Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter

October 29th, 2007 What software do we need and how much is this going to cost?

Welcome to Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter.

When looking at the implementation of social media, two of the biggest questions among business communicators are, “Where do I find all the software?” and, “How much is it going to cost?”

Inevitably, cost is variable depending on what your needs are. But let’s not forget, a key aspect of social media is that it’s not expensive to get involved. You can be up using RSS, wikis and blogs very quickly and cheaply.

Let’s look at blogs, for example.

Roll out your blogging program
Apache Roller is a free, open source, scaleable blogging platform. It’s the one used and championed by the oft-quoted Sun Microsystems.

Roller also underpins IBM’s Domino blogging platform, which plugs into the IBM Websphere platform. If you run IBM applications, as they do at the Attorney General’s Department in News South Wales, Australia, then here’s your logical blogging platform upgrade.

Wordpress is another free, open source blogging platform used by thousands of individuals and businesses. It’s currently undergoing implementation at a major, global organization based in the UK and forms part of a social media toolkit there that includes employee blogs and a company-wide wiki.

Consistent software updates and endless options to customize mean there’s every chance you too can consider Wordpress in your organization. Did I mention that it was free?

Wikis in the workplace
I mentioned wikis, so how much can they cost to implement?

Well, the software that runs the “supreme fountain of knowledge” that is Wikipedia is called “Media Wiki” and, you guessed it, it’s completely free and available for download. But Media Wiki uses a formatting system (a syntax) called “Wiki mark-up”, which can be quite complicated.

A great, easy-to-use, commercial alternative is Confluence– an enterprise-standard wiki platform that’s rapidly becoming the wiki software of choice with large organizations. Some users of note include BT and the BBC.

Confluence has a What-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing and formatting system that will be familiar to anyone using a word processor or e-mail application. So, adding hyperlinks, images, and formatting the fonts is very straightforward.

Although Conflunce is a commercial program, it’s still not going to break the bank, starting at just US$1,200 for a small team licence, US$4,000 for a 500-user licence and US$8,000 for an unlimited user, enterprise-wide licence.

Furthermore, Microsoft recently announced a partnership with the Confluence developers, Atlassian, that will see the program connect with the 2007 versions of Microsoft office applications including Sharepoint and Outlook.

Alternatively, if you’re not ready for a big, corporate-wide wiki installation and simply want to see what all the fuss is about with this tool, you can set up a free, web-based wiki and a range of other social tools over at Zoho.com.

What about RSS?
And, last but not least for this issue, RSS. As a simple text XML file an RSS feed can take mere minutes to create and place on your intranet, quickly helping to cut down the information overload and giving employees the option to subscribe to news and announcements that they want to hear about.

To get started and learn more about RSS you can set up a free Google account enabled with Google Reader (one of the world’s most popular RSS applications and, hopefully, still accessible from your work computer).

Head to your local Google site (Google.com, co.uk etc.) and in the top right hand corner you’ll see a link to “iGoogle” where you can set up your own, RSS-filled homepage “within 30 seconds”. Of course, there are plenty more RSS feed readers to choose from, just search on the web for “RSS reader” and you’ll get over 300,000 returned results.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 also features a built-in RSS reader (as does Apple Mail 3 for all you Mac aficionados). With e-mail applications like this you don’t even need to worry about installing any other applications.

Give it a go
So many options, so little cost but, quite likely, not much time to try it.

However, take a few minutes one morning or lunchtime and try some of the above links. Chances are high that there’s an opportunity just waiting to be uncovered.

Best regards,

Alex Manchester
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com

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