Choosing the Right Social Technology Vendors

By Michael Brito (@britopian) Jul 6, 2011

Finding the right technology partner is not easy. While the good news is that there are dozens of vendors offering “white label” social business solutions, the bad news is that it makes the process for choosing one that much more difficult. Additionally, many technology companies today are making acquisitions, so in the near future, the number of vendors may dramatically decrease. That being said, there are several considerations that technology decision makers must think about before deploying a social application, like first understanding the company culture and leadership, the technology feature requirements, vendor support models, training and maintenance.

Understand the Organization, Culture and Leadership

Choosing a technology vendor has to be a strategic decision. Organizations need to first understand what it is they are trying to achieve before thinking about which technology application to deploy behind the firewall. Are they trying to streamline communication between business units or geographies? Are they looking to roll out a collaboration application that will eventually replace their intranet? Or, are they planning to use Social CRM and weave it into their sales and marketing initiatives? Whatever the case, it’s important to understand the culture of the organization and its leadership.

Social business transformation requires a change in behavior. It requires organizational leadership to embrace the social customer, tear down organizational silos, empower the organization to share knowledge across job functions and geographies, and invest in technology that will help facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing. It’s more than lip service, too. These change management initiatives have to be driven by organizational leadership and practiced at every level in the organization from senior leadership all the way down to a customer support agent. Otherwise, change will not occur. This means that executives must not only talk about changing the organization but exemplify the behaviors that really do facilitate and practice change.

Technology will not change an organization’s culture. That has to be a decision from company leadership and then supported by employees at all levels. What technology will do is help facilitate collaboration and communication across job functions and geographies.

Application Feature Sets

Companies need to choose technology vendors that do more than just provide the features and functionality needed for today’s dynamic business environment. They must also choose the vendors with features that may be needed in the future. For community related software, some important features to consider include the following:

Support for internal groups, forums, profile creation
Support for topical sub groups (private or open)
Multi-language support for global companies
Support for micro-blogging, general blogging, group messaging, wikis and chat
Email support and integration
Single sign-on (SSO) capabilities that integrate the platform with other internal registration databases as well as external profiles like Facebook and Twitter

Feature sets for collaboration applications may include:

Document sharing and control
Task management, shared calendar
Workflow and roles-based management
Reporting analytics
Self-service features that enable dragging and dropping of various widgets to allow for customization of each user’s interface
Full set of APIs for integration with other internal and external applications

Several technology vendors offer both community and collaboration feature sets. Many of them are also starting to build in Social CRM functionality into their platforms and already have open APIs that integrate with traditional CRM applications. The benefit of this is that companies can use one vendor for everything, which is cost effective and easier to scale.