Social Web Experiences at the Web Experience Conference

The IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference session “Social Web Experiences leveraging the Power of IBM Connections and WebSphere Portal” was delivered by Mac Guidera, Social Business Evangelist, IBM and  Jon Brunn, IBM Connection Architect, IBM.  The session focused on bringing WebSphere Portal and Connections together in a single cohesive solution leveraging the capabilities of both products to deliver unified customer or employee experience.

Background

The session started with the Forbes “5 Ways Social Media Takes Customer Relationships to the Next Level” to set the stage of why and how social is important.

• Make it easy for people to share a story
• Leverage the social in social media
• Make it about the customer, not the product
• Takes every opportunity to gain feedback
• Breaks through barriers

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Today, customers are in the driver’s seat.  Connecting with them individually requires a consistent and engaging online experience.  Winning customer loyalty requires delivery of meaningful customer self service on the web.  Some of the key supporting statistics are:

• 86% quit doing business because of a bad customer experience
• 75% would prefer to use online support but only 37% try self service
• 50% of “How to” questions could be deflected to self service.

Integration options

The IBM products at the core of social experiences are IBM Connections and IBM WebSphere Portal.  They integrate well together as IBM provides many integration techiques out of the box.

The remainder of the session focused how the products integrate along with several live demonstrations.  Below is a summary of some of the key integration techniques discussed or demonstrated.

• The Web Application Integrator can be used to inject the portal UI and navigation into Connections
• WCM social rendering summary & details portlets bring Connections rendering features directly into the Content Template Catalog (CTC)
• The portlets can keep the user within the portal or direct to the IBM Connections UI
• The portlets are configurable so they don’t require custom code
• WCM social rendering queries and renders Connections content directly from within the portal
• Basic customization doesn’t require coding
• The Activities Stream portlet is a new capability which allows users to see activities across all Connections services (blogs, wikis, etc)
• Community pages allow direct Connections community integration to portal with portal through administration
• An option exists to automatically create a community when creating a community page in portal
• The social media publisher enables social media marketing by allowing you to publish media to third party sites, even non portal sites
• Connections search can be integrated with portal search to deliver a federated search within the portal search center
• The portal tag cloud can also index the Connections tag cloud to provide a federated tag view
• Connections APIs are still available as REST services to implement any integration requirements not available by an out of the box solution if needed

The presentation then shifted to the various deployment models and more detailed integration techniques.  Much of this (and previous) content is covered in depth well in the new IBM Redbook The Building and Implementing a Social Portal.