• by dave.b , Max Kalehoff , January 16, 2009

Social-media technologies are subordinate (by a long shot) to business relationship goals, alluded my friend Peter Kim, who's building a consultancy focused on "enterprise social computing." And he's right

However, if you're building an online community, technology is inevitable. That's why it was reaffirming that Forrester Research's new evaluation of online community technology platforms rated Telligent Systems among the top two. Last year, with far less third-party market intelligence available, my team at Clickable adopted Telligent's Community Server to power our customer community and team blog.

Provided the explosion of interest in online community building, I'd like to reflect on some of Forrester's findings and share insights from our own technology platform evaluation. I underscore that business strategy and customer relationship goals come first and should comprise 90% of your plan. You must make sound technology decisions, but, ideally, the technology platform should fall into the background and boost your core relationship strategy with the greatest simplicity. Most important, we're all new at this. So I hope you'll share your insights as well.

Community Platform Conundrum: Agency Versus Pure Product

Jeremiah Owyang, prolific blogger and lead analyst on Forrester's community platform evaluation, commented on the vendor landscape: "Despite the immaturity, we evaluated nine and were impressed with Jive Software and Telligent Systems who lead the pack because of their strong administrative and platform features and solution offerings....we applied over 60% of our weighted criteria based on what our clients tell us they want, a solutions partner that delivers strategy, education, services, community management, analytics and support."

From my perspective, the customer "wants" of strategy, education and services make sense, but it's important to unpack them.  Here's why: strategy, education and services typically are agency or professional-services attributes. Most successful entrepreneurs and senior managers across technology, product and professional-services industries will confirm one thing: it is extremely difficult for a company to be both a product-technology and professional-services company. You have to be primarily one or the other because there's a conflict of agenda. And trust me: there are a lot of conflicts going on right now in this early stage of the game!

The agency mindset is to deliver highly customized solutions for individual customers. But too often long-term product innovations and investments suffer because the model is biased to reward customized services versus a better, scalable product. There are some hybrids, but they are rare. Many of the most successful technology companies are, in fact, agencies -- once you look under the hood or into the books.

Platforms Should Be 'Products'

At my company, we selected Telligent precisely because it was a proven, robust workhorse, powering many of the highest trafficked communities. We also chose Telligent because it was a product company -- NOT an agency with proprietary technologies that form the root of a consulting shop. We wanted a technology platform that seemed most likely to work out of the box, scale, iterate and improve according to customer feedback, and stay in business. (Please rest assured I have no special relationship with Telligent; my company pays Telligent's standard software license fee).

Looming Consolidation

I underscore "stay in business" because we're likely to see most of the community platforms go defunct and retreat into a pool of consolidating agencies; there are just too many of them with little differentiation. The differentiation most often comes down to flavor of strategy consulting, and that's a fundamentally separate offering -- important, but not core to the notion of platform.

In fact, consolidation was foreshadowed in Owyang's report: "Many an entrepreneur has realized this community opportunity. When I started to cover this market there were 8 vendors on my list, today the space now boasts 100 vendors and it continues to grow."

Future Of Community Platform Technologies

A more mature community-vendor landscape will probably include a handful of strong platform product plays. They'll exist symbiotically with a diverse and growing base of agencies and consultants who build their businesses on top of those pure platforms. Some marketers will benefit from agencies, while others won't. The most important thing is to separate all these vendor propositions to their essence and then make best-of-breed decisions. Best technology, best agency management, best education, best integration, best analytics, etc.

As we're witnessing with the exploding WordPress blog platform, open standards can become a huge platform advantage because they rally stakeholders, especially passionate developers, to iterate and innovate at a rapid clip. I hope and anticipate the same will happen in the community platform space.

Free Forrester Report

Now that I've shared my personal evaluation experience, you can download Forrester's community platform evaluation for free, courtesy of Telligent.

So what's your experience and framework for building community into your business?

How are you approaching technology and platform investments? Let us know what you think!