What are the key challenges that an enterprise faces today in this social media age?
In my assessment, companies still lack a cohesive social media strategy, which is a great challenge. As a matter of fact, social media can not be done in isolation and you can not have community on the side. Community and social media content has to be a central part of an integrated strategy. Most enterprises look at social media as an after-thought to their overall go-to-market strategy.

At the end of the 90s, businesses needed enterprise grade vendors who understood web as a space. Today there’s a similar need for experienced vendors who can manage, govern, and publish end-to-end solution for enterprise social media. But solutions are just that – bits of code that connect the tools with your web presence. And for anyone working for a large enterprise, one question always comes to mind, so How about those legacy systems?

The advantage of solutions provided by companies like Vignette is that they can work with any legacy system. Even companies without a content management system can use it because it can be deployed as a standalone system. They provide more than website content management , they provide widgets and gadgets that are used to share content beyond a single destination and they are connecting around products. The integration of  content happens around and within the community, be it external or internal to the community.

What does deployment, cost, & support look like?
The solution can be pricey, at $50k in the Vignette example; with support coming in at 20% annualized cost. So let’s face it, it’s not an easy sell when executive leadership continues to consider Social Media as a luxury, an unknown and “unquantifiable” on the balance sheet.

That being said, companies like Vignette are using their enterprise solutions to create real-world case studies and proving efficiency gains and revenue growth that can be measured and tied closely back to the sales channel. They drink their own Kool-Aid, utilizing social media tools that it advocates for training and support and they use wikis for training documentation on the product, and they are making it easier to update and provide training to their customers. Proof by practice.

I was recently asked by some friends at HP how I viewed the the use of social tools between them and others that participate in the space. I told them the greatest challenge HP faces is connecting through their channel all the way to the customer. They don’t want to intercept customers and move them away from the channel partner, but the customer in a social media world, is demanding to be asked what they want in products and services, and they want to have access to the people who shape them. Dell is a great example of opening the communication channel from an R&D standpoint, but in the latter part of the Idea Central implementation they lost steam because they proved again that they just don’t really care.

But that’s my opinion.