From Jive World: Social Business Strategy, Metrics, Marketplace #jive

By Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) Sep 20, 2010

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I had the opportunity to attend my first Jive World conference this year and while I did not get a chance to stay as long as I wanted I did learn a few valuable things about both Jive (news, site) and the current customers.

This year Jive held its annual conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco (rumor is that next year it’s going to be in Vegas!). For those of you not familiar with Jive they are a social business software solution which allows companies to deploy and integrate both internal and external communities. Jive has received numerous accolades and has recently been positioned in the “leader” section of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report on Social CRM, externally facing social software and social software in the workplace.

First, a brief overview of the conference with one caveat which is that I did not attend all days of the conference. After my little mishap (in which there was no record of my registering or signing up) I was finally able to enjoy myself.

This year the conference boasted over 600 attendees (from what I am told) which is around double what the conference saw last year — a testament to both Jive’s success and to the social business industry growth as a whole. There was a lot of information to take in and I found myself running around from session to session getting bits and pieces of information from all the great speakers. The food was fantastic and there were plenty of interesting conversations in the lobby of the hotel. Jive also provided attendees with both a morning runners club and yoga club option to help attendees start their days.

Talking about Community Strategy

I must confess that I always thought Jive was overpriced and even a few speakers during the event joked around on stage saying things such as, “…because we all know Jive is such a bargain.” Yet these large enterprises continue to shell out the cash for this premium software solution. I got the sense that many of these organizations are not looking at community strategy as a long term goal.

I asked several folks at the conference where they see their communities and social initiatives in the next 3 years and when I didn’t get shoulder shrugs or blank stares I received candid “we’re not sure” responses. This is one of the reasons why I believe that most of an organizations budget for these type of initiatives needs to go towards strategy and not towards tools.

Talking About Integration

Another common discussion that I was involved in was with large enterprises that are currently seeking a way to integrate all of their existing portals into one solution and how they can make that happen. Definitely not an easy question to answer.

Talking About Metrics

While Jive World was rich with customer success stories and experiences I got the feeling that actual metrics were still an issue and being able to tie those community metrics to a specific business outcome or objective.