Can You Help Create A Social CMS?

Why isn't content as easy to manage as Merrill's Siftables? How do we create a social Content Management System (CMS)? Contribute by...

1. Share a comment.
2. Send ideas to MartinSellingZoe(at)AOL
3. Tweet ideas to @Scenttrail

The Need for A Social CMS

Tomorrow is my first day back at work after a week off. My grand plan was to have the functional specification for the first "Social Content Management System" or Social CMS ready to share tomorrow. Yeah, that didn't happen. Thinking on this I realize wisdom of crowds is needed. This post shares what feels like the pain points with some ideas for relief.

I hope you read this post with an eye toward contribution. My thought is to create an open source Social CMS platform called SpinSnip. Social is changing too fast for any one group to corner the market (lol). Working together is the only way we will create relief for publishing pain points.

Social CMS Pain

As an active creator and curator of content, several hundred pieces of content on an average day, I'm frustrated. The tools we have to manage content aren't smart or social. Here are my top complaints:

• Content isn't tagged for easy retrieval by subject, keyword, author or theme.
• Content must be recreated over and over.
• Curation eats itself, the more you do the more tangled you become.
• Time trumps content relationships.
• Everything related to content curation and creation takes too much work and so costs way too much.

What features does a social CMS need?

(feel free to add to this list)

• Manage content in multiple dimensions simultaneously (time, author, keyword, macro subject micro subject, social history).
• Pour into new content easily.
• Understand what content is getting picked up by whom and why.
• Be able to construct new content easily out of existing building blocks.
• Easy to connect like Lego blocks to social nets, blogs, wikis, feeds.
• etc...

I can go on and on about social CMS, but that would defeat the idea. I can't create a social CMS WE can. Instead of thinking about a new abstract thing called Social CMS think about what frustrates you as a publisher and/or creator and then share those thoughts.

The idea here is to create something for US, a publishing tool that understand how to help writers, curators and artists get into a state of creative flow moving content, creating content and sharing content. To achieve this goal we must reduce the friction between creators and published content and between curators and existing content. How do we create an admin that is Pinterest-like in its fluidity, Scoop.it like in its community and Facebook like in its connections?