Introducing KickApps 5.0!

Earlier today we announced the availability of version 5.0 of the KickApps platform. With this major milestone in our evolution we now provide the first complete site authoring and management system for publishers and brand managers looking to create the next generation social media web site.

Most traditional CMS systems have failed to react to a new set of socially enabled site creation needs and have forced publishers to compromise on design, live with costly site creation processes and unfulfilled audience or customer objectives. Some of these traditional CMS players have awoken to the need to go social but have done so by retrofitting old architectures fundamentally based on editorial publishing of static articles.

We on the other hand believe that a membership or customer base should be at the heart of the next generation site experience and that’s what we’ve built with KickApps 5.0. The broadest set of social media applications enable engaging experiences and through the natural interaction with the social media applications our client’s audiences and customer bases now have a forum to express their passions and views. The publishing process is no longer a one-way broadcast but rather a two-way dialog.

This represents the fundamental difference between KickApps 5.0 and traditional CMS’s but even the editorial experience provided by us will be different. Editorial experiences will be more about aggregating from sources on the web filtered to reflect an editorial voice and for this to be easily co-mingled with the publisher’s or brand marketer’s editorial and user generated content. Even the presentation of the editorial experience needs to be different to support multi-media formats and to elegantly wrap the editorial content with social apps to facilitate contextual surfacing of social activity and viral syndication out on the social web.

With the introduction of KickApps 5.0 we now offer website publishers the ability to manage all their online assets (including editorial content) under a single, unified content management system. This frees publishers from the interoperability and resource issues associated with managing multiple point solutions for CMS, social and video capabilities. KickApps 5.0 provides a 100% solution for creating and hosting socially-enabled websites.

It’s simply no longer practical for brands to juggle multiple, single-purpose platforms when the goal is to deliver a unified user experience— and, for the first time, we’ve made the need to integrate those siloed systems completely unnecessary.

KickApps’ Social CMS capabilities allow publishers to extend their content beyond stand-alone websites to branded experiences on web-based platforms like Facebook and mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad and Android. KickApps 5.0 is designed to help web publishers manage their entire world of online content, wherever it exists and however it is consumed.

A key new feature of KickApps 5.0 is the ability to quickly deploy an unlimited number of custom web pages that are fully optimized for social interaction (e.g. comments, tags, ratings, sharing). These new page experiences can incorporate user-generated or editorial content in many different formats, from external or internal sources, and can be launched in seconds.

KickApps 5.0 also adds an array of fully integrated applications including Pro Video which features optimized uploads, content curation, advanced set creation, new delivery options, unique monetization capabilities and iDevice support. As always, KickApps 5.0 continues to integrate seamlessly with other CMS products when required