A Free Idea: The social CMS that isn’t a CMS at all
I often come up with a lot of ideas; and I generally believe that ideas in themselves are relatively worthless. Ideas become more meaningful (more valuable) once they are backed by an execution strategy, money and follow-through. So, if I have an idea with no execution strategy of substance or any serious intent to fund it, my follow-through diminishes significantly. I figured why not share these ideas that I believe could have value in the right hands – no NDA and no royalties or licensing needed. This may be the first in a serious of posts or could just end up being the only one; regardless, here it is!
The Idea:
I work with a lot of small non-profits. The issue isn’t really getting online (I do acknowledge it is an issue still) — hosting, domains and usable web design templates (that are seemingly unique) are becoming easier and easier for the novice to get access too at a low cost. Dreamhost.com is an example of a hosting company that will work with non-profits and offer services such as one-click installs for WordPress. The number one thing I’ve seen as a blocker to non-profits online is that understanding and ability to leverage online social networks in a viral marketing context. Publishing content to the web is easy (blogger.com solved for this a long time ago) — getting a user base and extending that message to the masses is the challenge (getting the word out about your mission). Many of the small “grassroots” non-profits I’ve worked with don’t have the time or resources to really launch or even investigate a viral marketing strategy; most who do have a public relations team are not yet equipped with or even have the know how (a press release just isn’t enough in today’s over-abundance of information dissemination).
I’ve been researching and sketching out a concept for developing a new light-weight CMS that isn’t actually a CMS. It is more of a social networking aggregate publishing system. Right now, non-profits around the country are publishing to their independent websites (if they are online at all) and the only way users are getting access to that information is by either a direct message (RSS, Email or checking the site itself) or through a specific web search. In both cases the user is seeking the content out. When the user has to already be engaged with the non-profit or the cause to gain information, you are more reaching out to constituents than attempting to grow a new volunteer and support base. The need for better dissemination of information becomes evident — a need to help kick-start the viral component of any message. By using thriving and existing social networks the aim is to leverage their open API’s to accomplish this objective.
Why publish an event into your own proprietary event calendar when you can tap into a social event site such as upcoming.org. Why publish your compelling photos into your own proprietary photo gallery when you can tap into the social photo sharing site such as flickr.com. Why publish compelling video into your own proprietary video player when you can tap into the social video sharing site such as YouTube.com; and so on, and so on. The value-add really is an inherent built-in online viral marketing component (at its basic sense of the term) — why publish content to your specific users when you can publish content to millions of users. Where now publishing content online is easy, the aim is to make publishing content much easier and putting that content in-front of potentially millions of users much much easier.
Tapping into social networks with large audience bases and ones that currently support or plan to support initiatives such as OpenID or OpenSocial, will make the process much more clear, intuitive and almost effortless. For example, with OpenID, the non-profit can log into one system at one location and be automatically logged into all systems needed to publish. An example of how the system works: you determine what type of content you are publishing (calendar event, photo story, video story, press release, etc.) and if you choose calendar event, you from within the system, enter your information and publish. That information goes from the CMS to the social network, such as Upcoming.org, via the open API and then back to the non-profit’s website. Now you see, the CMS isn’t much of a CMS at all — it is a middleman that essentially makes working with open API’s very easy in the context of publishing content. The data points associated with an event on the non-profit’s site are also not proprietary, they are elements (such as comments and number of attendees) continuously pulled from the larger social network. Again, we ask, why have an event on upcoming and then have your own comments, tags and your own related photos when upcoming (the larger audience base site) has comments and photos and tagging? Use that information, pull it back into the non-profit’s site and let it work for you.
There is still much research to be done regarding which services are a best fit with respect to the flexibility of their open API, their related audience base as well as legal and technical limitations with the use of those API’s — most of the initial research to-date shows that this is a very viable concept especially in the non-profit space.
You can now see how a technical strategy as this gives the niche site owners the power and lets the larger social networks flourish with more content, and most importantly, more relevant content. The original concept name for it was “Energy CMS” as this new way of thinking would ultimately power the life of the web based initiatives for these non-profits specifically. And of course, brand extension elements of the CMS working independently would be known as “Batteries” — portal widgets of “Energy”.
Also, it is important to note that while the focus of this concept with respect to “Engery” has been on the online social networking space – one must acknowledge that in itself isn’t even enough. There would need to be a plan to leverage services such as PR engines that can allow for a single press release in the CMS to be auto-submitted to many of the press release systems. Again, the real objective of the CMS is to provide site owners, non-profits specifically, the ability to mass disseminate information easily and effortless.
- August 27th, 2008
- 24comments
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As an 11+ year developer and marketing type who is always looking for a better, more efficient way to get messages out and pull in content to a place where people looking for it can readily digest it, this is intriguing.
Ultimately, any API that is a true web service- XML in/out- and is platform independent would be the ones to work with.
I’d love to hear any further thoughts/research and could really get behind an initiative like this in the data/heavy lifting, whatever, realms.
Content is king, but, targeted, relevant content is king for life!
@Al,
Thanks for the comment and sharing the sentiment that this is idea possibly has some merit.
Upon further thinking/research, it appears that building on top of a pre-existing open-source platform might save significant time. Perhaps creating a variety of WordPress plug-ins that work with these third party CMS systems. Of course the trick there is in that you can’t repackage WordPress and sell it or license it.
But I agree with you; targeted and relevant content is king for life.
If you are anyone else is willing to bring this concept to life, I’d love to assist in anyway I can. Like I said, the idea alone is relatively worthless.
That’s a really good idea. I’m sure a lot of good developers already more or less do this on their personal sites etc (who hosts their own photos anymore?) but to apply the concept to a modular CMS that you can “install” for your clients is really smart.
I may have to see what I can do with that…
@Mykola,
Thanks for the support of the idea! I think you are right on, I’ve seen many people do this in one way or another on their personal sites. But creating a way to allow everyone (especially the less technically proficient) to have this capability would be extremely powerful. Imagine how much more of a social web it would really be if accessing and sharing of our OWN data were just a bit easier.
Martin:
I think a plugin could work for Wordpress, as it has the whole “if you can use MS Word, you can create content” thing down. I’ve created hard-coded screen scrapers to import my own content (!) from various sites, etc., and I can see this acting in the same way as far as aggregation; using WP as the data origination (holder) point so that any changes are reflected across what ever network(s) you choose while keeping it “home” on your site.
If I’m not mistaken, you can sell configurations/themes of WP that could include this all in a neat package, which would be a way of monetizing it. Something of this magnitude would have to monetized as it would require constant support for changing API’s, the every evolving WP core code, and, of course, bug support.
I’m up in Baltimore, btw, and would love a bran-picking session some time.
-Al
I’ve wanted that for along time. Too much on the web is duplicative or a mass of unneeded fluff and features that are better handled elsewhere.
Kind of like we approach web design. Let the XHTML handle the structure, the CSS it’s presentation, the JS it’s behavior. Online everyone, every service, every application has it’s core role. Websites don’t necessarily need to be the all encompassing portal clients want them to be. They need to tap into the resources and services available online and maximize the benefit by minimizing their cost.
Great idea, and I’d love to see it in practice. Sign me up for the beta!
@Al, I will be up in Baltimore teaching at MICA … but you should come out to Refresh Baltimore on Tuesday September 9th; we can talk a little shop afterward over some drinks: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/992429/
@Martin:
I shall be there….thanks for the invite.
BTW, in an effort of transparency and to put me in content, I’m the VP/Director of Interactive for gkv (gkv.com), but, at heart, I’m a developer/IA geek.
See you then…
-Al
Definitely a good idea that makes a lot of sense. Ning is close to this, plus it has the added bonus of creating a social network as well. With Ning you can import photos from Flickr, Videos from YouTube, and it supports OpenSocial, so it’s got a good start.
@John,
Great point …. I can’t believe I left out my statements from my post yesterday on social networks and that market place. This is what I said about Ning specifically…
“I strongly believe that the future of the web, especially in the context of social networking, is going to be on the niche. Ning is a perfect example of a temporary solution to a large problem. People flock to Ning because there is no alternative that can do it right just yet — but if Ning has taught us anything; it is that users want their own networks and at the same time want a larger network that connects them (but they don’t want Ning). There is a lot of power in the existing social networks — but they must and will evolve (we’ve seen the trend move that way already with the emergence of Facebook Apps). Right now, the big players in the social space are being fueled by their user-generated content — users proprietary to that specific network. A powerful social network would be one where content was provided by all users (inside and outside the specific social network) — some emerging social networks are trying to move towards this model. My only issue there is that you still must play inside that one social network — they are just making a much bigger network with customizable flexibility to give the niche sites on the web the ability to have a uniquely customizable social network. These emerging networks business model will be successful because the concept of building a social network that gives niche site owners more control and flexibility is a growing demand and popular trend.
However, I believe the true future of this market space is in thinking much like Google with “OpenSocial” — the future of online social networks will be one where the MySpace and Facebook’s of the world live together more in harmony than apart as competitors — each network for a specific demographic and further differentiated by aesthetic presence, usability, flexibility as well as quantity and quality of the user base. With a system similar to OpenSocial in place, the major social networks can become a hub for web based user content as opposed to their specific user generated content. The real issue with the existing networks is that now we have a variety of places to upload photos, to blog, to have a contacts list and create/maintain our professional resume (along with a variety of other activities) and different audiences viewing that data (so, the necessity to double-post becomes greater). If YouTube can be a place for video and flickr a place for photos and blogger a place for blogs and linkedin a place for resumes and myspace a place for friends — and then you can create a global social network aggregate that is fueled by this content, then you have created the future of the online social space.”
Check out yesterdays post, some of the commentary there is what prompted and inspired this post: “The Facebook killer is coming … in 2011“
Again, this is another topic that I’ve mulled around endlessly, but more from the angle of aggregating the information into a customized format (i.e. newsvine’s modular homepage).
while it is not a bad idea, i think that the more these sites are overwhelmed with submissions, the “find-ability” of specific articles actually gets worse.
why not pass the idea through the netconectrix folks in DC that have set up web 2.0 training programs for non-profits.
As you say, is how big the group is. Trying to get older folks to move beyond email is very hard.
Having spent over a year messing with diigo and del.icio.us even the big boys aren’t getting this stuff even remotely right at this point. I’m attracted to Calais’ tagaroo system but they are still way beta. I have a large library but complex needs.
Having talked quite a bit to programmers, I can bet you that 90% of them don’t really understand what to do with somebody who has a million old news stories in 300 directories.
I’ve not talked to the connectrix people myself but the idea of a system that could bring an old library alive would be attractive to a whole lot of small groups. Wouldn’t that likely evolve into some kind of web server coop?
Building a new mouse trap is not the answer; rather, I see the problem is that too many non-profits have become exclusive groups geared more towards serving their own interests while downplaying others competing in the same arena; thus negating any benefits of collaborative efforts and realistic problem/issue resolution.
When the Internet became their vehicle of choice for their campaigns, the ones with the most ‘gee whiz’ gadgets became the ipso facto leaders in their campaigns. Perhaps the main reason for their catching the most mice is that they paid their tech heads the most cheese while those without any large cheese budgets are forced to rely on volunteer web developers who often are also seeking organizations with large cheese budgets.
I do agree that using web services such as social bookmarking, social news networks and mashups to attract attention to their non-profit web sites is a cheap means for publicity. But I also must assume that most of the smaller non-profits do not have the technical capacity to use these services effectively.
Existing CMS/blogging frameworks such as Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress have very steep learning curves in areas of customization. They do offer the great benefit of being open source and free, but to extend their frameworks to include Web2.0 wizardry generally means that additional expense must be paid by the user. While this additional expense is relatively cheap, it also increases the complexity for the user, meaning if something breaks, the user must pay more to fix it.
The whole point of my diatribe is that a non-profit, especially those without large budgets, that relys solely on the Internet for their fund raising campaign are destined to fail. The Internet must be a component of a more organized fund raising campaign that includes speaking engagements, brochure distribution, button/refridgerator magnet/bumper sticker sales and newsletter subscriptions. Costs associated with gaining more charitable contributors are the means to achieve the non-profit’s mission. By tipping the balance between the physical aspect of their marketing strategy towards relying on the ethereal Web should only be considered after establishing a critical mass of charitable contributors causing their mission to become viral on the Internet. Smaller non-profits should not be deluded into thinking that just uplinking a web site will increase their charitable contributor base without executing any physical actions as those previously described. Sadly I have seen this happen many times now where a pseudo web developer shows the non-profit some gee whiz Web2.0 gadgetry, conning the non-profit into purchasing open source CMS/blogging frameworks from him, then holding that non-profit hostage to him.
Now after reading about your Energy CMS and looking at your portfolio, will you do the same as the snake oil charmer I just described? If you are of the more idealist web developer sort, then count me in but if you are of the snake oil charmer, I’ll stand on the side.
It is just an idea … nothing I plan on moving forward with — just not enough time to warrant the initial time investment. Well, that am I am more on the front-end side of strategy, visual design and front-end development; someone much more technically proficient on the back-end would ultimately have to build the core-functionality.
@Martin: I was checking out your portfolio and other errata. You do excellent work. Your idea is great, very great, indeed. My friend and I were discussing what you were talking about for nearly a year: providing help and resources to small non-profits just for the idealist philanthropic angle. Sadly even though the potential exists, our mousetrap must have seem baited with peanut butter to those non-profits. Then again, when I think about that issue, I also feel that those non-profits with cash like to spend it on useless blingy, gee whiz Web2.0 gadgetry rather than to focus on usability and attracting return visitors.
But when you wrote your dream to do this, the first thing that came to mind was Mozilla’s Prism , a golly, gee whiz gadget that turns a website into a desktop application. Basically Prism is just a stripped down browser with one caveat: the user can click on it on their desktop, then be taken to the website in a doubleclick. At one time, I was hoping to help others use this type of application. Although there exists a need, to quantify that without seeming too obtrusive has become an issue.
Hopefully you can continue on with this angle as there are other SaaS applications such as Prism that could be totally useful to those easily distracted by the browser toolbar buttons and other browser bling.
It is interesting that you bring up Mozilla’s Prism, because it was actually the Flock Browser that inspired this idea. I was working with a very small Washington, D.C. non-profit on a pro-bono basis that had no time or technical resources; but desperately needed an online web presence.
So, ultimately set them up with a website that was powered by traditional blogging technology. I then installed flocked simply because it was the only “all-in-one” interface to allow them to manage all of the components they would need to power the website; flickr for photos and blogger for blogging, etc.
It worked really well; I hated that the one hold up was that the organization would have to download, install and get used to a new application (flock); but the all-in-one management concept was perfectly ideal.
This was back in 2004 though; so in retrospect, WordPress has evolved enough now and with its wealth of amazing Plug-ins that I probably would have gone that route if I could do it over again today (realizing that I myself am limited from a back-end technology knowledge stand-point).
Here’s a list of CMS’s on CMS Frameworks…for what it’s worth, these basically became worthless today with extreme adoption and modifications of Ajax to other purposes other than tricking out a web site.
This is my first comment submitted using Google Chrome.
Hopefully, Martin, instead of building a better mouse trap, the new web technology helps us build better mice.
My other view is mainly this presumption: The user, in this case, a non-technical savvy non-profit organization, just wants to just upload details of their newest activities, news events and other errata to their website without the complexity in some current CMSs. Although many non-profits do have the capacity to use emails which is basically the same process as uploading materials to their website. Evidently, they, like me, make too many assumptions about this difficulty in uploading their materials. As in Wordpress and the CMS frameworks, the ease with which the user can upload their materials once they are logged in is nothing short of amazing, considering their nightmares in the Web1.0 days; the problem arises when the users see some fancy gee whiz Web2.0 gadget added to their page-they can customize their CMS or they outsource this to a web developer. Either way there is an associated cost with this customization and their concern is this cost.
I also assume that these non-profits require user interaction such as requesting more information on their services or just asking questions or distributing current organization news without newsletter design costs, and delivery expenses; tasks best suited for forum software. I feel that this is the aspect they are seeking, if they are doing so. Currently, as with the proliferation of the CMS framework wars, forum software is in the competition struggle for more users. But again the associated costs with deployment, customization and training with the forum software is prohibitive for smaller non-profits, even the forum software might be open source.
Finally the non-profits, needing Web2.0 gee whiz gadgets for their websites but wanting the least expensive approach, also need simplicity in deployment and maintenance. While building a better mousetrap might be required, and training smarter mousetrap layers might seem attractive, there is a point where adding too much cheese (money) simply covers up the mousetrap, giving cause for gluttonous web developers, leaving none for the actual desired mice (charitable contributors and users).
I think you make some good points. My point was simply that non-profits are publishing content to the web; but still struggling with outreach on the web. And as much as some of us might be sick of the term; “viral marketing” is something that can be of use to these groups.
Hell, SEO could — a hand full of things could help. But they need to tap into social sharing sites to publish their content to better increase their awareness and audience base. But the struggle is that in doing so in present time is too much of a time burden with respect to resources and technical stump with respect to knowledge.
I am just advocating for a simple, slick, intuitive “CMS” that handles this content relationship. Think of it as more of a “content relationship management system”. It is the future, but sometimes, good ideas have to wait a long time before they become the present.
Double Jon created this masterpiece:
http://www.dennajones.com/colophon
Now put those features in a “CMS” for non-technical folks, and you got yourself a winner.
Lasse,
Amazing find, thank you for sharing. This is a great example of what I am mentioning!
Interesting idea. I’ll be looking forward to any other ideas you might have.
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