Why Content Management is Not Social Business

The differences run deep — so deep that current attempts to repurpose CMS systems as social platforms are likely to be futile.

CMS is built for command and control.
Social Business platforms are built for collaboration and sharing.

CMS is designed to manage content.
Social Business fosters conversations.

CMS reinforces organizational boundaries and hierarchies. Users are siloed in separate sites and document spaces.
Social Business promotes openness and connectedness. Users are part of a unified community.

CMS tracks activity without providing context or meaning.
Social Business platforms are all about context and meaning. They apply adaptive intelligence and social connections to bring information to the right people at the right time.

… CMS systems don’t typically provide sentiment analysis, tools for innovation and ideation, support for mobile devices, activity filters and more.

… CMS has its roots in transactional, database-driven systems. There are no provisions for essential social constructs such as activity streams, user profiles, social feedback and reputation mechanisms, a centralized view of community activity and collaborative messaging. These capabilities come from a bottom-up design, not just slotting in some new modules or slapping a new UI on top of an existing CMS foundation. Actually, adding social features after the fact can make matters worse, creating more walled-off information that is hard to manage and search.

 

Very interesting article on Content Management and the differences to Social Software. In particular I do like the comments on Sharepoint following in the posting: A tool developed for file and document management is not social – by nature, whatever the vendor claims it to be. You need to put real social software on top of it to be successful. The decisions e.g. Bayer and Continental in Germany made, confirm this judgement.

It will be an interesting discussion at the XING Content Management Lounge on October 13 in Cologne, where we are going to discuss „ECM and Social Software, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.“ Play it again, Uli K. and Uli L.!