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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Drupal vs WPMU + BuddyPress + bbpress

2 great projects underway at my web design and social network company West London Web. One is for a client to build a social network site using Drupal, which as it’s under NDA is all I can say at the moment. The 2nd is more a personal project to get WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) with BuddyPress and bbpress installed. I have an aim in mind for this but that too is a little under wraps at present, though those that know me might guess what it is 😉

What I’m interested in doing is really comparing the 2 platforms/apps. Drupal is to my mind the more industrial of the two and certainly the only one that offers the sort of robust customisation we need for Project One. WordPress is the one I’m most familiar with though and the one I’m most fond of.

Getting all the integration with WPMU is proving a headache. I can get WPMU working with BuddyPress, but getting the forum powered by bbpress working is a ‘mare. Diligently following the instructions at bbpress forums and it all goes well until the last synch up with the WPMU bbpress plug-in. I add the code and all the accounts get mangled. Time for install number 391 to see if I can get over that final hurdle…

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Featured Articles General

Ubik

Interesting to compare images of the cover for Philip K Dick’s novel Ubik:

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Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles Intranet

Islands of Enterprise Social Media

Last night I dreamed I went to Megacorp again, and as dreams are, this one combined such experiences with work I’ve been doing of late on open source wares and of being in a J G Ballard novel (my nearish neighbour sadly having passing away last week).

The dream was of a company as so. Imagine if you will a global panoply of very well-known brands of FMCG, forming a multi-billion dollar business with healthy profits; a sophisticated distribution network to consumers and wholesalers and other purveyors of the products; multiple business units producing their own independent goods and branding and the whole matrix working together to bring joy to households across the globe; but ultimately disunited by an intranet that beggars belief.

Some more details are as follows. The employees (and especially the Exec Admins of the more senior peeps) spend an inordinate amount of time ringing ‘offworld’ to get basic connectivity back, IT having out-sourced this aspect some years back. The employees do however have Smartphones, either Blackberries or such and these they like. Some use of social media by marketing but little or none inside the firewall.

How on earth might one introduce such an entity to the benefits of enterprise social media?

My thoughts are on something ad hoc. Pulling up the intranet and starting again, whilst a nice thing to do would be out of scope, remit and even possibility.

So an ad hoc enterprise social network (ESN) of nodal social media would have to be the only route. Dropping boxes into the network, no matter how robust or sophisticated wouldn’t work as the network would let them down. They would have to connect into an ESN  in the cloud of disaggregated social functionalities. Tagging and such meta data would pull them together.

Which software might do it? A series of Nings, but how to connect? Has to be mobile friendly, very mobile friendly. One of the social vendors doing a SAAS maybe, but would that apply a false unity on their flattened and distributed matrices? Perhaps nodes of open source social media would be fun. One here one there. Islands of socially mediated brands connecting via their own media.

Time to sketch how this might all fit together…any suggestions / ideas /inputs most welcome!

[n.b. I awoke early after 2 days of feeling very unwell and more sleep than is healthy, to the welcome of a bright London morning and drinking freshly ground Blue Mountain coffee as supplied by the most excellent Has Bean coffee co. – brilliant start to the day! Promo over – just a happy punter btw]

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Case Study Enterprise 2.0

Of Church & Flu – 2 new social media case studies

Social Media Case Study Hot List New Additions

New social media case studies

Flu Shirts – great guerilla case study on SEO and undergoundblackhat tactics: Forums, Twitter and Forbes

My Church – what a good Christian can do with an annual budget of $225 and help in High places:

Website 17,539 unique visitors; 31,529 visitors, 107,726 pageviews YouTube 17,540 views since March 25, 2008 Blip.tv 19,288 views Vimeo 3357 views Flickr 71,264 views since November 2007

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Case Study Enterprise 2.0 Featured Articles

Social Media Case Study 4 + 2 Tools

Added to the Social Media Case Study ‘The Hot List’ – 4 new Social Media Case Studies and 2 new tool/app case studies that I found interesting

Bacardi – using Facebook to reach Irish punters and get them drinking Bacardi via a compo. n.b, integration with Facebook API re tagging & photos.

National Express & Silverpop – e-mail marketing in conjunction with social networks – National Express cited (but what about the major TV ad campaign?)

Embarq – conservative telecoms company overcomes the hurdles and battles with negative customer feedback via social media – esp videos (links don’t work – I think the slideshare is to this Slideshare).

Radvision & PixelPoint Press – Corporate blogs, Communities and Twitter (Slideshare)

Publius Project is an effort of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society – uses Drupal for new portal, replacing WordPress.

Corvu “Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage”. Differentiating between public, team and enterprise Wikis, looks and governance and use of Wiki as KM.