Can a corporate web site be a social networking community?
Posted by Matt Rajkowski on March 9, 2010, 9:05 AM EST
This is a question that we have internally discussed for years. We decided that the answer was yes, a corporate web site can be a social networking community, and we have been running a web site and community, all-in-one, for about 8 years now. Powering concursive.com is ConcourseConnect 2.0 -- it's a collaboration application, but with the flexibility of a light-weight content management system.
I'm fairly excited to see the latest version of our site. It's a simple looking site, with many dynamic elements.
The content managers have the power to modify the content areas using a real-time WYSIWYG editor at any time. There are limits though, as this isn't a full fledged CMS. The pages are all tied to a wiki, so the freedom of HTML is out of the question; and for depth, the user ends up in the wiki. The strength of the wiki however, is that the content has structure and format, and that users can participate by commenting on the content. Power users are also promoted to content editors.
With this update, the web site team also changed several aspects of the site by organizing the product message and the community under separate areas, but linking them together in an obvious way. Previously we tried to attach collaboration elements to the product message directly, but that was confusing.
With this site update we will continue to improve the user experience and listen to any suggestions you have.
How do you feel about using a product built for collaboration to power a web site? Good or bad?
