Trend 3 - Five Trends that indicate Social Media and ECM are Converging

Trend 3
People Helping People – Build your Community Wisely
More Details From the Article: The Convergence of Social Media and ECM

Trend 3
People Helping People – Build your Community Wisely

Social Media encourages and supports people to help others. People that are not part of the formal organization will spend inordinate amounts of time to help others. While this may be a good thing a key factor to consider is that the people responding may NOT have access to the content a corporation maintains. Enlightened companies will open up their content repositories. One of their challenges will be to insure privacy.
IDEA – This is an opportunity for vendors to provide tools and solutions to drive the convergence of Social Media and Enterprise Content Management.

Additional Details about Trend 3

Community –

• If you build it, they MAY come
• The Key to Communities is Commitment. A commitment to show up, to organize, and to be a part of the community. This point is directed at corporations.
• For individuals – They will ONLY continue to show up and commit their most precious resource – their time – towards something where they feel like they get something in return.
• Cynical comment --- Nothing is Free!
• Just building a community site is not enough.

A Community Effort in Action:

A good example of a community site that is focused on the Business Process Management (BPM) space is the K2 Underground. This site is built on Telligent’s Community Server and was developed by Chris Geier. Chris just passed 5000 members on the site. How? By being present and active in the community. If you want to know how he did it ask him - contact Chris directly via e-mail or Twitter.

Communities are only successful if people participate actively. Social Media technologies allow people to actively engage and ECM technologies allows for active management of the content. The convergence of the people and the content will create vibrant and dynamic communities.

Thinking Points:
Are communities really part of a Social Media experience? Can Social Media really impact the way a community develops and grows? Will companies make the investment to build their own communities? Will they encourage sub-communities to form outside their purview?

Your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated. Please feel free to comment on this blog, tweet about it, Retweet it and if you are so inclined send me e-mail directly. You can also find me on Facebook and LinkedIn too.

About The Author:
I have spent the better part of the last 16 years working in various aspects of the ECM space. I spent time at Kofax, Microsoft, FileNet, K2, and most recently Captaris (which was acquired by Open Text in Nov 2008). Prior to that I was a Unix VAR running my own company.