Telligent Blog

Sports Marketing 2.0

Adonis — Tue, 20 May 2008 12:34:00 GMT

Telligent and Community Server were sponsors of the Sports Marketing 2.0 VIP Summit in San Francisco this last week. 100 attendees engaged in conversation through four panels hosted by a number of industry experts from Telligent, Microsoft, Intel, General Motors, IBM, Omniture, the NFL, the NBA and others.

There were some great topics. We spent time talking about measuring the impact of social marketing. We discussed that, often, social marketing is "top of funnel" marketing that can't be measured simply by counting click-throughs. So, how do you justify investment in social computing? Harvest can help! We talked about engagement and keeping members active and drawn into sites. When talking about killer apps, a lot of time was spent discussing open framewo.rks and utilizing sites like Twitter and MySpace and Facebook. Finally, in my panel about Social Networks, we talked quite a bit about how teams, fans and sponsors can build successful communities. Dan Harbison from the Portland Trailblazers talked about how he used his network to encourage fans in the lean years giving them a place to interact with still-rabid fans even though the team was struggling. We talked about the ability for a regional site to build off-line community in addition to the on-line presence and the ability for teams to build direct channels to their fans for commerce and PR. In the past, teams communicated to fans through media outlets. Today, those walls can be broken down and teams and players can communicate directly to fans and vice versa.

Personally, I had a great time. I got to share how Telligent has provided solutions with Community Server for Electronic Arts and Gridiron Greats. We talked about how Mike Ditka, Eric Dickerson and Steve Young used the site during the week leading up to the SuperBowl to bring attention to a very worthy cause. The location was awesome; AT&T Park is gorgeous. We had cocktails and a nice meal in the visitors locker room and I got to meet with various partners and companies I'd like to see us partner with.

If you're involved in Sports Marketing, you should seriously consider attending the next event in Chicago on June 12. I can't give you details yet, but Telligent is planning a special treat for attendees. Brenda - can we talk about this yet? No? Ok - well, let me know you're coming and we'll bring you a Mike Ditka "Bad Ass" cigar and try to find a place to kick back and enjoy the city.

Community Server 2008 Now Available!

rhoward — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:22:02 GMT

Early this morning (at about 3:45 AM Central Time) we launched the new communityserver.com web site along with officially releasing Community Server 2008!

The Community Server 2008 release includes:

Enterprise reporting and analytics to help dissect, analyze, and trend user and community behavior.
Deep integration with Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
For developers, Community Server 2008 includes a complete Web Services (REST) API for easily integrating and extending the platform.
Social streams enable people to quickly see what friends or others in the community are actively contributing to.
Robust media gallery for sharing content published in the community or from external sources such as YouTube, Flickr, and more.
Enterprise file storage enabling both local storage as well as integration with services such as Amazon S3.
Widgets for easily sharing data between applications. Included widget support for Google, and more.
On demand groups / social circles make it simple for intranets and even large-scale public communities to quickly form small micro-communities.
Community Server 2008 is one of the first software platforms to include built-in support for OpenID.
Community Server 2008 includes many improvements to existing features such as multi-user blogging tools, robust message boards, and person-to-person messaging.

You can read more about the new version of Community Server at communityserver.com.

Community Server 2008 Launch WebCast

rhoward — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:46:36 GMT

Join me for a 60 minute web cast on Tuesday April 15th from 11-12 CDT as we launch Community Server 2008.

Gartner says Enterprise Social Networking...

rhoward — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:48:48 GMT

Is the #3 on their list of the top 10 most disruptive technologies in 2008.

Chaotic coproduction rules the roost in social software. Users post content to a tag cloud or a wiki to share with others. This data may be altered several times, creating an emergent structure. But beyond the traditional blog or wiki are rich personal profiles that provide an expertise network for enterprises. Don't know who in human resources to go to for 401K data? An enterprise social network could help find that information.

We expect 2008 to be a very strong year for Telligent and our products as well as the industry as a whole.

Graffiti CMS Blog Extensions now in Google Code

rhoward — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:41:43 GMT

Earlier this week we published the Graffiti CMS Blogging Extensions. Graffiti is a publishing platform that makes it really easy to create great looking, interactive web sites. Graffiti can also be used as a blogging platform, as Jeff (of Channel9 fame) and other's have done.

We heard from some bloggers using Graffiti that they wanted more blog-specific functionality. The new Graffiti CMS Blog Extensions is just that - it adds additional blog specific features into Graffiti!

For more specifics, Jeff Kazimer wrote up a great post detailing what all is included.

We also thought it would be great to publish the code for this Graffiti plug-in/add-on so others could see how it's done. We also heard that people wanted to help contribute... so we published the code on Google Code:

http://code.google.com/p/graffitiblogext/

OpenID 2.0 for .NET now available

rhoward — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:40:59 GMT

The OpenID open source project for ASP.NET (DotNetOpenID) now supports the OpenID 2.0 specification and is available for download on Google Code:

http://dotnetopenid.googlecode.com/

For businesses or developers that use the library it would be great if you could donate to this Open Source Project. Telligent is contributing to this project both financially and with our developers and we'd love to see more people support it! We've added OpenID support to Community Server 2008 (natively).

You can contribute via PayPal

You can also help spread the news:

Digg | Kick it | Stumble It! | Save to del.icio.us

Some notes from Andrew who is the primary developer:

This release adds full support for OpenID 2.0 while preserving full backward compatibility for OpenID 1.x. It is a mature library with lots of help for diagnostics and debugging, and a balance between simplicity and extensibility. For a complete list of enhancements from the last release, check out the Version Changes page.

Here are the highlights of this library and particularly this release:

Support for OpenID 2.0 Relying Parties and Providers, including but not limited to these features:

Xri and i-name support
Directed identity support
More secure hashing algorithms (SHA-256)
Interop with Yahoo and other OpenID 2.0-only providers
Better security against replay attacks.
Send unsolicited positive assertions from providers to automatically log your users in to relying party web sites.
Much more comprehensive testing of common scenarios and possible security exploits.
More comprehensive HTML-based identity discovery.
Completely stateless mode support for Relying Parties (not even HttpApplication state).
New OpenIdMobileTextBox ASP.NET control.
All relying party ASP.NET controls now support immediate mode.
Improved support for custom stores that have to serialize associations (for databases, etc.)
Debugger attributes to make stepping through the code easier.

Community Server and SharePoint Integration

rhoward — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:51:01 GMT

We just officially announced that Community Server 2008 will also have an awesome integration story for Microsoft SharePoint. You can read more details in the post, but we're obviously very excited to announce this -- it's been in the works for quite a few months now and we'll have a beta ready a few days after we launch Community Server 2008.

Community Server 2008, Beta 2 now available!

rhoward — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:21:35 GMT

Community Server 2008, beta 2 is now available!

Let us know what you think - share your feedback.

Some highlights for this beta 2 release:

The beta includes the new Community Server 2008 theme "Hawaii" which introduces and showcases many of the great new Community Server 2008 capabilities including the new user home page that provides a summary of what is happening in the community. Now when you are signed in to Community Server your start page has a summary of what's happening and what your friends are doing:

We've also re-worked much of how the forums work. Conversations are bubbled to the top and a directory style display is used for browsing discussions. This makes browsing and following a variety of conversations a lot easier:

The media gallery includes built-in players and viewers for content. For example, Flash video files published into the media gallery can easily be played inline with no additional configuration. We've also built-in support for popular media sites such as YouTube, making it super-simple to embed content hosted on YouTube directly into the media gallery:

Widget support is fully integrated with the Hawaii theme allowing you to fully customize what is shown in the side-bars of your site as well as the order in which they are shown. Additionally support for Google Gadgets, SpringWidgets, and WidgetBox widgets. For example, you can add the Super Mario widget to your blog!

You'll also find some new additions to the user profile page, including an activity list, an announcements 'blog', and a wall feature where people can post notes to you:

All-in-all there are a lot of exciting new things in this beta of Community Server! We look forward to hearing your feedback!

Introducing Hawaii

rhoward — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:00:23 GMT

Hawaii is the new theme that we created for Community Server 2008. Hawaii is a very social-centric theme that brings together many of the new features of CS 2008, such as groups, social streams, and more!

Below is a screen shot of Community Server running the Hawaii theme:

While the work isn't 100% complete yet, we wanted to give people a preview of what is coming.

First off you may notice is that the "Home" tab is selected and the page that is shown is a user-centric dashboard. A big goal for us in Community Server 2008 was to make the user more central to the entire experience of Community Server. The "Home" tab now shows information that has recently been created, content that has been contributed to, messages from friends, friend activity, as well as groups.

The feature previously known as "Private Messaging" has been completely re-written for 2008. The feature was previously couple to the forums functionality and only allowed messages between 2 individuals. The new message functionality allows for multiple participants in a "Private Conversation". While an individual message can be started with anyone multiple participants from your friend list can be added. We've added some really nice auto-complete functionality so that your friend list can be browsed as you type:

Friend Activity (Social Stream) is another capability introduced in 2008. With your friend activity list you can more quickly follow what your friends are doing within the community. The friend activity list is extensible so you can plug in custom data/information into the list as well:

The next beta of Community Server 2008 will include the new Hawaii theme -- we're looking forward to your feedback!

Last day for deal on Harvest!

rhoward — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:39:29 GMT

Today is the last day for our introductory pricing of Harvest 1.0 at $999. After today Harvest will be $5,000/server.

Note, Harvest is included as part of the Enterprise Edition of Community Server 2008.

Of Social Streams and Circles

rhoward — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:24:32 GMT

Yesterday the Community Server development team provided me with a review of the current state of Community Server 2008 beta 2, due out soon.

While there a number of exciting new additions in our 2008 release I'm particularly enamored with several specific capabilities. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to write about some of these new features and thought I'd start with social streams and social circles.

Social Stream

If you've used Facebook you've experienced Social Streams first hand. On Facebook it's called a News Feed:

In Community Server 2008 we call this a Social Stream. A social stream is a chronological list of updates and other information about what your friends are doing and it's front-and-center on the new custom landing page for users [1]. Community Server 2008 places a lot of emphasis on people and this is one of the new ways you can track what your friends are doing, what they've written, etc.

There are about 15-20 events that Community Server has built-in. For example: posts on your profile page, new friends, updates by friends, posts by friends, etc. But in addition to the included events you can also add in your own events. One of the samples that we'll hopefully have available is integrating Twitter as an event feed.

Social Circles

Groups or Social Circles are micro-communities within a Community and are designed to allow users with common interests to have their own "area". These groups can be public or private and support invitations - this means you can start a group and invite just your friends to join.

Within a group there are discussions for the group, blogs, and the ability to share files. You can even personalize the look-and-feel of the group much like you would personalize a blog by editing a theme. It even support Widgets that you can add into the sidebar:

You'll see these features and more show up in Community Server 2008, beta 2!

[1] We'll post some screen shots of the new Community Server UI in the coming weeks. The new home page for users is a new addition we're excited to show off!

Telligent voted amongst best places to work in Dallas Ft. Worth

rhoward — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:02:00 GMT

Telligent was voted one of the best places to work in Dallas Ft. Worth - we're still hiring too!

New Community Server logo

rhoward — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 16:50:56 GMT

Today we're unveiling the new Community Server logo that we'll use in Community Server 2008. The new logo matches the new brand work we've introduced for both Harvest and Graffiti:

Let us know what you think!

It's all about being Open

rhoward — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 19:50:10 GMT

We're happy to report that our work to support OpenID for Community Server 2008 is done and we can now officially state that Community Server 2008 will support OpenID for authentication!

Jason Alexander, our CTO, started the dotnetopenid project as an open source implementation for Microsoft's .NET platform. The team working on the .NET OpenID implementation has grown along the way and while we've (Telligent) continued to remain active the other members of the open source have also helped us get OpenID working with Community Server.

Community Server has always had support for Single Sign-on. We've found this to be a critical feature for all of our customers since many people have different authentication systems they wish to use or pre-existing systems populated with users. Adding OpenID for Community Server provides yet another way customers can authenticate into Community Server.

What is next for social software

rhoward — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:01:00 GMT

I expect to see a change in the market for social software this year. Less so from all the new competitors that seem to enter daily, but more so from the typical challenges that face business everyday: explaining the value of the investments they make.

When it comes to social software solutions the past 2 years have been quite fun. Most companies have viewed software, such as ours, a checkbox requirement on the 'to-do' list from the CEO or CMO. This will continue through 2008, but organizations are also making the shift towards looking for the Return on Investment too. We're eager to make that shift with them.

While I don’t think many of our customers yet realize just how valuable ‘communities’ are, I happen to be of the opinion that social networks/communities happen to be a gold mine of customer data. Typically marketers will pay astronomical amounts of money to market research firms for demographic information on their customers. Whereas in a community these individuals self-profile and provide all manner of data (gender, age, location) in addition to product feedback. There are obviously some early adopter companies that get this[1], but they are few and far between right now.

This data mining/analysis/customer behavior is something that Telligent is focusing on and investing in this year – because frankly it seems no one else has realized how valuable all this data really is. Our first set of investments will be in Community Server 2008, our Enterprise Social Networking platform, as well as our new Harvest product.

I'm personally excited to watch this transformation take place. At Telligent we've always had a strong focus on providing and helping our customers prove real business value for the solutions we deliver. I'm eager to see the rest of the market catch up while our customers benefit.

[1] Wall Street Journal Article, The New Focus Group: Online Communities