IBM Claims Social Media 'First'

IBM has announced an expansion of its social media business services including 'Connections', which it claims is 'the industry's first social networking platform that provides organisations with the ability to track and monitor social data in real-time'.

Connections allows client organisations to track and trace data enterprise-wide on the fly; analyse it and tag it to meet compliance regulations, and uses microblogs, wikis, communities and activities to collaborate with clients, partners and employees. Compliance features are provided through a partnership with specialist firm Actiance and enable companies to quickly pull out relevant data from conversations, posts and file uploads.

Other new features will help foster greater participation in communities through moderation, allowing online content managers to review materials prior to publication, the firm says; while social analytics will help users find experts and be able to comment or vote on ideas in a community, and the Connections IdeaBlog facilitates crowdsourcing of ideas across teams and customers.

This month, analyst IDC published a report, Worldwide Social Platforms 2010 Vendor Shares, in which it ranked IBM as the worldwide market share leader in the Social Platforms market based on total software revenue, for the second year running. IDC says worldwide revenue for the social platforms market was $501.1m in 2010, up 31.9% on the year.

Alistair Rennie, IBM's General Manager, Collaboration Solutions, says the benefits of social business are 'too great to ignore' and adds: 'With these new advancements around compliance enablement, a social business can confidently activate networks of people to use a variety of collaborative
tools, to improve and accelerate innovation.'

IBM Connections is available both on premise and in the cloud - more details of this and other IBM social software are at www.ibm.com/social .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.