Customers Should Avoid Community Software Vendor Lock In: Own your data
Jeremiah is right — a company entering into SMM should be very wary of outsourced relationships. If you do go outside for support, make sure you are in a portable format so when and if you decided to bring the operation in house, you can easily import the data accumulated under the outsourced relationship:
“I’ve been talking to more and more companies that are creating their own corporate communities around their brand. For the most part, they lean on the SaaS models that the white label social network, collaboration, or even insight community vendors provide. While it certainly makes sense for marketers to lean on application service providers (it’s all setup, ready to roll, without the hassle of dealing with internal IT) and a decent to moderate price.”
We used Ogilvy Digital Influence to launch our first corporate blogs, but insisted it be build atop WordPress so we could migrate the archives onto our own boxes when we hit the tipping point that justified a self-serve. Photos are all in Flickr and easily exported and migrated (well, not exactly “easy”), videos are moving to YouTube.
Smart scalable thinking there David.