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”

I promised at the end of the presentation to post my slides on Slideshare and indeed I have as you can see below. The problem with my slides is that I talk – a lot – and not all the points are in the slides, so I thought I ought to flesh it out a bit.

I try and bring the thing to life with personal experiences – on the ‘back channel’ of one of our events someone referred to me as ‘the king of analogies’ – is that good?

Anyway – in this case I talked about web engagement being like buying a suit (yes, I’ve done this before and you might have read about this in a guest post I did for CMSWire).

The story I tell is of walking into a suit shop – the guy in the store taking a look at you, guessing your size and taking you to the right part of the rail (possibly paying you a compliment along the way) and as we subtly move to suits that would really fit – he asks a question “What’s the suit for?”

He suggests a suit, we talk about the colour, the style and begins to compare my reaction to one suit or another. Eventually we hit on the perfect suit, it’s not on the rail it’s “out back” and he disappears, returning with a flourish and a sale (of a suit that is probably more than I wanted to spend).

The sale is great, but he’s also learn’t something about a customer like me – next time he might be able to narrow down to the requirements quicker or if he hadn’t made a sale that he needed to stock a certain kind of suit or maybe there is a big wedding in town.

The point I try to make is that this is analogous to a visitor coming to your site and the relationship we should have. The way they arrive, the search terms they have used, their first few clicks, their behaviour, we should use multi-variant A/B testing to compare those reactions – to learn what they want and equally we should understand our content well enough to match it to those interests. The same way that the suit guy knew what he had ‘out back’.

This understanding of our objectives and the audience, feeds our content strategy – what content do we need? The presentation builds on this premise, you need to understand your audience and have a large canon of well understood, relevant and fresh content for your visitor to consume – delivered to the channel, social media platform or website of their choice.

To build that content repository you need to get closer to the folks with the knowledge, the people that your visitors want to talk to (not necessarily sales and marketing) in order to be persuaded, engaged, communicated with – maybe even sold to.

Adoption into your web content strategy by ”Information Knowedge Management Professionals” as Forrester refers to them – the interesting people that really know stuff – will be a key success measurement of your digital engagement strategy.

A super sexy website on launch day one is going to be worthless  if in 6 , 12 or 18 months it’s barren of content or if you are unable to react to your market or the needs of your audience. The same of course is true if you embark on a social media engagement strategy, not just a website – they need to be nourished with a reliable stream of fresh content.

These folks don’t give a stuff about the high principals of content management, they want to use tools they are familiar with or tools they can easily adopt.  But… “easy to use” isn’t just it. I promised to talk about governance and as you can see in the slides – I refer to this as an enabling  environment, of building trust, of devolved approval – who needs more bottlenecks? Who can spend a week going through a process to respond to a tweet?

Anyway, if you were there – hope you enjoyed the presentation - otherwise the event was videoed by the event people, so maybe at some later point I can add a link.

Updated 7th April 2010: Here is the video from the event, but they don’t show the slides!!

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.

For starters I’d better set some context, of what I think about our market historically, so you know where I stand.

Content Management has gone through various trends, casting my mind back, it was once believed that the CMS services (CMS only mean’t web publishing back then) would be commoditised down into the application server and that the application server in turn would be part of the operating system. We would then build content management and deliver applications (or portals) on this common back end – and of course this Java centric world view never came to pass.

Back then a CMS was an IT enabler and part of the infrastructure and that infrastructure grew to become managing all content and knowledge of an enterprise – an Enterprise Content Management System – it’s reach extending to Digital Asset Management, Document Management – the world became obsessed by compliance, records management and the vision moved from the geek to the librarian – of turning organisations into filing systems.

All very worthwhile, but in the meantime the budget and requirements pendulum swung toward the business – and marketing specifically – as they didn’t like the IT focus of these early CMS implementations, didn’t get the greater good of ECM and wanted to focus on the marketing problem at hand – a website they could own.

So, an agile, diverse, vibrant bunch of open source, small to mid-tier vendors rushed into the space the old titans of CMS (now ECM guys) had disconnected from. The focus was on ease of use, of rapid implementation, of appealing to this newly empowered business user and for some, their chums at the agency with easily accessible and cheap site building skills like PHP and ASP.NET.

And increasingly, through social media making people at ease with web publishing – a democratisation of content authoring.

Yes I know, I’ve simplistically crashed through quite a lot of history in a few crude paragraphs, but in a nutshell – we’ve gone from pleasing the geeks, then the librarians to it being all about the business user, the marketer or the communicator.

This broad band of website building offerings, delivery models and tools that enable real people to add pages to a website, from a range of vendors – the ECM leviathans to open source projects – came to be known as WCM. And it is a broad church of technologies, best practice, capabilities (from a blog, a brochureware site to a multi-national roll out of hundreds of personalised sites) and of course prices.

To some a WCM is nothing more than a PHP UI on a database, or maybe it’s a web delivery infrastructure and to others its an intelligent purveyor of well understood personalised content to the discerning, well understood visitor – its hard to tell what’s out of the box and what’s down down to the skill of the crew that builds with it.

Which brings me back to my trend topic and the predictions - this nebulous haze of requirements, product and solution capability has attracted a fair amount of comment, as my fellow bloggers swish around the tea leaves for what’s next.

The general view is that WCM – the acronym, the definition of this as a software space is up for debate and that maybe 2010 is the year we see some changes.

Barb Mosher in Emerging Trends in Web Content Management over at CMSWire says:

we really need to think less about WCM as the only way to categorize a product/solution/platform and start thinking tag lines like “Web Publishing Framework”, “Integrated Online Marketing”, “Content Creation and Management”. Are we caught up in trying to define a market that is changing so rapidly that it really defies definition?

Laurence Hart (@piewords) also touches on this, in his Predictions for 2010 post:

Constantly Hyping Acronyms Of Systems: WCM is suffering. It doesn’t really cover mobile platforms well and there are big differences in the presentation and the management of the landscape.

Enterprise Content Management and WCM will go their separate ways. Okay, that isn’t going to happen, but it NEEDS to happen. Why? Because it is distracting them from their core, which is the platform and their core applications.

This last comment was inspired by the CMSWatch predictions, one of which being that Document Management and ECM will go their separate ways (so if ECM and WCM are splitting, who’s left at the ECM party?). CMSWatch also inspired a typically entertaining post from Jon Marks – in which he says:

Enterprise Content Management is well defined. The term WCM is horseshit, unnecessary and should take a long walk off a short pier….. I can already see the news headlines: LONDON, 2009 – SHOCK HORROR! WCM Geek Demands Death of term WCM. But it’s true. I’m of the camp that wished the term WCM would cease to exist.

Jon then goes onto de-construct WCM into its constituent parts, with an underlying content infrastructure layer with common standards (CMIS/JCR), separated from a delivery framework.

His post inspired Seth Gottlieb at Content Here, who agrees, wondering if we should go back to calling it CM  - you should also check out Peter Monks and The Case for Killing “WCM”, inspired by Jon (and he nicely puts how we WCM folks feel about Jon calling us losers!). Then, if you haven’t had your WCM predictions fill, then I’d also suggest a look at this from Peter Monks on his shiny new personal blog.

I am not sure how one goes about creating the tipping point that defines a new software segments or niche, how do we get customers asking for one of these new website-publishing-but-not-WCM-doohickies?

Clearly the analysts are key to this, CMSWatch had a stab at realigning their tiers and I think that’s definitely work in progress and needs at least a bit more explanation, Gartner have got back into WCM after a long absence of ECM focus and Forrester have long observed WCM as part of the marketing platform mix. But – I am sure that CMSWire, Jon, Peter, Seth, Barb and Lawrence have more influence than they admit, so perhaps it could be the year of the death of the definition of WCM as we know it today.

OK, so I had better venture my own predictions, it would be rude not having had a look at what these folks have had to say.

Personally, I think whatever we call it – we’ve had the era of IT, the librarian and the business user/marketer – and whilst clearly all of these folks should be catered for in the WCM of 2010 – I think it’s the era of the audience, our community, citizens or customers – the visitor.

Yes folks, it’s web engagement – sorry, did I say I wan’t going to talk about that…?

Image of cystal ball published under Creative Commons License, courtesy of  Bitterjug

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.

As Irina Guseva of CMSWire (who was at JBoye) points out in this post - the first point to consider is whether there is something that needs fixing?

Apparently at the conference – CMS Watch’s Jarrod Gingras was certain there’s nothing to fix and I have to agree. As a software genre it’s vibrant, there is a strong open source community and I reckon I could find a new vendor every week. I also discovered, meeting a new competitor at the last big Internet show I was at – there are VC’s out there still funding start ups (in Scandinavia!).

I have a small theory here (not about Scandinavia), but that in it’s most basic form a CMS is a database (or data store of some kind) with a user interface and a web application – it’s an accessible idea for developers (heck, I even built something in PHP for a personal website once) and this contributes to this diversity, despite the countless CMS options available – of folks continuing to build their own, in the shape of their own niche, geography or ‘unique’ requirements.

This leads me to the next observation made on Twitter, WCM or CMS is a broad church and many folks saw that terminology, the software classification as needing a fix – the fact that there was confusion initially on the hashtag, probably tells it’s own story as people moved from using #FixCMS to #FixWCM.

This discussion got more granular, the suggestion seemed to be that products and I guess their strengths and fit for niche should define them. Market niches have always been ‘crowd sourced’ as industry observers and analysts have defined them (not vendors) and the market adopts them, so it’ll be interesting if this idea gains any momentum.

There were very few suggestions of what we should call them, but it seems that this would provide more evidence that the industry being organised around tiers based around the size of the implementation (or budget) is flawed.

Talking of organizing the industry into tiers – analysts – they also got a few mentions.

What helps customers best; a simple magic quadrant or a weighty volume with detailed look at 41 vendors? Personally, I think this needs to be part of the mix, organisations should talk to the analysts about your own needs, analysts reports are written academically, independent of a real project.

As CMSWatch and Gartner got a nod in these discussions, I’ll mention Forrester, as I think their model serves customers well, they have a very transparent RFP like process, based around real life requirements (as they see them) and they score vendors against those and publish the scores – it irons out a bit of the analysts gut feel, emotion and how good a vendors marketing might be. It also gives someone trying to choose a vendor a matrix by which they can look at their own requirements and compare.

Hmm… matrix of requirements – could that form the new WCM niches?

Anyway, back to the subject at hand – requirements got more than a few mentions and the way organisations form them internally and present them during procurement.

RFP’s and sizing up a vendor for the job seemed to be the only thing that got a definitive agreement on – it’s about the organisations own requirements, not an IT wish list or a generic downloaded RFP  and these things should be presented as scenarios – with stakeholders and business owners.

I wholly agree with that, I would also suggest that if an organisations presents a well structured set of scenarios, requirements supported by business value, a clear objectives (and dare I say budget) – vendors will self determine if it’s for them or not. No vendor, agency or systems integrator wants to embark on the expensive process of bidding for business that they don’t fit, that they don’t feel they can win or enter into an unsatisfactory partnership.

Whilst much of the discussion was around the pre-sale, selection, procurement and the vendors offering. The implementation got a bit of focus, with some of the arguments getting some fresh debate – of whether a vendor should do the implementation, whether you should choose an implementation partner first, who should help an organisation choose a vendor and whether in fact the track record of the implementation folks was more important than the vendor.

I don’t think I agree with any of these exclusively, clearly the right combination of crew and technology is essential and partners provide a fabulously broad set of experience and skills that a web engagement project needs outside of the vendor software skills. Although I think vendors should maintain a professional services team, not to compete with implementation partners, but to provide subject matter expertise and a valuable direct connection between the product and it’s market.

There was also talk of pilots and proof of concepts, again from my point of view, an excellent opportunity for organisations to really get their requirements across and for the business partnership to be tested and forged.

So, what am I missing…? Oh yes… vendors.

It seems pricing complexity was the primary issue – I’d encourage folks to engage with their vendor on how they want to commercially partner with them – but it seems there are some complex models out there that are bending customers and their partners architectural choices to fit.

Thanks to Jon for being the catalyst of this discussion, I haven’t added links to everyone’s tweets as linking to all would render this post unreadable and I found it difficult to pull out one tweet over another – I would however urge you to check out the #fixwcm and #fixwcm hashtags on Twitter and the following posts:

• #jboye09 Web Content Management: Inconvenient Truths and Industry Challenges By Irina Guseva
• Let’s #fixwcm Before The Wheels Come Off by Jon Marks
• My JBoye09 Fix WCM Presentation by Jon Marks
• The World’s Worst WCMS by Seth Gottileb
• Rethink Content Management by Janus Boye

A long post, with lots of  stuff that hopefully I can mine in future posts,  but what do you think, what did I miss? Does WCM need fixing?

Image of workshop reproduced under Create Commons License courtesy of M J M

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.

I am guessing that you can guess who we believe are the ‘who’ is of Web Engagement (sorry to spoil the ending for you!) – but on your way there you’ll get some really nice quotes from analysts, our customer and other industry experts, wrapped up in some text from me and the team that we hope will help and inspire you.

The books will be used as part of a marketing campaign pretty soon and when that starts you’ll be able to register for one on our website – but if you are interested in getting one in the meantime let me know (it’s free!!).

*** update 16th September 2009 – You can now register to have the little book sent to you here ***

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?

I am also obviously going to talk about Web Content Management, which I think is interesting as this turns the discussion from the theoretical and well ordered filing system that your organisation should become, to being about achieving something. WCM is about publishing to the web, not about having well ordered drawers of stuff.

I’ve been in this WCM industry awhile, so lets put aside the crystal ball a minute and ask if we have yet delivered on the CMS promise of 10 years ago? (That’s we as in our industry, rather than we as in our company). Of the democratisation of contributing content, of connecting our Knowledge and Information Workers (as Forrester refers to them), the people that know stuff – with the people that want to know stuff?

And I don’t mean those projects where we have hundreds of content authors or an Intranet, I mean connecting the real people (not hundreds of marketers) in an organisation with your audience through the web.

Connecting people? That sounds like a job for social media. With Social Media we are now breaking down communication and marketing barriers in 140 character chunks. Are our websites, or the messaging and brand values they are used to project now being blown apart and deposited in crumbs around the web? We are now potentially all becoming the messengers, representatives, dare I say marketers for our organisations and any other brands, products, destinations, services we interact with and comment upon. But, for all that, websites are still the destination – the majority of tweets are linking people with web content.

Peng T. Ong (founder of Interwoven) in a the forward of the 2001 book “Web Content Management: A Collaborative Approach” – he talks about the motivation behind founding Interwoven – of enabling users and ‘web masters’ (it was 2001) who are “enmeshed in trying to launch websites” amidst the “chaos of building websites” – pains that organisations still feel today.

We are also seeing the “enterprization” of social media, corporate twitter governance, of paid bloggers and of a greater profile for blogging on corporate sites. We are all becoming accustomed to consuming opinion and news when researching products and services and I think we are become less tolerant of and less attentive to the polished sales and marketing message – people want to meet and understand the people behind the brand, we want to hear their opinion and see them. This appears to be to be convergence, as the ownership of the message is moving from marketing to ‘the people’ as at the same time the consumer becomes more accustomed to and expectant of a less formal, blogger, opinion based style of content.

This gets me back to my point, publishing web content is about the people – tools will need to be adopted by engineers, consultants, product managers and customer service reps – not just sales and marketing – the people our audience want to get a feel of.

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.

Is that right? Is that Engagement?

I think to a certain extent it is. Social media is just one pillar of an organisation’s audience, citizen or customer engagement strategy, and to implement this we do need tools. Having access to social media tools on your website also says something about you as an organisation and if you can motivate your community to comment, then even better. We all love the opinion of someone else like me that bought this product.

As well as the tools that we tack onto our own websites, there are of course also tools to reach out to other folks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and WordPress, which is perhaps a more essential focus for a social media strategy. What people say on these sites will hold more weight for your audience – it’s independent and it’s discussed with a community of folks that have self-selected and could potentially be your audience.

How frequently do people engage with you when they have some thoughts on your products and services, compared with how often they engage with each other, with their friends, with other people in your potential audience and community?

I know from my own browsing habits if I don’t like a website, its brand, its products or its prices, I’ll not hang around to leave a comment – 99.99% of the time I’ll vote with my mouse and go elsewhere.

I am not saying 99.99% to be sensational, think about how many site visits you make, visits that made you think about something or that you had a reaction to – how many times did you leave a comment? It’s a fraction of a percentage.

I have a burning desire to get something done or find something out – my time (and that of your visitors) is precious. And, of course, only a tiny fraction of these experiences will get me sufficiently engaged and emotional to bother Tweeting about it.

So, what can you learn from what people are doing and saying when they interact with us – the other 99.99% of those conversations, when people don’t comment?

People will engage with us through behaviour, through coming to our website, clicking on our content, linking to us, buying our products, downloading our whitepapers or reacting to our call to action.

It’s that kind of non-verbal communication (alright, so typing a comment isn’t ‘verbal’ but hopefully you see what I mean) that we need to analyze because it is at the crux of our engagement conversation. Even the simple metrics of how long people stay, how many pages they view and how deep they go will give you some insight.

What we’ve established here is that those that comment are the minority – an important minority, but still a minority. Putting too much focus in your engagement strategy on this noisy minority might mean you are missing something that good analytics would indentify. Engagement is about understanding and listening, and not just to the people that are shouting.

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.

I’ve often described ECM as turning your organisation into a filing system, a necessary activity that keeps everything neat, ordered and regulatory compliant. It brings operational efficiencies and it can even help save the planet as you de-dupe and remove all that redundant server room kit.

The functionality and products of an ECM suite are all about that business function of keeping stuff ordered, records management, document management, asset management etc. Over the past 5 years this is the path that both Interwoven and Vignette set themselves strategically on, mainly through acquisition.

This was the path to becoming the new SAP or IBM and to becoming the System Integrators friend through alignment with big business change and major IT projects. Documentum, arguably the ECM pioneer was swallowed up by a storage company EMC (which kinda emphasises the point).

In the meantime, specialised Web Content Management vendors had stuck to their knitting, detected the shift toward agile solutions for business users and away from big IT projects. Technically organisations started to go “small IT” to bet their on-line business on Open Source, SaaS, Microsoft and away from the traditional platform of the web (Sun/Oracle).

Many vendors have prospered in a vibrant space that Vignette and Interwoven originally helped shape, driven by new business focused mantras of “ease of use” and “quick time to value” – of engaging the marketer, the communicator or anyone outside IT who has a message to deliver over the web.

These are things that I have always considered as delivering on the promise of content management software – yes you need the IT stuff to work, yes you need governance, but to truly deliver it’s about democratizing the contribution and user adoption. The web site as a business tool.

To put it very simply, you have a divergence of ECM and WCM – but I don’t identify myself with you as a brand because you have a neat and tidy warehouse or you are Sarbanes-Oxley complaint – it’s good to know, but it’s not what I like about you.

The challenge to the marketer is not about simply publishing content, it’s about what our websites are for – the audience – or more specifically the websites role in persuading, encouraging, educating, communicating – engaging the audience to act.

This is a trend that really came through at Internet World this year in London, with vendors and speakers talking engagement (some based solely on a screenshot of Google Analytics).  

So, what interests me about the two acquisitions (so far, it’s still early) is that the OpenText path appears to be doggedly ECM (with a bit of social media), whilst Autonomy is talking the language of engaging with the visitor making the Interwoven acquisition look far more interesting.

Also published on our corporate blog.

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.

In my experience, the social web seems to be much more people centric than the rigid old days of communicating over the web through fairly static ‘brochureware’ sites and brand engagement built around established channels of marketing, sales and support.

Over the social web people will respond to you being you rather than a faceless corporate. There is also the old saying that ‘people buy from people’ and the social web gives you a great opportunity to return to this personal engagement.

But a few days after making the comment, it occurred to me it’s not as straightforward as that – who best represents ‘you’ as a company, as a brand?

Your CEO? Whilst he probably embodies ‘you’ as a financial entity, the acceptable face of ‘you’ to the city, to the accountants, he may not resonate with the people who buy your products. Alright, there are exceptions, but not every company has a Steve Jobs at the helm. Similarly one of your talented engineers may be able to out geek a darkened room of Metallica fans – but is he you?

How about this from the blogs of ZDNet – Is it time for a Chief Social Media Officer? of putting someone at the C-level to sort it all out?

The answer will be different in every company and is probably dictated more by the kind of audience you have – but it seems to me that companies should invest time in finding and enabling whoever is ‘you’ in the organization and encouraging them to contribute to your website, tweet, blog, set up discussion groups etc, give them the time and maybe the title to do that.

There is inevitably more than one ‘you’ – a social web strategy should consider relevancy as of course ‘you’ are different to different audiences and those different audiences will be on different channels.

The stock exchange know you are innovative, but ultimately safe and the CEO creating a MySpace page will do nothing to enhance ‘you’. But if you sell skateboards and your cool new intern likes to video himself throwing himself off the steps of the town hall for some ‘gnarly’ moves – then his MySpace page probably will.

So, be yourself and if you can’t do that, find the people who are.

Cartoon kindly contributed by Tom Smith,  see more from the drawing board of Tom Smith here

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.

Lots of other vendors were soon in, having been tagged. This generated a lot of buzz on Twitter and the CMS blogging community, probably being best documented by Jon Marks on his blog “Jon on Tech”, Irina Guseva’s blog and Julian Wraith’s blog . Day also do a nice job of describing what the meme is all about.

So, I’ll avoid a commentary of what has happened and urge you to visit these blogs for the full story. I share some of the concerns of some of the other vendors – in that basically to describe the CMS software industry as a “broad church” is an understatement and so to try and get a picture of this industry through a few short questions is not going to suit everyone. Vignette put this very well:

It would be great if this meme could start to help all customers understand the broad range of solutions in the big space of WCM applications, and which ones best meet their Web experience needs.

The focus of the questions is on procurement and install, which in our experience (a sentiment shared by plenty of the vendors tagged) is only a small part of why an organisation would choose a vendor. Kas’s original article seems to me, to be focusing on this software as a commodity as a simple service or product who’s procurement should be accessible through the web, he suggests that the web software vendors are out of step with the world in which we sell.

I like Kas’ blog and that has a certain ring to it – but the truth is that implementation of a CMS system is not always about the end result – the website – but actually demands cultural and business process change that does require a much more consultative, solution – in person – sales process and sophisticated post implementation support that may involve multiple parties.

Splitting between the best vendor to fit your CMS needs also takes some thought. As Forrester comment, there is a gap that needs to be bridged between the technical tool set, marketing and the folks that they define as “knowledge and information professionals” – the people that know the stuff you want to get to your audience.

So, user adoption would feature much higher in most projects than how simple the install or software procurement process is.

This business vs technical debate interestingly manifested itself in the decision of where best to respond to this meme, I chose here as I am guessing this audience is more CMS technical focused – but it could have been our new official blog at http://www.this-is-marketing.com. But what would the marketing audience there make of all this techniness? Anyway, I have, as ever digressed…

In agreement with those that have gone before me – to get involved with something like this is a good thing – so, first off, I guess I ought to apologise for our tardiness (a week is a long time in Twitter) and lets get on with the games.

Let me also point out to those that don’t know us – we have two Content Management products aimed at two different markets – detailed here – and our Content Management functionality came by way of the acquisition of Mediasurface (detailed here) and I am going to answer for both products, or editions as we call them.

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Yes it does.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

I think I’d join the others that have answered this with a ‘why is this important’ – but in the spirit of it all – it might not. That would depend on the product and platform you have chosen. If you are implementing our Enterprise edition product for Java delivery on a UNIX box – probably not – if you are implementing on Windows then the pre-requisite software definitely will. If your organization has concerns about rebooting boxes, we or one of partners can host the whole thing for you.

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

As a content contributor yes, although some technical administrative functions have not been translated in either product (yet).

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

No, although partners do have access to demonstration software and we are pretty reasonable when folks ask for a hosted demo or a POC.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated “sample web site” and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

Yes

6. We ship a tutorial.

Both products have detailed in-context help for using the product, for developers we have developer documentation with examples, as well as the example sites.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

No, but that seems pretty neat – the slight problem would be that often first line support is offered by our partners or with an internal team. In the Enterprise product we do have chat functionality, so that you can quickly raise issues with a more experienced user or site administrator.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

Yes.

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

Yes, we are also implementing an integrated web application using to the rest of the Alterian platform – not just the WCM products – to include email and marketing analytics.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Yes, we have pretty mature, well established WCM sales channel who understand this space, many of our engagements are driven by partners who can also call upon years of experience with both our products and with CMS products in general. The recent acquisition means that we have a whole bunch of new folks to turn into CMS evangelists, but these guys are backed by an incredibly knowledgeable business consulting / pre-sales team.

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes – I thought Sitecore’s response to this was interesting – in that if you have a vibrant implementation channel, the onus is on the vendor to stay honest.

12. We don’t charge extra for our SDK.

No, we do not.

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

Yes, it’s basically a CPU model for Enterprise and a matrix of users and servers for Corporate.

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Yes, by product and geography to reflect local markets.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Yes, I’m here – oh hang on you said ‘top executives’ – our CEO and Marketing VP blogs on www.this-is-marketing.com. Our CTO blogs there too, as well as at Talbot on Technology and is on Twitter – www.twitter.com/mike_talbot

—- Update – been prompted to add this ID: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf as suggested by Bertrand Delacrétaz to help Google find related pages —-