What Every Business Owner Ought to Know About Website Security

What Every Business Owner Ought to Know About Website Security

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Ongoing list of Social Media Efforts from Banks, Credit Card, Financial Institutions and Lenders

The finance industry has a unique challenge, hindered by government regulations and often a conservative culture, they have a real challenge embracing the online conversation that’s already happening between customers.

Criteria: Although there are many finance startups and consumer review sites, this list is really about the financial institutions, large brands, and banks that are adopting social media to reach customers.

Ongoing list of Social Media in the Financial Industry

Wells Fargo
The first and greatest case study to date is of what Wells Fargo has done with their multiple blogs, starting with the Guided by History blog, Later, they launched the Student LoanDown blog, and a virtual world called Stagesoach Island Community that lets members learn and experience financial management.

H&R Block
This company has done quite a bit with blogs, virtual worlds, Facebook campaigns, and social media programs and campaigns. During tax time, there was a significant upswing of activity from Facebook applications, and they engaged in online dialog in Twitter by first monitoring keywords and directly responding to members.

Intuit
Online communities are nothing new to Intuit, this customer-focused brand let’s customers self-support each other, as well as communicate to them using blogs. Quickbooks (financial software) has extensive growth for SMBs who want to connect to each other.

Chase +1
This credit card company used Facebook to find out about what customers desired, laying the foundation for delivering a customer-focused product

Ernst & Young
This large accounting services and consulting firm is anxious to reach new hires fresh out of college, by creating a sponsored Facebook group, they have online dialogs with graduating students starting the interview process online. Smart way for each party to learn for each other.

Royal Bank of Canada
Launched this ongoing blog called the Innovator Blog, which goes back to October 2006. Link via Trevor Cook. Also, they’ve a Facebook page, (link from iljazz)

ING
Trevor Cook has more details, listing that ING has an Asia / Pacific blog, My Cup of Cha, a microfinance blog, and a Chinese blog. They’ve also created a microsite called I need to go, that has a spreadable widget.

Fidelity
Using map mashups and podcasts, Fidelity is reaching to it’s customers using new channels. (from Benjamin Ensor, Forrester)

Genworth
Springboardforum – From Genworth – you need to get an account to see it (free) “Genworth has partnered with Dow Jones, Time Inc., Bloomberg and Source Media to provide you with tools & resources that may support your business”(tip from Jay Bryant)

HSBC
This online community from HSBC Business Network is for SMB and entrepreneurs (tip from Jay Bryant)

Alberta’s Commonwealth
Online community for Alberta’s Generation Y provides a lifestyle platform for youth to self express and support called Young & Free.

Discover
This lifestyle portal provides helpful content for Discover customers, called Discover Edge, it delivers expert best practices for money management. It’s difficult to see if this has social features.

American Express
This website called OpenForum provides a dialog for customers, Chris Brogan has the details.

Capital One
This social network for small businesses, called Slingshot, allows people to connect to each other, promote their services, in this ‘yellow pages’ type of marketplace.

Canada’s Largest Credit Union, Vancity, launches blog
This blog, called Change Everything, is intended to spread feel good messages and videos to attract Vancity’s community, and interesting project.

MyVault by Scotia Bank
This ‘dashboard’ style interactive application allows members to manage their money, gather feeds, and communicate with community members via forums, called MyVault.

IT Counts by the Institute of Chartered Accountants
This community site ION, yields blogs by thought leaders on the topic of technology, sponsored by Microsoft.

Instant Communities: List of companies that provide Web Collaboration Suites or Platforms

I get asked by a lot of folks to provide recommendations for products, often there’s too many companies to keep analyze, so I make these lists and refer folks to them. One of my most popular index lists is the list of companies that provide White Label Social Networking solutions, in fact there’s over 60 in that space.

Requirements
Here’s a list of companies that provide collaboration platforms with turn-key social features for ‘instant’ community.

Collaboration tools and social features

Common features, but are not limited to, include: forums, wikis, blogs, media, rss, aggregation homepages, presence, instant messaging, and ability to connect to identity systems such as LDAP/Active Directory.

These tools may have social networking features, that’s optional, but should certainly scale to it.

These platforms can be used in intranets, extranets, or public communities.

Limitations: I am NOT seeking platforms which you could build these features on top of it, I’m really seeking a ready-to-go community suite. I’m seeking solutions to build community, not ERP systems (but if they have both, that could be included). See my list of web-based CRMs.

List of companies that provide collaboration platforms

Alfresco
“Alfresco is the leading open source alternative for enterprise content management. The open source model allows Alfresco to use best-of-breed open source technologies and contributions from the open source community to get higher quality software produced more quickly at much lower cost. Our goal is to not only provide an open source offering but to surpass commercial offerings in terms of features, functionality and benefits to the user community. Alfresco is built by a team of leading members from Documentum® and Interwoven® with 15 years experience in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), including the co-founder of Documentum. ”

Blogtronix
“Blogtronix is a social media platform for Enterprise 2.0 communication. We provide a single, unified system that includes blogs, wikis, and social networking. Unlike other companies, we are able to offer a product that’s easy to use, scalable and can be delivered either on-demand or as a software. We’re equipped with a rich feature set that includes vlogging, podcasting, flash as well as a fully customizable interface. Our applications range from corporate in-house collaboration to global user created networks. ”

Central Desktop
“Central Desktop provides simple project collaboration tools for business teams.
Our tools help your business organize and share information efficiently, communicate with others and collaborate on projects.”

CommunityZero by Ramius
“CommunityZero’s many features simplify community management and support group communication by making it easy for users to share information and knowledge online. Read on to learn more about these features.”

Drupal
“Drupal.org is the official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.”

iUpload
“iUpload enables Internet-based business communities for the purpose of improving communications, enhancing customer relationships, driving sales opportunities and gathering marketing data.”

JiveSoftware
“We develop award-winning collaboration software that improves a company’s productivity through open collaboration among employees, partners and customers. We’re located in downtown Portland, Oregon.”

<Lotus Connections, IBM
“IBM Lotus® Connections is social software for business that empowers you to be more innovative and helps you execute more quickly by using dynamic networks of coworkers, partners and customers.”

Pluck
“A leader in social media software solutions , Pluck helps transform how publishers, media sites and major brands engage their audiences and customers to discover, create and distribute information online. Providing the technologies for content generation, syndication, social networking and news personalization, Pluck helps its customers more easily consume and leverage the new open content model that has emerged as the cornerstone of Web 2.0.”

Sharepoint, Microsoft
“SharePoint Products and Technologies provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs like managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling better informed decisions. Using the combined collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007, plus the design and customization capabilities of Office SharePoint Designer 2007, organizations can enable their users to create, manage, and easily build their own SharePoint sites, and enable these sites to be discovered throughout the organization.”

ThoughtFarmer (For Intranets)
“Capture intellectual capital and strengthen workplace community with ThoughtFarmer social software for enterprise intranets. ThoughtFarmer combines the best of wikis, blogs, and social networking into an attractive, easy-to-use intranet solution for Windows server environments.”

Traction Software
“Founded in 1996, Traction® Software, Inc. (formerly Twisted Systems, Inc.) set out to eliminate the frustrating and costly inefficiencies in team communications and information management by creating a revolutionary web-based end-user hypertext journaling system. Traction TeamPage was first released in 1999 and, after commerical launch in July 2002, is the industry’s first and leading Enterprise Blog software. The software is deployed in leading enterprises, universities and many branches of the U.S. Government.”

Zoho
“Zoho is one of the brands from AdventNet, a software company started in 1996 focusing on building affordable software for businesses. AdventNet has served a diverse range of enterprise IT, networking and telecom customers. We know our customers have a choice of many vendors, and we want to earn their business and their trust by working hard for it. And having earned their business, we want to keep them happy so they will choose to do business with us again. These simple ideas have served us well, during good times and bad. AdventNet has achieved impressive growth, and has emerged as a rock-solid supplier and partner, with sound financials.”

Sosius
Sosius is an online workspace, accessible from any PC, that lets you create and collaborate. No software to buy and set up. Powerful and flexible yet easy to use.

Project Spaces
“Simple, secure and powerful web-based workspace to help your project teams, workgroups, committees, partners, and others quickly and easily connect, share and collaborate.”

Six Groups
“six groups enables you to start your own community for free, about every topic, available to everyone: Start immediately with a fully-enabled community, Define the data fields for your members’ profiles, Choose your design from a large variety of templates, Benefit from the six groups community.”

Web Crossing
“Web Crossing helps companies strengthen brands and build relationships. We are the innovative leader in Internet collaboration solutions used by online communities and project teams.”

YouFig
“Create your own secure collaboration communities branded & customized for your company, school or organization.”

There’s a bunch of companies that provide document management or email type systems, this isn’t that. If you know of other companies that should be on this list, please leave a comment.

A list of web ready CRMs companies and sites (and a cheaper alternative to SalesForce)

Many startups out there need to keep track of customer, prospect, and partner information, including the status of those relationships. For many, SalesForce is too expensive for their needs. Since we’re all living the the ‘new’ web world where software is everywhere, I’d thought I’d put together a list of CRM systems you could use, please add to the comments of other CRMs systems

List of Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMs):

SalesForce

Daffodil CRM

Centric CRM

SugarCRM

CRM Solution

Sales Boom

Free CRM

Boss CRM

Klyptix

Boss CRM

VTiger

Zoho CRM

Highrise, 37 Signals

VTiger

Solve 360

Big Contacts

Net Suite

ProspectSoft

Instant Sales Tracker

Patoo

Terasoft

Patoo

Easy Customer

Pipeline Deals

Sage software

Goldmine

Avidian

Heap CRM

IT Factory

Batchbook

Geez, what a crowded market.

Other Resources

-Web Worker daily has some analysis of just a few of the above that I listed.
-eCRM has a partial list, they include other applications in addition to CRM, such as Helpdesk, communication tools etc.
-You can glance through this comparison matrix in this vendor showcase, very helpful.

You always get what you pay for, so I’m sure you’ll be a savvy consumer. As you add comments, I’ll add to this list over time.

What’s the difference between a Portal and an Aggreagtor? not much really

Portals are Dead. Portals are Dead. = the mantra of Web 2.0, content is distributed, open, and amorphous.

The Web Portal, which gained fame in the late 1990s was a web application that was intended to keep eyeballs on one page by providing all the information in a dashboard type style at once.

An Aggregator, like a feedreader, techmeme, page flakes, netvibes, and myyahoo (and now facebook) is designed to collect all the information you want on to one page. If you think about it for a moment, Google search results is actually an aggregator too.

So what’s the difference between a Portal and an Aggreagtor? Not much, if you ask me. So if portals are dead, then are aggregators too? While sure, the resources required to create the modern portal/aggregator or low, the strategy is the same: bring all the resources to one page.

If the Blog is the new resume then the “Google Me” is the business card?

Josh observes that Blogs are the new resume. Of course only a fraction of internet users blog, let’s not forget however that the next generation of workers are using Social Networks (From MySpace, Facebook, as well as uploading their own videos) so this is a trend that is not likely to go away.

I know several people that have gotten jobs primarily because of their blog, it had a lot to do with me getting my job too (read the comments from my CEO). Employers can see what someone is like, how they think, how the write, but more importantly what others think about them by checking out trackbacks and how people deal with disagreements, comments, etc.

So if the blog is the resume, then Jim Turner’s analogy that folks are not handing out business cards as much because they tell folks to “Google my name“.

List of “White Label” or “Private Label” (Applications you can Rebrand) Social Networking Platforms

What is “White Label” Software?
This is software you can brand and integrate tightly into your existing domain. The user experience should be near seamless, therefore any company can have their own MySpace. Kindly do not submit Social Networking tools that don’t meet this criteria, as the list can extend to hundreds if not thousands of companies.

The List
Here’s a list of Social Networking platforms, or suites that you could take and rebrand, if you know of any others, please leave a comment (many of the following are from those that left comments, like Gideon who left quite a few links). Not sorted in any particular order:

BlogTronix
I met Vassil, the CEO, I think it has a chance of giving Sharepoint a run for it’s money given it’s Intranet type features

Sharepoint
Microsoft’s collaboration suite is getting social networking tools for it’s 2007 version, I’m waiting for Microsoft to call me to do a demo.

Five Across
SF company just acquired by Cisco

Community Server
I was looking at this while at a previous role, this is what the famous Channel 9 was built on, as well as Dell 1to1 and Xbox

PeopleAggregator
I’m having dinner with Marc Canter tonight of Broadband Mechanics, I’ll be video interviewing him to learn about his “white-label MySpace-in-a-Box”

Social Platform
Just saw this one, looks pretty interesting. (Update: Feb 2008, now acquired by ONEsite)

SiteLife from Pluck
Pluck already has some other products this could be interesting.

Affinity Circles
This seems to have quite a few educational clients, interesting.

Kick Apps
White label hosted version.

Web Crossing
Social networking and collaboration suite.

Crowd Factory
“Platform that allows you to create a social network site similar to MySpace”

CollectiveX
Doesn’t appear to be a white label, but it’s certainly a Social Network, pretty interesting.

ElggSpaces
“Elgg Spaces allows you to create social networks for your organisation. You decide if the network is private or public.”

Me.com
“Build your own community with SNAPP! It’s as easy as point and click”

Onesite
“Customized white-label social networking partnership solutions for large media, entertainment, and community brands.”

PHPfox
Looks like it has some of the open source apps I’ve used before glued together for a social network. I wonder if this will be a dedicated feature available to most web hosts.

Select Minds
“SelectMinds pioneered corporate alumni programs over 7 years ago and continues to push the boundaries of technology in this industry to provide corporate social networking solutions that help our clients and their current and former employees build and maintain the professional relationships that drive success.”

Small World Labs
“Small World Labs provides the design, implementation, and hosting services for your online social or professional network.”

Social Network Server
“Our platform creates two versions of your site,
one for the Web, and one for mobile phones.”

Sparta Social Networks
“We are a full-service social network solutions company, specializing exclusively in the social network arena. ”

Phpizabi
“With literally thousands of websites powered by PHPizabi including everything from simple friends sites to the most complex networking super sites out there.”

Leverage Software
“…suite of functionality which includes personal profile pages, people-matching, blogs, chat, polling, rss, discussion groups, file sharing, widgets, targeted advertising, and robust customer and community analytics…”

Going On
“Organizations of all sizes can use GoingOn to build interactive communities around their most important initiatives and benefit from the open and compatible “network of networks” environment.”

Momo
“Got a brand? Build your community today and start generating incremental revenue from user generated content..”

Drupal
“Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites.”

Awareness (formerly iUpload)
“At the core of the Awareness solution is an on-demand social media platform that combines the full range of Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, discussion groups, social networking, podcasts, RSS, tagging, photos, videos, mapping, etc. – with security, control, and content moderation. Awareness builds these features into complete communities for companies, or customers use the Awareness API and widgets to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into their own web properties.”

HayStack
“Haystack gives businesses the ability to build social networking capabilities into their websites, encouraging customers and sales reps to create more personal connections. Haystack can also be used to help individuals within organizations connect with each other.”

OmniFuse
“We specialize in rapid creation and adoption of online social networks using our FUSION platform. FUSION combines social networking software with consumer generated media technology to provide a marketing and community building tool for brands, organizations, and other verticals.”

Mzinga (Acquired Prospero, March 2008)
“We enable organizations to easily, quickly, and cost-effectively develop branded, integrated communities and social networks comprised of message boards, blogs, ratings, and chats and to manage them using a single, intuitive platform.”

LiveWorld
“Liveworld builds, operates, and moderates social networks and online communities with a difference that creates real solutions to meet real business goals. We are distinguished by these advantages”

Userplane
“Userplane is the premier provider of communication software for online communities. Five hosted web apps comprise the application suite – each adding core, must-have features to thriving websites. The apps are robust yet lightweight, cross-platform with no user installation, and customizable for a site’s specific needs.”

Ning
“Ning is the fast and free way to create custom Social Websites!”

The Port
“Grow a community and extend your members’ visit to your site. Provide robust social networking tools to stimulate community interaction and foster word-of-mouth.”

Joomla
“Joomla! is used all over the world to power everything from simple, personal homepages to complex corporate web applications.”

eFriends by Altrasoft
“…is an online social networking software that allows you to start your own site just like Friendster and MySpace. The E-Friends software allows members to connect to people in their personal networks and community, creating a new online interactive resource that is based on a trusted network of friends and associates on the internet.”

intronNetworks
Complete graphic and content customization
“Can be attached via web services to any database. User Features include ability to interactively search and filter results of matches out of 1000’s of users in seconds. ” (From comments as I can’t copy and paste any text as the site is in flash)

DZOIC
“start your own social networking portal? If so, then you have just found what you were looking for. Feature Rich User End, Advanced Admin Console, Paid Membership Integration, Flash Instant Messenger and Chat, Fulfeatured Modules”

Boonx
“Use flexible and powerful community software and implement your brilliant idea in real life. Build a community site using Dolphin, and enhance it with Ray and Orca.”

World Web (in German)
I can’t confirm this site meets the criteria, since I don’t speak German

Dave Networks
“provider of an integrated video distribution and social community platform designed to ignite brands.”

Village Engine
“We created a social networking technology as we felt that there were no really good software out there.”

Neighborhood America
“The Trusted Leader in Social Networks for the Enterprise”

Movable Type
Recently announced social features and APIs

Lithium Technologies
Successful Customer Communities

Group Members International
“Outsourced White Label Enterprise Level Hosted and Managed Social Networking Community Platform”

Vibe Capital
“Vibe Capital builds Web 2.0 community software solutions for vertical market sectors”

Social Groupware
“Social GroupWare is an approach to create a Free on-line platform for Social Networking with the most known success story as Business Networking Club of Milan, Italy- http://www.milanin.com”

World Dating Partners
“We build your brand… not ours. Earn the highest income possible with your own branded or white label site. A Free solution to fit your ideas, plans and financial expectations”

Kwiqq
“Kwiqq.com enables online communities for travel, media and football. Our product provides a complete social networking solution ‘out of the box’ and is fully customisable.”

Go Lightly
“GoLightly provides communication and collaboration solutions for community-minded organizations. Our social networking tools give your members the ability to interact with you and each other in powerful new ways.”

Atlassian Confluence
“Confluence is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge. Confluence – The Enterprise Wiki. Adding, sharing and finding content has never been easier. These benefits come with all the additional features needed to make it a part of your business:

conVerdge
“ConVerdge is a social media, networking and community building specialist. We help clients around the globe take advantage of the shifting consumer preferences to connect, communicate and share content online. We have created a superior platform that enables us to white-label our turnkey hosted community solution for portals that want to quickly establish themselves with the best of web 2.0 technologies. With Converdge, we empower both large organizations and small businesses to customize, personalize, target, distribute and monetize their brand by delivering a robust, scalable and reliable solution.”

Rsitez
“Group Networks, Social Networks, Photo Sharing, Blogs, Live Chatrooms, Dynamic Searchable Profiles, Videos, Articles, Events, Calendar, Forums, Jobs Database, Private Email, Instant Messenger (IM), user generated content and more.”

Pringo
“Pringo Networks offers a complete social networking and media sharing platform allowing your company to effectively build an integrated online community around your existing user base. Pringo Networks provides the power and flexibility of state-of-the-art social network solution on your site. With features surpassing the leading popular networks, the Pringo technology can offer you and your audience the same functionality as MySpace, YouTube, Tribe.net, Bebo.com and then some!”

FriendSite
Your own Sub-domain. With our social network site, you simply add a sub-domain (an A record) to your website, and this can be whatever your choose… http://members.yourdomain.com, http://community.yourdomain.com, etc.. or even your own dedicated domain name – your choice.

SixApart
“Extends blogging and social media platform to user-generated content in internal and external communities. Movable Type Community Solution (MTCS), a package of social media features built on top of the popular Movable Type 4 platform. The Movable Type platform powers many signature websites and blogs around the world, from the Washington Post to the Huffington Post, from General Motors to Nissan Motors, and from Boeing to BoingBoing.”

Satmetrics (Formerly Informative)
“Marketing 2.0 is about digital democracy and the wisdom of crowds – where prioritized content trumps mass media; and where collaboration and communities of customers drive growth and innovation. Informative provides interactive market solutions that engage customers and identify their top priorities.”

Mixxt
“Easily create a social network that looks, works and feels exactly as you want it to”

Plone
“Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.”

Diso (WordPress)
“DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris puts it: “to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

KREM social networks (Netherlands)
“Realize the potential of social networks”

Social Engine
“Build your own niched, customized, viral social network. Start simple and buy features a la carte”

introNetworks
“introNetworks, Inc. offers an award-winning platform that facilitates the creation and management of these private business communities with world-class, easy-to-use tools that visually display relevant matches between people, companies, products – virtually anything. The result? You build loyalty, learn about your audience, and drive revenue.”

Vitrue
“Our Advanced Platform enables companies of all sizes, including some of the world’s most visible brands, to leverage social media to enhance their brand value and long-term business success. Whether it’s through the development of promotional web campaigns and communities, or by integrating into the fabric of a company’s business, we use our expertise and advanced technology to help brands connect with consumers on a deep, interactive level. More about our Solutions..”

Wild Apricot
“Build a professional looking website without having to call up expensive nd busy web experts. Wild Apricot’s software provides professionally designed templates and tools to easily adapt the look and feel”

Acquia
“We are a new software company that will provide value-added software products and services for the Drupal social publishing system. With over two million downloads since inception, Drupal is used by web developers worldwide to build compelling websites. Diverse organizations use Drupal as their core social publishing system, including media companies, non-profit organizations, publishers, and many others. Acquia plans to accelerate and extend market adoption of Drupal by advancing the core technology and offering value-added software products and network services that dramatically speed deployment and reduce risk.”

CoreSpeed
“CoreSpeed provides cohesive private-label online marketing, ecommerce, and social media platforms for your enterprise with our flagship Web 2.0 product, CorePlatform”

Flux
“We’ve developed an expansive toolset and powerful platform to give you a huge range of features: content sharing, member profiles, customized page layouts, photo and video uploads, easy technical integration, and so much more.”

Higher Logic
“Higher Logic provides hosted Social Networking software for non-profits and member based organizations. Our products integrate with your membership management system to give your members new and exciting ways to communicate with one another.”

TamTamy
Enterprise Social Network

List of 50 OpenSource Social Network Platforms
Go nuts! Here’s many more, some are already on this list.