It’s Elgg season for Social Media Marketing
Every week, I try to bring you Open Source software for you social media marketing endeavors that I am able to test out first. That, of course, means it must be simple enough for someone like me to use. This week, I am going to tell you about a program that I am not going to download, but I hope to give you an easy-to-use tutorial that will help you get started with it. Elgg is a powerful Open Source social networking platform. Well, that is what they claim to be, but I am going to take their word for it.
For those who like to read and explore for themselves, here’s what’s in Elgg according to Elgg (that means they wrote it, and I am giving credit to them):
Profiles
Elgg comes with default profile fields that can be extended or completely customized by the site administrator.
Activity Streams
The granular activity stream feature ensures you keep up to date with all site activity.
Blogging / Microblogging
Blogging and microblogging functionality that is both powerful, yet simple to use.
Pages
Create documents collaboratively with full control over read and write access.
RSS / JSON
All content – such as blog posts, activity streams and group discussions – is available in both RSS and JSON formats
Widgets
Add widgets to user profiles.
Video
Search for your favorite videos on services such as Youtube and add them to your Elgg video gallery.
Social bookmarking
Share your web resources with others in your company, group or course.
Groups
Collaborate around specific topics via public, private or hidden groups.
Access controls
Control who can access your content.
Web Services API
Expose functionality through the REST API by building a plugin and either publish the API for other developers to build clients, or provide your own.
Documents
Upload and share documents with the rest of your network.
Photo Gallery
Using the powerful Tidypics plugin, let your users create their own photo galleries.
For those who would like to know more about how they can use Elgg for their social media marketing, there are plenty of plugins to explore, including plugins for events, photos and images, widgets, games, site and user admin, and more. There is also a forum for those who want to know the latest about what is going on in the world of Elgg. For those who want to download Elgg, it includes bug fixes and security enhancements. For those who want to experience Elgg, but do not want to download it, they can sign up for more information here. For those who need help uploading it, here is a great video. (Video coding and me ain’t getting along too well this week).
Okay, so that’s it for this week. Enjoy. And please tell me what you like or don’t like about this blog. I’ll try to get a live video on here for all you visual people. Oh yeah, thank you all for your comments.
Erick
