Community and Social Network Vendor Blogs

I find it interesting that some of the smaller vendors playing in the community and social networking market are missing public-facing blogs. I was updating my feed subscriptions this and remain surprised that certain vendors still don’t seem to have implemented what I consider a basic stake in the game. If any of these vendors has a blog that I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll correct my list below.

Otherwise, my advice is “ante up”…

Vendors Missing A Public Blog

• Communispace
• iCohere
• Ramius (Note: there is a blog for Sixent which is in beta)
• SelectMinds
• Sparta Social Networks
• Tomoye

Vendors That Have Public Blog(s):

• Awareness
• HiveLive
• Jive Software
• Leverage Software
• Lithium
• Mzinga
• Ringside Networks
• Small World Labs
• Telligent

One request to those vendors that do have blogs: please use full items in your feeds. Summaries that force readers back to the destination site are not a best practice (in general) in my book.

Comments

[lance.simon]

One of the most robust community & social networking vendors is iCohere. Blogs are being added by the end of 2008 and they will be "private" or "public". Thanks!

[ei-lun tsai]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your post - you can find a direct link to Lithium's public blog here:

http://talk.lithium.com

Best,
Ei-Lun

[John Kembel]

Hi Mike -- completely agree that a blog is entry stakes for this market. Launched ours this week (it's part of our larger HiveLive customer community):

http://community.hivelive.com/blogs/social-by-design

I appreciated your advice on the blog at Enterprise 2.0... looking forward to any follow up comments or thoughts you may have.

How many folks are using a community to engage and connect with customers?

[Melany Gallant]

You're absolutely right about the need to "ante up" with a corporate blog. Our Sixent blog is targeted to a consumer audience at Sixent.com. We of course of have plans to integrate it into the ramius.net website.

[Peter Woodford]

Hi Mike, i wonder if there a debatable point about having a presence on many blogs rather that a single corporate blog. With the brandstation platform (mostly implemented closed corp networks) we tried to get away from the typical 'CEO blog' and provide blogs focused around team based engagement. Also file, events, activity and info sharing between teams. So on any brandstation social network there could be hundreds of blogs. As a company we do blog on our platform but point taken that we'd do better not to ask for registration to get to it. There's a live demo of the brandstation front-end on: http://www.brandstation.tv
We're kind of excited about our new management features... that have been developed in partnership with community moderation companies if you'd like a live demo of the admin tools please let me know! Peter Woodford, CTO, brandstation, powered by viewmy.tv

[Gian]

Hello Mike! That's a good point you make about blogs. Sparta Social Networks actually does have a blog roll which is part of their own social networking website, Sparta Live (http://www.spartalivenow.com). The website is updating every day and is open for everyone to join.

[Social Networking Software]

I'm forwarding this link to our team of web programmers. Yeah it really is shocking so many vendors are missing this.

Thanks take care.
Jon ta Social Networking Software Developer