Order out of chaos - it's not just LinkedIn
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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All eyes in business may be on LinkedIn’s monster share offering at the moment – but this gargantuan social network for suits is merely the most high profile exemplar of business’s comprehensive embrace of social and collaborative media. Parallel but less spectacular developments in companies like Salesforce, Northern Light and newcomer Avos are no less worthy of attention.

Salesforce.com has now completed its acquisition of social media monitoring platform Radian6 (recently reviewed by VIP’s Scott Brown). Used by more than half the Fortune 500 companies, Radian6 trawls zillions of conversations every day on Facebook, Twitter et al, delivering marketing intelligence to its clients – for a price.

Meanwhile Salesforce has also announced JigSaw2, its updated version of the crowd-sourced contact data product that it originally purchased around a year ago (see LiveWire comment from Nancy Davis Kho). A classic social networking application for business in the first place, Jigsaw 2 includes strong social applications that allow customers to collaborate on business contact information, using “real-time clean data” – again for a price.

Next there’s market and competitive intelligence specialist Northern Light’s new capabilities for co-ordinating content between its own SinglePoint enterprise strategic research portals and Microsoft SharePoint sites on a company’s intranet. Because anyone can throw up a rudimentary “portal” using SharePoint, many companies have seen a proliferation of intranet sites resulting in document storage shambles, Northern Light suggests – whereas allowing it to index an organisation’s own content within its SinglePoint portal makes all the internal stuff findable at the same time as the licensed external market research.

And that’s the thing about social and collaborative tools in business isn’t it? Anyone can have a go so, without some firm content management capabilities of the kind that players like Salesforce or Northern Light can offer, the risk of chaos is ever present – and order out of chaos is what such services thrive on.

Which is why the activities of Avos, the new internet company run by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, may well be worth keeping an eye on. As LiveWire’s Penny Crossland reported, Avos recently acquired the social bookmarking service Delicious from Yahoo! although its talented new owners’ ambitions remain enigmatic at this stage.

But now Avos has also acquired the real-time business intelligence platform Tap11. Unlike “listening only tools” (Avos claims), Tap11 integrates social publishing and analytics into a single dashboard, allowing marketers to monitor, engage and measure the impact of their campaigns – the claimed result being faster, more relevant data to maximise return on investment in social marketing.

So – LinkedIn may grab the headlines, but perhaps the work with greater potential for immediate application in business is being done by somewhat smaller but more outcomes-focused specialist players.

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