Top 10 Social Media Enterprise Companies
Cosmin Ghiurau
Social Media Today
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Social Media Today
Social Media for enterprise is a facet of business that is on a continuous evolution to discover best practices and strategies. Social Media has grown due to consumer use and will be refined by enterprise use. Being involved with social media for a few years now and following certain companies and discovering other ones I have consolidated a list of my top 10 current companies that offer social media platforms and solutions for enterprise.

If you are a company looking to get the most out of your Social Media strategy, take a look at these companies below:

Mzinga

Mzinga is another company that has emerged on the scene the past few months. I met Jim Storer (Sr. Director Social Media Strategy) at OMMA New York and was thoroughly impressed by their companies current busines model and strategy to social media for enterprise. This was a company which first impressed me on the fact that from the very beginning impression on visiting their company website the seemed to "practice what they preached" when it came to leveraging their own website as a social media tool.

They also were the authors of a first of its kind book called "We are Smarter the Me". A "crowdsourcing" book that was done pre-company launch. A very smart idea in my opinion. Thank you Jim for handing me a copy.

Company overview from website:

Our company philosophy is built around the idea of pervasive community. Quite simply, we believe that by using social media and Web 2.0 technologies to enable a dialogue with your employees, your customers, your partners, or your enthusiastsâ€"in other words, by threading community throughout the enterpriseâ€"you can achieve tangible business results.

Through our combination of highly scalable, enterprise technology, rich domain expertise, and skilled moderation services, we help businesses achieve higher revenues, lower costs, and greater workplace and customer satisfaction.

Jive Software

Jive software has been a mover and shaker within the social media enterprise now for some time as well. I consistency see senior executives of this application development company among various social media webinars and meetups. I am impressed at their founders persistency in developing this enterprise level social media solution.

I am thoroughly impressed by the company culture as a whole based on their gorgeously designed website and user interface.

Company overview from website:

Jive Software makes enterprise social software that reunites employees with each other and connects them with their customers and partners. Our leading products, Clearspace & Clearspace Community, use a people-centric approach to facilitate conversation and solves the problems associated with legacy systems. Jive Software is the market leader in social productivity and community software with more than 2,000 customers and over 15% of the Fortune 500. Jive was founded in 2001 and is located in downtown Portland, Oregon.

Powered

I have followed Powered for a few months now and spoked to some of people who have been associated with this company in one way or another. I have heard positive feedback and in my opinion are one of the leaders in this space.

Company Overview from website:

Powered was founded in 1999 with the goal of using social interaction and consumer education as a new strategy for online marketing. Today's consumers are increasingly wary of intrusive forms of marketing and sales messages. With the recent explosion of social networks, consumers now have more ways to engage with each other, to share their views, and learn from each other â€" from entertainment to products to brands. Powered provides a way for consumers to engage with brands on their terms â€" and in a way that the consumer values, not avoids. Every year, brands using Powered's social commerce programs reach tens of millions of potential new buyers and convert a significant percentage of them into hundreds of millions of dollars in product sales.

KickApps

KickApps is the top white label solution where a typical user/company can create a social network application with zero knowledge of programming. Their user interface gives anyone the ability to setup a social application.

I personally was part of their Beta testers prior to public beta and began kicking the tires almost immediately. They have a great business model in being able to use their service for Free along with a Premium version.

Company overview from website:

The KickApps hosted, white-label platform puts social media and online video functionality directly into the hands of every web publisher who aspires to be a media mogul and turns every web designer and developer into a social media rockstar! With KickApps, it's now easier than ever for web publishers to leverage the power of social and rich media experiences on their websites to drive audience growth and engagement.

Community Server

The product by telligent is another social media application product. One that is compliant with Microsoft ASP .Net. Their showcase is quite impressive with such clients as Microsoft Surface, Betty Crocker, Intel, CorelDraw, and more.

I have not heard to much about this company within my socialsphere but that is not to say they are not strong in the social media enterprise space. If there is someone who has worked with this company on some level it would be great to hear from you.

Company overview from website:

Managing knowledge within an organization is a constant challenge. Community Server can help facilitate knowledge retention through its Integrated Mail Server, which enables the forums application to be used like an email discussion list. (The Integrated Mail Server can also be easily integrated with existing email distribution lists, such as those found in Microsoft Exchange Server). Once these email streams are in Community Server, they are immediately available for search, ratings and, RSS subscriptions. Most importantly, they ensure that the data continues to be available long after the email discussion is over.

HiveLive

HiveLive is another type of white-label social networking platform for enterprise. I haven't ran across anyone from this company to get a more personal look into their product, but HiveLive has been mentioned within my socialsphere for social media enterprise solutions. I wish they had some type of demo on their website.

Company overview from website:

HiveLive's on-demand software enables companies to rapidly deploy custom-fit enterprise communities built around people, their relationships, and their shared knowledge. The foundation of our patent pending technology is a new Web 2.0 building block (called a Hive) that can be easily configured to function as a wide range of community applications (blogs, wikis, forums, FAQs, and more). With our platform, companies can connect to three community solutions:

Lithium

Lithium was a spin-off of Gamers.com in which they had deployed their first 'enterprise forum' for Dell.com. Currently their community/forum clients have expanded to over 50 market leaders such as Cingular, Comcast, Sprint,Nintendo, and more.

What I like is how they tease with the pricing of their product with general information on how things will be priced. A great model to spur interest and lead to that client call.

They have an extensive list of client website examples which as a great added feature to their website and quite frankly is really impressive.

Company overview from website:

The technology and social software principles we use date way back to product development started in 1997. At Gamers.com, our founders developed custom message boards for the very active participants in the online gaming industry. Online gamers demand novel personalization features and innovation, they probe for security vulnerabilities, and they use vast amounts of bandwidth. Imagine that. So, developing a platform to address this criteria warranted a fast, scalable, reliable, secure, and easily customizable solution. All the required elements for success in other enterprise communities as well, we thought. And this foundation became the perfect springboard for businesses that wanted to let their customers communicate in their own online forums.

Corespeed

The last entry in the social media enterprise offering before we dive into the last 3 which are open source is Corespeed. This company though their own website is less than appealing seems to focus more on an application that is your traditional social networking/portal solution.

Their own community utilized their main product which is always a great way to demo your product and take it for a test run. They package some products as "hubs" around Expert, Community, Customer, and Team hubs.

Company overview from website:

CoreSpeed provides a suite of products that enterprises leverage to create and enhance business systems with rich user interfaces, flexible content management, and an extensible service-oriented component architecture to facilitate better business interactions.

CoreSpeed's primary product platform, CoreInteractive, is used by organizations, non-profit and for-profit, that recognize the need to expose and leverage communities that already exist off-line as online solutions as well as to execute innovative business models built around community and social networks/media.

Open Source Products

Of the above seven options I would like to highlight the last three social media solutions which can be used for enterprise. Of course with any open source solution the key is the amount of support a company is willing to invest and or customizations they wish to include which will add costs on to the initial potentially zero investment.

BoonEx

BoonEx has a suite of open source products that are solid. Their social networking platform called Dolphin is quite frankly the most robust open source solution in this space that I have seen with features that rival the most robust paid enterprise solutions.

I have installed Dolphin numerous times and the install is quick and easy and the included features and modules are amazing.

Design and templates are few and far between. The better looking templates are of course premium which still is at a fairly low cost compared to most paid solutions. A highly recommended open source solution.

Company overview from website:

BoonEx has a unique approach to running business - we treat every employee as a community member and all our internal operations are based on community moderation principles. All BoonEx-ers are equal decision-makers motivated to reach a common goal - to build a reputation as the leading community software provider.

BoonEx brings people and computer technologies closer together. One of the primary ways we accomplish this is by conducting superior web software development to create premium community applications that are then tested live on our own sites/projects.

PHPizabi

This PHP solution is another vetern in the open source solution for social networks. The support community is an active self supporting group. I have had an opportunity to install this solution as well and it was fairly straight forward with a nice front end and flexible admin area to customize the user experience.

At times I wish there were more developed custom modules that can be added along with a larger selection and community developing custom themes to select from.

In either case a solid foundation for a company to utilize to test the waters of a social media campaign. Though I wouldn't use it for a long term campaign. If anyone differs please comment why.

Company overview from website:

PHPizabi is one of the most powerful social networking platforms on the planet. With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi including everything from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there. Easy to install, use, and raising the bar on what it is to provide a reliable, fast, social networking package to raise your business to the next level.

elgg

The last entry for this post if a company that has a product named elgg. I did not place this one last because in some shape or form it was less inferior to other solutions, I placed it last to hopefully be seen as a solution to watch.

elgg is newcomer at this stage within the open source enterprise space. I recently installed it on one of my servers and tested its features. I must admit the user interface is by far the best among even the top enterprise solutions mentioned here.

I currently showcase this solution as the "skinny Facebook". This is probably how Facebook would look if started today and they had a designer as one of the co-founders. Currently the biggest lacking feature is no Photo or Video option. For social media "media" per se is a key ingredient to a successfull community.

I am going to continue to watch and monitor elgg. If the developers and community continue to grow this product it will make a huge impact.

Company overview from website:

Elgg is an open, flexible social networking engine, designed to run at the heart of any socially-aware application. Building on Elgg is easy, and because the engine handles common web application and social functionality for you, you can concentrate on developing your idea.