In response to: Part 1 | Part 2
I agree Geoff. Thanks for your thoughts. For the sake of conversation, consider the layman perspective… A contextual social collaboration platform and an xRM Platform both provide history and relevance. The difference is perception on the basis of how intuitive it is to identify relevant information once it has been made available. In both cases, the playing field is neutral because the behavior is expected to be “most recent first”. Social platforms are just recently introducing “most relevant first” – and I’m intentionally excluding that from this discussion as I haven’t seen anything indicative of success. In addition, the paradigm on both platforms for identifying situational relevance is to conduct a search. The social collaboration platform will be perceived as the more intuitive approach – and frankly I agree with this. Which leads me to my point…
What’s lacking in these tools is a real model to define contextually relevant information and an intuitive mechanism to retrieve it. The concept of tagging in both tools (a.k.a. Groups, Favorites, Likes, Collections, people, places, etc…) provides a generic mechanism but to your point – at what end? Searching is a painful paradigm… a business (like a brain) wishes to recall information, not find it. Every member of the organization desires to see things that are relevant to them and what it is they are doing. Today, the answer in both tools is hardly better than forum moderation, suggestive selling, etc… circa 2002… That is, we understand that tagging information is better for interactive indexing of relevant information but we haven’t actually figured out what to do with it beyond devising very expensive models with more attributes and more data to suggestive sell. I refer to suggestive selling loosely because the pattern applies across many other areas.