This is a reflection on all the hype around “social media,” and “social networking,” as the fact is that brands are racking their brains along with their digital agencies to turn their websites into “social sites” that allow them to create an environment for the humans behind their databases to connect with the brand, or each other, and develop relationships or content, without the need for site administrators to mediate these connections or content contributions.
It is one of the basic premises of the school of web design and strategy "put it online and let them come." We at Seed are also working on this and with some of our clients, we have made great progress developing or integrating tools that fit into the core of Drupal, our preferred content manager.
It is important to note that Drupal is fundamentally a social platform and since there are many ways to conceptualize the functionality that a client wants to make available to their audience on a “social portal,” there are just as many ways to achieve this; not all portals need the same set of social features.
Flexibility is one of the great things about Drupal; some sites may need Facebook-style tools such as creating friends lists, other sites may only need logs of site activity, or just a news feed. Many other needs involve recommendations to other users, voting, or private messaging; in Web 2.0 projects, the needs of each site are very different.
This is if you want to take into account that Drupal is an excellent alternative to proprietary code solutions when you want to play in the big leagues of social network management on the Internet.
Creating a portal “with all the toys” is certainly not a child's thing, but it is not, today, a project years in the making.
The first step to take in this sense is to evaluate what you have; If your customers can't talk to you through your website, if out there, you can't talk to them or if your clients can't talk to each other, maybe it's time to think about taking the step towards web 2.0.