A Rich Brew of Social Content

In an ideal world, anybody running any type of content management system would have a real time feed into all the social media outlets that would automatically inform what content would be displayed next on the site.

As content strategies mature, it’s becoming clear that it’s not as much about how much content you have as it is about surfacing up the right content at the right time. Your organization may have all kinds of information that could be used to facilitate or expand a conversation taking place on any one of two dozen or more social media outlets. But by the time you surface that information up on your Web site, the conversation has passed you by.

Day Software CTO Dave Nuscheler says the reason that IT organizations should be paying close attention to evolving social media standards is because, long term, the goal is to leverage social media conversations to drive content management strategies. Right now, most organizations try to achieve this integration manually, but Nuscheler expects to see much of this process become automated.

Key evolving standards include OpenSocial, driven largely by Google, and Facebook Connect. There is much debate about how open these standards need to be. But when you combine them with standards such as RSS, WebDav, JSR 170 portal standard and the Content Management Interoperability Service (CMIS) specification, a powerful brew for driving the next generation of content management on the Web starts to emerge.

In fact, Nuscheler says an important project to keep an eye on is the Apache Chemistry Project, which is building a high-level API that will make CMIS more accessible.

In terms of content management, it’s pretty clear that we’re on the cusp of some major transformation brought on by the convergence of standards. The only real question is, will your organization be in a position to take advantage of all these new potential capabilities once these standards actually solidify.