CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Thanks Chris for putting forward a better picture of the problem. I personally tried to suggest what I liked in Nation Builder(For example, creating twitter followers as contacts and giving them rights even before they sign up was pretty interesting).

I am trying to finalize my project proposal right now and few points which I could note down from the discussion were:

• Though there is not much done in terms of Social Media done yet in CiviCRM, whatever we implement during the project should make sure that we respect privacy of the users. (In other words, do not cross the line of creepiness
• Look at things, to make them simpler, not to complicate them or provide something which is already available.
• Look at already available solutions, before trying to implement something.

I personally would like to focus on Events to begin with, because that is something most of the community members agreed to. Some features which I think can/should be included are:

• Being able to register for event through one click social media connect.
  
• Auto RSVP to event on Facebook through CiviCRM
• Consolidated preview of all the post regarding an event, this can be done by predefined Hashtags for the event, and an option for people to tweet with the Hash tag through a tweet button on event page.
• Show visualization(using Civisualize) of reach of event on basis of the activity on social media.

The second part of the project will be working on contacts:

• Admin being able to connect their facebook/twitter account and pull all the followers and friends.
• These contacts can then be matched with already available contacts in Civi.
• Letting already registered contacts to connect their facebook and twitter account, letting them login through them, and being able to invite their friends about the same.

Suggestions?

Hello all, I have posted my proposal on melange. I am also attaching it here for your suggestions and feedback.

It will be great if you look at https://github.com/TechToThePeople/civisualize for the work I did in last Summer of Code.

Chris, I like the points you have put forward, they are great. I am a student that applied for this projects also , and i think all these details should be discussed now so we can see the big picture and know how to achitech that functionality. My point is, adding a functionality should increase the simplicity not reduce it, connecting Civi to social networks, we should look at the security involved, what to get from social media, what to send, how to interact. this is to make sure that we get only what we need and can handle savely and let social media interact with Civi in a save or carefull way. If we look at NationBuilder, can we see the underlying interactivity structure?, the best practices carried out for social media interaction?, security measures? and all the things we need to be able to hnadle to ensure smooth communication to serve our purposes of social media interaction with CiviCRM?, We should answer these questions and decide what to copy from other platforms that have implemented such functionality.

I think another concern which was put by Joe is that we should look at making things simpler for civi users, though NB is using social media in a brilliant manner. It is quite a possibility that civi users might not need all of them, etc.

This is a very interesting thread. I strongly agree with this statement by Chris Burgess:

Since CiviCRM always integrates with a host CMS and those CMS all have SM tools available as add-ons, I think it's a good idea to focus on  where CiviCRM can contribute something new / special to the mix rather than implement things already available through existing plugins / modules for CMS.

Perhaps there's a case for an audit of what each CMS does well in this regard, classed in terms of incoming and outgoing "flows" of data?

A few points off the top of my head that may be of relevance here:

I have set up a number of WordPress-based sites which have social media logins where the user's details are automatically transferred to CiviCRM. I have also written a fairly comprehensive plugin that allows the integration of CiviCRM with BuddyPress for those who want to host their own social network. Likewise plugins for memberships and events. And there are number of plugins that will post site activity to the big SM sites.

So, could the focus here better described as "marketing via social media"?

Or are we talking about the IndieWebCamp idea of POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere:

https://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE

If so, then I'd suggest looking closely at what's already been done with Bridgy for backfeeds:

https://indiewebcamp.com/Bridgy

Above all, a comprehensive audit of the available options seems like a necessary first step.

Cheers, Christian

If you haven't seen it yet, check (OP) Siddharth's post

That's how I arrived here

One more caveat, learned from bitter experience with the SM APIs - they change all the fersplunking time, so be prepared to spend plenty of time staying on top of them. Look forward to following the progress of this project.

CROSS-POST
I just saw this thread and posted to the one references on the blog: http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,36315.0.html
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This can be a powerful contribution to civicrm.  I've done some work on social integration but using the CMS rather than a native approach.  I have a few thoughts/suggestions to keep in mind:

1. Understand duplication/boundaries of CMS + social integration.  This is particularly important for user authentication as we do not want to ask users to authenticate twice (once for CMS, then again for civicrm.)  If you focus on twitter+FB and WP+Drupal CMS you may find that there is a middle ground in
 a) bridging with CMS like we do with contacts/groups and sync and
 b) leveraging all the existing code for the CMS.  For example, if a user logs in via twitter to the CMS then pass those credentials, to civicrm (or make them aware they exist.)

2. Think about BOTH input and output.  Getting user activity into civicrm is great, but sharing from civi is powerful.  For example, Pushing event info to a FB user's friends, noting a contribution or event attendance.

3. Pushing info to the organizations account/page is every powerful.  In drupal, we built a system to tag an event (publish to facebook) and automatically post to the org's wall (as a FB event with all the appropriate bells/whistles.) There is a drupal module called Facebook Autopost that handles this very well.  Likewise a push to twitter feed about a new event, grant app, etc. is useful.  It could even be integrated with dashboards/reports to publish stats/etc or the mail system to publish content.

In a sense the social networks are like an extension of the CMS as a publishing point, but civicrm has a lot of the native content.

Not trying to blow up the scope but please keep this in mind....

Best of luck!

Shawn