Social Glass

Techrigy was kind enough to give me and a few others a demo of their Social Media Manager application (SM2) which is currently in Beta. SM2 is an application designed to monitor blog (and soon wiki) posts both inside and outside an organization looking for compliance violations. It’s enterprise software designed to help the enterprise manage the new gradient of risk that’s inherent to the openness of Web 2.0.

But surely, as a compliance officer, I could manually search for corporate policy or legal violations using a search engine. So how does SM2 add value on top of Google.com (internet) or Enteprise Search (intranet)?

The answer is business intelligence. SM2 combines discovery with analysis, meaning the compliance officer is notified of potential policy violations (policies are defined in a .NET 2.0-based admin console, and SM2 ships with many policies out of the box). This helps companies enforce compliance with Sarbanes Oxley, for example, or manage issues before lawsuits are raised by detecting and correcting inappropriate use of social media.

SM2 is currently in Beta with a handful of financial services companies (which seemingly have the most to gain from being compliant). I can, however, also see tremendous value in this software for the Marketing or Public Relations department. SM2 can be used to track market reactions to product or to help gauge public image of an enterprise. I think Techrigy would be wise to expand it’s marketing approach accordingly.

The only thing Techrigy needs to work out is its pricing structure. Currently they’re contemplating a “per blog or wiki monitored” approach, which given the emergent nature of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 (with new blogs and wikis popping up every day), I don’t think this is something an enterprise would go for.