I’ve been talking to a couple of software vendors about “socializing” their applications. As part of those conversations I started clarifying the difference between the vendors like IBM and Microsoft that have collaboration platforms (Lotus, SharePoint) and the vendors that are offering unique “suites” (Jive, Awareness, and others). This month there is a great article in KMWorld Magazine by Tony Byrne, “Enterprise social Software technology” that does a fair amount of the work for me. I agree with Tony that the market is still very fragmented as indicated by the categories:

• Platform vendors
• Social software suites
• Wiki software
• White-label community services (e.g. Ning, Lithium)
• Public networks (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook)

He also describes eleven scenarios for the use of social software, seven of which pertain to internal organizational use and four of which are external scenarios.

The framework is a good starting point, and I’m interested in delving more deeply with my clients on expanding and detailing the scenarios, and also understanding the implications of platform or suite use outside of enterprises.  In my previous post, I described how the use of wikis supports emergent communities. These communities can quickly cobble together  “home grown” solutions that use free (or almost-free) tools. For example Ning does provide white-label community services, but it also has a free version that is showing great traction in the nonprofit community.  Note that in addition to the Wiki I referenced in the Gustav post, the hurricane community also used Ning to create its Hurricane Information Center, which is of course expanding to look at Hanna, Ike, and perhaps grow into a permanent community. Actually, for a pretty impressive list of all the vehicles set up for Gustav, see Nancy White’s Tracking Hurrican Gustav on Social Media blog post.

The challenge for enterprise social media is to learn from these naturally occuring networks  what is needed with respect to integration. It is also a challenge for the players in the social software marketplace to understand how to work with niche software application vendors to learn how to bring them into the internal social network.