The much anticipated Forrester Wave Report was released today. Jeremiah Owyang has invested much time in gathering, evaluating & reporting on companies that offer community platforms.
I appreciate that the focus was on more than just technology. Building a community requires a strategy combined with an integration of resources (including people!).
… 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.
Nine companies were chosen for the Wave Report. They are Jive Software, Telligent Systems, KickApps, Pluck, Awareness, Lithium Technologies, Mzinga, LiveWorld & Leverage Software.
Over the past year I’ve gotten to know people from these companies. How? Many of them are providing great resources.
Lithium has some great whitepapers. And Scott Dodds commented on my blog enough times so that I sought him out in person at Defrag & we had a great chat!
Awareness offers great webinars & whitepapers! Check out their archive of webinars . Dave Carter, CTO has been a great friend & mentor. He gave me insight into the vendor’s side of this process. Robin Hopper is another great resource there.
I met Mzinga folks at the Social Media Strategies & DeFrag conferences. I have their book here. And I met Mike Walsh from Leverage at Social Media Strategies conference too. Lawrence Liu of Telligent & I had a great chat at DeFrag! (His intensity reminded me of Jeremiah’s!). And George Dearing, also from Telligent & I have crossed paths online.
And last but certainly not least, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know Bryan Person, Community Evangelist, for Live World. In my opinion every community platform company should have one – so take note guys! Bryan is doing a great job of defining that role.
Tom Humbarger had asked if these companies are – Walking the “Social Media Walk”.? I spent time outlining all of the ways that these companies are contributing to establishing community best practices. I’m a huge proponent of education & many of these companies are contributing to the conversations in addition to participating on social networking sites.
Thanks to these companies for setting the bar for community building & I look forward to your contributions in 2009!
(I’ll let each company link to their resources in the comments & I’ll put them in the post. Thanks!)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=71045fd9-85f6-47a5-a786-d0ffcd3aa0df)
Connie:
It’s been a pleasure talking about community best practices and getting to know you, too, these last several months.
I think Tom issues a really good challenge for the vendors, wanting to see us be visible leaders and to use social media ourselves as a way of demonstrating its viability. That’s certainly what I’m trying to do at LiveWorld!
Bryan Person
Live World social media evangelist
[…] Connie Benson: Wave report showcases community platforms […]
Thanks Connie! Yours is such a great voice in social media industry, it’s been wonderful to speak with you both here on your blog and in person. Your kind mention means a lot.
Though I noticed a bit of a pile-on effect going on over on Tom Humbarger’s blog as we vendors all tried to show how active we all are. I’ll have to be sure to do my bit over there as well – I guess we’ve all learned the first lesson is listening. ;)
That said, I hope we aren’t substituting quantity for quality judgments – there are some really great voices that for one reason or another aren’t everywhere doing everything all at once:
Chris Allen’s Life with Alacrity (http://www.lifewithalacrity.com) is seldom updated in favor of higher signal to noise, but I could re-read his posts again and again and get new insights and useful data each time.
Sean O’Driscoll (www.communitygrouptherapy.com) is one of the celebrated heros of the fledgling industry from his time at the head of the Microsoft MVP program. His blog posts are averaging every two weeks or so, but is he less visionary because of that?
And then there’s uber social celebrity Seth Godin, who went so far as to turn off comments on his blog (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/why_i_dont_have.html) – hardly social, but I can’t fault his reasoning.
Granted, these folks have social pedigrees longer than your arm, but I suppose that’s my point. Leading is about action, not words. I think Tom is fully justified in asking us to walk the talk. We’re proud at Lithium to be recognized as a leading company in this space and think that inclusion in the Wave is a great indication of our momentum and thought leadership. But this was just the first Wave, a milestone but certainly not the finish line. It doesn’t take vision to see that this tough economic year is going to be a greater test of each of us and of the promise of social media than any we’ve yet faced. Welcome to the Social Media Marathon!