Yammer announced a new partnership this week with Klout, the social influence measurement service, to measure social influence internally and externally...

It will be implemented in a couple of ways. First of all, Yammer users can publish their personal Klout scores on their Yammer profiles, which will give fellow employees a sense of the person's relative influence on the open social web.

Secondly, administrators can integrate Klout in Yammer to measure influence on the Yammer network. In other words, theoretically at least, it would measure the amount people who are engaging based on number of followers, posts, shares and so forth.

But is it a useful measurement?

Tony Byrne, from the Real Story Group, thinks it's great that Yammer has this API to drive such integration, but he's not convinced this is a good one. "I don't think Klout in particular will prove particularly helpful, since it tends to overweight participation in lieu of business impact--a problem social network managers are already trying to overcome as they review internal metrics."

Most important, social collaboration software should be able to tie into all those business applications, like Salesforce, that employees use to get their jobs done. Or, it should be able to wrap around those applications. Tibbr, an application and integration platform from TIBCO Software Inc., allows for that, but it requires engineering and is expensive to deploy, Byrne said. "Sticky challenges" remain in layering social into business apps. His bottom line: CIOs charged with socializing the workforce should expect to extend, supplement and or complement their existing social software and collaboration tools.

That's not surprising. After all, the goal is to take two irreconcilable forces of software -- the secure, highly flexible business application and the insecure, highly regimented, social interaction tool -- and get the best of both worlds in one platform. Is this going to happen? You bet, but don't ask me how.

Cloud file sharing solutions from the likes of Box, Dropbox, Oxygen, EMC, and others have dramatically expanded their footprint in the enterprise, often through “freemium” models that lure individual employees in the hopes of capturing an enterprise license down the road.

Major document management and collaboration vendors like Microsoft, Alfresco, and OpenText have taken note and have developed their own cloud-based file sharing offerings.

But it turns out that enterprises can end up licensing these platforms for highly different reasons, and CFS vendors have broadened the number of use cases they try to address.  In Real Story Group’s CFS vendor evaluation research, we identify five key business scenarios: Enterprise File Sharing, Highly Secured Sharing, Team Collaboration, File-based Extranets, Mobile Sharing & Sync.

"One of our most popular speakers, Theresa Regli, shares The Real Story Group vendor map."

Most Web properties require frontend presentation and "experience" services, as well as backend content management functionality. Most Web content management (WCM or Web CMS) tools provide both tiers of services.

However, as complexity increases—especially around advanced personalization, visitor permissions, integration and dashboarding-an enterprise may turn to the long-established approach of applying an enterprise portal framework.

Mobile marketing has often been hailed as a game changer, but in reality it has not lived up to industry expectations. If the industry growth in 2012 is any indicator, it appears that after many years of underperformance, marketers are finally getting serious about mobile. eMarketer estimated that enterprises would spend $2.6 billion on mobile marketing in 2012, but later found that the actual spend was $4.1 billion. Despite such impressive growth, mobile marketing accounts for only about 1 percent of the total spend, and it is still early days for the industry...Read More.

Taking its inspiration from the map of the London Underground and a content technology map from the Real Story Group, it charts the links between an ever-expanding database market and the data storing/organizing/mining technologies and tools (Hadoop, NoSQL, NewSQL…) that now form the core of the big data market.

Customers should remain wary of WCM vendors reinventing themselves as "Customer Experience Management (CXM)" suite providers, according to a new marketplace analysis released by analyst firm The Real Story Group. The new advisory briefing, 2013 Market Trends and Analysis of Web Content & Experience Management Systems, categorizes 36 Web CMS vendors and charts the relative customer risks with each solution.

RSG found that Web CMS vendors are trying to infuse their technology with tools for marketing automation, email marketing, predictive analytics, lead scoring, testing, and optimization, and associated reporting -- all under the umbrella of practicing CXM. However, The Real Story Group advises prospective buyers to perform careful due diligence against vendor claims of providing a comprehensive CXM platform.

Through the use of analytics and content optimization, you're now more prepared to strategize, manage and deliver personalized content to relevant audiences at the appropriate time on the right device.

Tony Byrne from Real Story Group says an extremely high-end media company might need one (custom CMS). "The only sector where I've seen it make sense to build a DIY CMS is in the media segment, particularly at the highest end. The intense performance and functional requirements in some media scenarios can supersede what an off-the-shelf platform or even available toolkits can do," Byrne told me.

But when you decide to roll your own, you head down a slippery slope, one that many companies learned about the hard way in the 90s. Sure that system might meet your needs today and even next year, but with a constantly evolving publications marketplace, how can you possibly adapt and change the system quickly when those inevitable changes are required. You could find yourself with an expensive, obsolete system in short order with very few options available to you for upgrading. How many of the older systems could adapt to mobile delivery or easily incorporate social media?

Digital experiences, customer experiences, web experiences — whatever you call it, it is important to understand what kinds of technologies go into play in order to orchestrate your CXM strategy properly.

Along with marketing features and functions you may find in a Web CMS, you’ll need to consider Marketing Automation services offered by some best-of-breed Digital Marketing vendors — and how to tie them together to get the best of both worlds.

The acquisition has "obvious potential benefits," Real Story Group analyst Apoorv Durga wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "EntropySoft connectors (or perhaps more pointedly, new connectors the EntropySoft team can build) could link various Salesforce CRM and Social Media services to enterprise back-end repositories, for things like archiving and -- in the future -- potentially even hybrid storage."

"But that's in theory. In practice, Salesforce applications have not played well with on-premise enterprise systems," he added. "The issues tend to revolve less around technology than Salesforce culture, so EntropySoft can't be considered a game-changer here."

The world of enterprise content technologies has always been difficult to decipher on its own, let alone with all the acronyms flying around. Let's talk about two of them today: CXM (or CEM) and WCM (or WCXM, or WEM for some).

Many organizations nowadays are paying heightened attention to the matters of CXM (Customer Experience Management), and not only because it is one of the buzziest acronyms in the industry. It is also because the crucial importance of retaining and acquiring customers in the impatient and fast-moving internet age is being realized more fully.

Effective knowledge management has always represented an almost mysterious mix of theory, practice and technology. KM theorists and practitioners alike quite properly point out the fallacy of focusing too much on the technology part.

Yet, effective technology deployments seem essential to KM success. One challenge, of course, is that there is no such thing as a "KM tools" marketplace. Depending on the application, knowledge management can span multiple different types of technologies, comprising many diverse (if often overlapping) market segments.

Today, KM leaders need to follow more technology developments than ever. Don't just take my word for it. The inquiry calls we get from KM leaders among Real Story Group subscribers have blossomed in recent years not only in numbers, but also in the breadth of topics on which they seek counsel.

I'm a big believer in the promise of social capabilities in the enterprise -- though primarily in the context of collaborative work -- but let's not rush to judgment here. Consider that the rankings might actually reveal any number of plausible alternative conclusions, such as these:

• CIOs' hype cycles are necessarily shorter than those of E2.0 evangelists.
• CIOs already have blessed social initiatives, likely with full awareness of the longish impact of horizons typical of projects that require major change management.
• CIOs quite properly understand social as a feature and not a technology in itself.
• CIOs previously deployed social technology that didn't scale well at enterprise levels, and they're taking an investment break.
• Other projects in their portfolios are even more transformational than social – sacre bleu!

I don't know if any of those are true in your enterprise, but they are just as plausible as accusing CIOs of "ignoring social."

ConceptShare named two Real Story Group analysts as top DAM influencers among others who are active in Digital Asset Management.

BYOD—Bring Your Own Device—is becoming a reality of office life these days. It's a natural consequence in a world where people are bringing iPads, iPhones, Androids and Blackberrys to work.

"As a result, organizations have been compelled to open up their networks to a wider variety of these devices that their employees want to use," says Apoorv Durga, senior analyst with Real Story Group.

As Marketing Automation tools become more sophisticated, enterprises acquire the confidence to use them for increasingly larger and more frequent campaigns. Yet, we know from talking to customers that many Marketeting Automation platforms will groan a bit at scale. Real Story Group’s Digital Marketing evaluation research suggests that most Marketing Automation platforms were designed for departmental use, rather than the needs of larger, diversified enterprises.

Byrne argues, entrenched Content Management vendors like EMC and OpenText are undergoing less of a paradigm shift and more of a hybrid evolution, trying to address demands for easier management without disrupting the current ecosystem. "We're beginning to see more traditionally on-premise CMS tools begin to become more 'cloudified,' with managed hosting offerings, including some cloud-based alternatives. To be sure, this is not the same thing as SaaS, but it does offer a kind of compromise where you can customize and extend the platform in bespoke ways, but can outsource most of the systems administration."