Hovering Over The Back Button

Forgive the cheesy title, but yes I gave a presentation at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising (TfMA) show last week where I talked about the place of content and in web or digital engagement. Or as marketing put it in the show guide synopsis:  "The importance of good content management and governance as a platform for engaging your website visitors" [ read more ]

I'm going to kick off 2010 with a blog post about Web Content Management, enough for now of my wittering on about my place in the social web or even web engagement. Content is still king and as I catch up with three weeks or so of my RSS reader, it seems that at the end of last year - the decade - that there was a new CMS blogging trend and it's for talking about trends, the CMS blogosphere was alive with predictions. All worthy of comment and I thought maybe I can chuck in some thoughts of my own. [ read more ]

As part of preparation for a presentation he gave yesterday at Jboye '09 - a few days ago Jon Marks set a challenge to his Twitter community; to give him examples of where Web Content Management fails. I admit I am not at the JBoye event, so I have missed seeing Jon in action - but as a blogger on this sort of thing, let alone as a WCM vendor it would be rude to ignore the wealth of great points this process threw up. As Jon crowd sourced his presentation content, seemingly every element of a CMS procurement and project got a mention. [ read more ]

I've written a book - alright quite a small book admittedly and when I say 'I've written' - I do mean with the help of various members of our marketing team - @karengibbons, @bob_barker and @lindajvetter  - but none the less, sitting on my desk, fresh from the printers is The Little Book of Web Engagement. It's  88 pages of tips, ideas, quotes and anecdotes on the what, how, why and who of putting your website into the front line of customer engagement. [ read more ]

CMS bloggers of the world have been double dared again, not this time by @kasthomas, but by Julian Wraith (@julianwraith)- who in this post wants the CMS community to gaze into our crystal balls and speculate on the future of Content Management.I think the Future of Content Management is about people. Is that too predictable, does this mean I am going to wang on about ease of use? [ read more ]

Suddenly, everyone in the content management world has jumped off the Web 2.0 buzzword bus and jumped on the one marked ‘Engagement’. What does this mean? Where are we really going? Folks seem to have merely scribbled out yesterday’s out of favour term ‘Web 2.0’ and inked in ‘Engagement’ and are using it as a label for community building; social media web tools – like blogs, wikis and comments. [ read more ]

More thoughts on Vignette and OpenText. The news of OpenText planning to gobble up Vignette and the recent Interwoven acquisition by Autonomy sees a new chapter for these grandees of content management and I think is further evidence in the shifts that have been occurring in this market around Enterprise Content Management and what organisations really want to do. [ read more ]

I recently read and commented on one of the many great blog posts out there that give advice on how companies approach the social web, in this article Kevin Gibbons lays down some basics – have a purpose, write well, be transparent and to basically be nice to your audience.

All great points. My comment was to be yourself, be a person.

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So the G20 summit meetings here in the UK are over and whatever your views and reflections on the whole event and the circus that surrounds it – it’s been an interesting week.

Interesting for lots of reasons of world politics, but my focus here is that it was interesting from an audience engagement and social web perspective.

We saw how the voices of social web crowd are becoming more influencial in the traditional news agenda, where the messages have been entwined, as the traditional news media has leveraged the crowd, while the crowd have consumed, commented on, debated and shared the traditional news commentary.  

This has not been without controversy. This editorial article from Management Today claims that the news agenda has been dumbed down, by the ‘traditional’ news media lazily following and being influenced by the social web, instead of providing a calmer, more considered and measured commentary. 

We are also seeing that every campaign now engages with their audience through a social web element – a trend that matured into the main stream during the Obama election campaign. In this case a UK government department, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, reached out to its citizens through this website, dedicated to the summit (a website that is powered by Alterian). Here you can see a rich site that is packed with opportunities to participate, blogs, a Twitter feed, aggregated comments as well as video, RSS feeds and all the engagement features that we’d have considered innovative and ‘web 2.0′ – especially for a government department -  a year or so ago. 

In the interests of balance, you could probably say that our technology is powering both sides of the debate – the UK trade union Unite uses our software to power their website and leverage many of the same social software engagement tecqniques, through a presence on Facebook, Union TV, feedback on articles  and the ability to customise the homepage, BBC style.   

What we are seeing is that engagement over the web is not just about customer engagement, or being like Amazon, it’s about connecting with people, influencing, communicating with and persuading folks through the power of the web. Regardless of the organisation – or message - websites need to show dynamic, rich content and have strong social media ties to share that information – engaging the crowd in the debate.

Whatever the objective, the smart organisations are putting content at the heart of their campaigns.

At the beginning of last week a CMS 'meme' broke out, where CMS vendor bloggers were challenged to reveal something about their products functionality and then tag other vendors to do similar. Day kicked this off from their developer site using a set of questions posted by Kas Thomas at CMS Watch, In this post, I make a belated Alterian contribution. [ read more ]