different topics or niches on the Internet. It can be virtually impossible for people to find what they want and connect with like-minded people. Social networking makes this possible. There is a growing network of Internet users who all share common interests. -Charles

[KPO]

I couldn't agree more! Users can share their own personal Web bookmarks, but they also have the quite wonderful option of discovering other people’s bookmarks and adding them to their own collection. More sites can be discovered, more treasures unearthed, if you work together as a whole instead of by yourself; it’s truly amazing what people are able to turn up together on the Web. Social networking is related to social bookmarking: you can make as many bookmarks on the Web as you can possibly stand to do, but once you start sharing these bookmarks with other people, interacting with them, starting conversations through a variety of methodologies, you are networking. You are part of the social networking community.

[more]

be virtually impossible for people to find what they want and connect