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 think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I’ve tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – I say “we took” but @janusboye certainly had a hand in igniting it.

Alright, I admit we didn’t quite plan it this way – but that’s the lesson of the new social media powered PR – you can’t always control it and it’s often a test of reactions – of ensuring you have the right tools, people and message to do that.

In this post (as I tend to on this blog) I’ll be focusing on my experience – you can read our official news release on Alterian Content Manager 7, it’ll give you some background as what I am going to ramble on about here.

Anyway, Tuesday a rumour is going around, I get a couple of DM’s – and Janus mischievously tweets:

sources tell that Alterian will soon discontinue Immediacy / Alterian CM Corp. Edition – wondering if customers will enjoy the sunset

Ah… not entirely true, but now it’s out there – so strap yourselves in folks – you’re launching a product strategy on social media!

The vigilant Irina Guseva of CMSWire clearly had her ear to the ground and grabbed me for an exclusive interview and in no time at all (how does she do that so fast?)  published – Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands.

In the meantime – and this demonstrates the diversity of this CMS community – there’s a CMS Haiku competition going on – Jon Marks (@mcboof) is offering free beer to the winners (yes folks, the stakes are raised, this isn’t about product marketing any more, it’s about beer) – he dares me to pitch in:

@iantruscott  Now that @irina_guseva  has broken the news (http://bit.ly/b8RQlO), can’t you re-break it in #cmshaikuform?

I quickly scan through the social media bibles; “Groundswell”, “Here Comes Everybody”, Jeremiah Owyang’s entire blog archive – no mention of haiku as a required skill of today’s social media marketer.

In truth, I admit, I did have to Google how exactly to write haiku – more on my first poetic foray later.

The next day starts with what we eventually agree was a Twitter interview (no doubt someone calls these “twinterviews”) by James Hoskins (@JamesHoskins) – long time social media agent provocateur – especially when it comes to all things CMS and Alterian.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to find this conversation, James and I didn’t hashtag it and twitter doesn’t lend itself to a Q & A structure, unless you want to read it backwards through replies – and I haven’t really got room for it all here. We have however ensured that the excellent points James has made are in our official communications.

This goes on all day and some of the next, with other folks now pitching in with questions – at the end, James pays me a huge compliment:

#followfriday @iantruscott  - raising the bar for other WCM vendor VPs in openness and engagement #alterian

Meanwhile – Adriaan Bloem (@AdriaanBloem) of CMSWatch got in touch, for a quick briefing, we have a positive chat and he quickly knocks up this blog post – provocatively titled “Alterian Drops Immediacy” and written in the house style, of a father warning his daughters to watch out for those vendor types, with their high-falutin’ words and fancy charming ways – nothing wrong with that – but please read my (admittedly lengthy) comment response.

Crikey.. now I’ve got Philippe Parker (@proops) encouraging me to haiku.

@IanTruscott impressed you can explain your strategy in #140 – now please do it as a #cmshaiku

So.. double dared… here goes.

C M C or E / Here me Alterian say / Autumn is Future

Which surprisingly made it to the short list and the community got to vote – it got a respectable 3rd, but no beer. (I could protest – the haiku rules I play by said it needed to include a season!).

So folks, that’s it. A few days in the life of product marketing via social media. It was fun – demonstrates that today marketing and PR is as much about listening and reacting as it is about planned strategies. It also sparked off a whole bunch of interesting conversations I’ve had with clients and partners since.

..and to whoever whispered that rumour in Janus Boye’s ear – I would genuinely like to thank you.

We have been executing a communication plan that started last year with our customer and partner events and we intend that the program will reach all of our customers and partners in the next few weeks. If you have questions about our strategy, then please contact me directly (ian.truscott@alterian.com), or your Alterian representative.

It was recently reported in New Media Age, picked up by the Hubspot blog that Coca-Cola were moving their campaign sites from “traditional” websites to social media platforms and they are not alone, Pepsi recently created a stir as they announced a move from big budget Super Bowl ads to investing in their social media community. So what does this mean for “traditional” web content management?

From a content publishing perspective (rather than a marketing trend) this isn’t really a big deal is it? Surely these guys have merely changed platform – moving to platforms that have greater focus on community tools. Should we now consider YouTube and Facebook as web content management systems or at least web publishing platforms?

Well.. I think.. yes.. and errr.. no.

The core functionality of any content management system, whether its digital assets, structured text content or documents – are the principles of not just authoring/uploading and publishing content – but of governance, permissions models, brand protection and approval processes – stuff these social media platforms simply don’t have.

Does this move suggest that perhaps Coke has surrendered all that back end control for some community features? I think, probably not.

The key I think is the quote from the New Media Age article where Prinz Pinakatt, Coke’s interactive marketing manager for Europe says:

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”

They want to publish content to where their audience is – and their community hangs out on Facebook and YouTube. Of course it’s the community that these platforms have attracted that is their value to these brands, rather than their functional and technical capabilities.

Build it and they will come. That’s the normal mantra of community building on the web, build a fantastic destination, invest in attracting visitors and encourage them to interact, engage and form your tribe.

But, hey with these social media networks – someone else has already built it and the people have already arrived.

As I referred to in my last post, there is a lot of talk about the redefinition of WCM, of separating the management bit from web delivery - publishing to social media networks could be a strong use case of that. That organisations are increasingly going to think of these sites as part of their multi-channel publishing strategy.

Of course the nice thing about the “build it and they will come” philosophy is that you exclusively own that community, you can listen to their interactions through web analytics and personalize or adapt your content and delivery in response.

A social media publishing strategy therefore needs a social media listening strategy to build that insight – but more of that in future posts.

But for now, as web publishers, looking to engage our visitors we need to rethink our idea of what the ‘destination’ is.

Coke Triumphant image courtesy of Oliver Scott reproduced under Creative Commons License.

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

I have been asked to write a Christmas or holiday themed post, now I don’t normally write what I am asked, especially when it sounds this, well lets be honest – cheesy – but, if you bear with me, I think I can do it. So, web content management, persuasive content, customer engagement and the holidays…. hmmm…

Lets start with me stumbling over whether this is a “holiday” post or a “Christmas” post. In the UK it’s firmly Christmas and calling it a holiday post would demonstrate that I am talking to a US audience. Writing and delivering persuasive, engaging content even in a shared English language is a subtle business.

Back to the topic – regardless of your tradition, I think we can agree that Christmas (or the holidays) is pretty much about some omnipotent being watching your behaviour, seeing if you are bad or good and making a judgment on what you can get in return (hopefully comparing a god with Santa isn’t too offensive, undoing my good work on the ‘holidays’ thing).

Anyway, in our house, the tradition is firmly hallmark, cocoa cola or Turkish saint (whoever you blame for a jolly red Santa) – it’s family, food and presents and whilst we may not be omnipotent, we do the same thing – looking for clues on what will make our loved ones the perfect gift.

Despite this, we have cupboards and shelves that hide tucked away dusty, untouched gifts from me to my wife over the years – indicating that I am not that good an observer of her want, need, taste or behaviour. I am clearly rubbish. How could I improve?

I could invisibly watch her wandering into shops lingering over a scarf or handbag she likes, but doesn’t buy. I could listen as she tells me, she’d much prefer me to spend the money on the children. I could monitor what she tells her friends and family. I could test her reaction, comparing the successful gifts with the dusty rejects. Is this starting to sound familiar?

Well yes, all this is an analogy of how we should be delivering content to our web visitors. They come to us expecting a content gift, tailored to their specific requirements and not in the least bit interested in the holiday tradition of the moment of “surprise”.

There are thousands of little gift givers in the pages of Google search results that this visitor has just come from and one dud pair of socks or an ill judged kitchen implement is going to send them scuttling off to see what everyone else has to offer.

Don’t get me wrong, I think your visitors will love a surprise, a little bundle of content they hadn’t thought of or a special offer on the very thing they wanted to buy – but it needs to be perfect for their needs – your website as a secret Santa – not a lucky dip.

It doesn’t need to be complicated, I often use the analogy of my daily visit to my favourite news site; clicking on sport, clicking on my favourite sport, clicking on my favourite team. I am telling them what I want, I am introducing myself to this site on a daily basis. You wouldn’t need to do that in real life.

So, great Auntie BBC, this Christmas, like every other Christmas I am a Chelsea fan – please remember me.

Image of Christmas presents published under Creative Commons License, courtesy of  allerleirau

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

Today we embarked on an interesting social media challenge, a few folks that I’ve started to hang out with virtually (and more recently in the pub) agreed to meet at a designated time in a Google Wave and set about writing a blog post – in an hour. There was no pre-determined title, no prep, just a blank bit of virtual paper and half a dozen scribblers…

A multi-national, multi-discipline CMS cast of characters was formed; a rough blend of implementation consulting, product marketing, industry commentators and CMS geeks from vendors, systems integrators  and analysts – Jon Marks, Irina Guseva, Adriaan Bloem, Andrew Liles, Justin Cormack and a chap who found himself without a wave account, through some cruel misunderstanding with Google (do you know who he is?) Philippe Parker who I attempted to link into the mayhem through Goto Meeting.

We learnt a lot about the tools (as I tried to work both Google Wave and simultaneously hook up with Philippe in Goto Meeting) – but I found the process just as interesting and the way people interacted, disagreed and eventually collaborated in this new social space.

The tools, I’ll leave for others to chat about and focus a bit on what we did.

The action began on time– with a flurry of simultaneous typing – as the crowd tapped away at suitable titles.

Impressively, well I think so anyway as a chap who still doesn’t find the process of blogging easy,  it took about 15 minutes for a theme to emerge and coalesce into a title. The crowd was in the mood to rant and the title was eventually toned down to “Things We Hate About Content Management”.

It was probably at this point that I felt like the bloke that drinks beer and finds himself in that young and trendy vodka bar, it’s kicking off, the cool kids are dancing and I am asking for the music to be turned down – “errmmm, you can’t say that!”.

The really weird thing was that it was silent, we are having a  pure Wave experience with no VoIP to aid the discussion and Philippe and I had abandoned getting him dialled into the Goto Meeting session and had resorted to me sharing my screen and the chat window in Goto meeting (which annoyingly I couldn’t copy and paste out of) and yet I felt a strange sort of sensory assault, like being in a room where everyone is talking at once.

The discussion was conducted by the six of us simultaneously typing, as the wave got bigger, it was five other people typing on different parts of the screen, bits of the screen scrolled out of view and I had to scroll up and down to see the action and inject my own thoughts.

Those of you who have not tried the Wave experience, it’s people typing at the same time, you see each letter they type as they type it – not like IM where you type in a private box and then post. (Now there’s a statement that’s going to date fast as this this way of working takes off – really, six people typing at the same time – wow!)

Meanwhile Philippe typed stuff into the chat window and I tried to reflect his thinking and my own in the tide of updates.  This wasn’t crowd sourcing or even content collaboration – it was a furious riot of ideas and opinions, being offered, edited, added to, toned down, expanded upon and sometimes deleted (no you definitely can’t say that about marketing). Sometimes people working in different parts of the article and sometimes three people working on the same sentence. There was even time for a bit of badinage.

At some point, I think it might have been Irina that started bringing order to the chaos, as we decided to flesh out the bullet point style that had formed and turn it into a grown up article.

As Irina started working on the introduction, I noticed one of the interesting things about Wave – not only can you see people type,  how good they are at working a keyboard, or spelling, but also how they form their sentences and self edit. To that end Irina definitely demonstrated her accomplished writing style as perfectly formed sentences sprang seamlessly onto the page.

The blog post forms into a coherent whole as we flesh out the points – too quickly time is called, as Irina (hang on – who made her boss?) – tries to attract everyone’s attention and stop people typing.

When I read it I can sort of hear the voices of some of the authors in some bits, but the collective seemed to have smoothed that out and I think it reads quite well. I think being strict about stopping to time also preserved it’s freshness, it’s rough edges haven’t been edited out, and we haven’t collaborated it to death and made it sound like something agreed by committee.

A few more minutes might have given us a better conclusion, but that was it – done. 1,662 words of crash, crunch, slam, crowd sourced blogging – or whatever moniker the cool kids give it.

We start chatting, in the wave, about publishing it – I’ve already blogged about the lack of publish button in Wave, so using cut and paste Irina immediately published the result here (I was marginally freaked out as I have a cautious approach to hitting publish with my own stuff )  and for Google Wave users Jon posted it by embedding the Wave into his blog.

As people drift out of the wave and I disconnect from Philippe, virtually looking over my shoulder – I am left with a weird feeling, thinking that everyone can see everything I can type regardless of the application (Wavanoia?)!

Even since publishing it’s remained interesting (I think I’ve said interesting about a dozen times in this post), as the Wave is not done, it’s not baked or dried – or whatever analogy we might want to use – it’s a Wave so remains editable, Jon opened it up to everyone to scrawl over – the riot continues. Not in the orderly blog post way, of I’ve said my bit now you can comment, I mean scrawl all over it.

Picture of Lego riot policeman reproduced under Creative Commons courtesy of Dunechaser.

Eric T Peterson - a veteran of the web analytics business, Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified and author some of must read books on Web Analytics – has published a report on what he sees as the current revolution in Web Analytics.

This report focuses on the needs for businesses to not just create reports but to develop insights and recommendations from the data – something that when I am talking about web engagement I have referred to as ‘actionable insight’ and it’s about more than pretty graphs.

Peterson also discusses the data that organisations are capturing and reporting on, the wealth of data available to organizations, from web analytics, to credit card transactions to observations about location – GPS data. He also covers the privacy issues wrapped around that – that people will give up their data, but it has to be in exchange for something valuable to them.

I like Peterson’s analogy of it being like money – the difference between using the money you have and just storing it – in terms of the potential rewards. As the report says:

If today’s business leaders want to take advantage of this treasure trove of intelligence about customers and prospects, a new approach is required. First and second?generation analytic vendors are good at what they do, but mining for correlation and causation within massive, disparate online and offline data sets is simply not what they do. To take the next step, business owners need to explicitly recognize the inherent limitations in these systems and augment them with appropriate systems that are built to extract, transform, load and analyze data regardless of the source.

With certain symmetry with our own Customer Engagement vision, he refers to a third generation of analysis tools that are bringing this together – that companies who treat offline and online as separate data silos will concede ground to their competition that look at this more holistically across their enterprise.

As the report concludes:

The only thing worse than not having data, is having data and not being able to use it.

You can read more about what Peterson has to say or download a copy of the report here.

Recently I was fortunate enough to meet with David Pullinger from the UK governments Central Office of Information (COI), who are driving our government’s citizen engagement strategy  and mandating the policy around which government must adhere to.

It was an incredibly absorbing meeting as we took a fast ride around all elements of where a citizen touches the government, (each of which I would love to have explored for longer than we had) and an interesting mix of mandatory policy, education and technical enablement that his department are driving.

David courteously and patiently indulged my interruptions and there is plenty to write about but, in this post, I’m just going to focus on one very interesting topic – the reduction in the number of government websites.

At first glance it’s easy to assume that this initiative is the old clumsy cost cutting exercise, a not terribly enlightened confusion between the words ‘platform’ and ‘website’,  which we’ve seen before. Whilst there is an understandable element of cost consciousness in this initiative – of recognising that a single WCM platform can manage multiple sites and a new website shouldn’t demand a fresh procurement process – I thought there was a more interesting driver behind it.

That driver is a recognition that the people look for information using search, not by turning up to the correct government agency website (or some obscure sub-site) and dutifully following the navigation. They are using Google and choosing from a list of results which is in direct contrast to the early days of DirectGov – of grouping information around ‘life stage’ on a single portal and assuming people will slot into the right shaped information hole. Today there is recognition that our lives are much more complex and subtle than that, and the way we access information reflects this.

Recognising that would not seem to be rocket science, ooh Truscott that’s SEO you say. But I say this is subtly different. It’s different because if you are looking for the cheapest TV or the information about Persuasive Content, the dynamic of sites competing for those clicks is different from if you are a Government hoping to engage with your people.

If you are a Government agency that provides services, advice or benefits for your citizen you are not competing for clicks – you are the authority, the source; you have the likely #1 search result the searcher needs. For example, there is only one definitive version of the truth when it comes to entitlement to state benefits, how safe a certain food is, the cheapest public transport to Manchester, whether it’s safe to travel to Uzbekistan and how to get a Visa.

What I think COI are saying is that by pruning the number of websites it avoids agencies and other government bodies, sub-sites and campaign sites from competing for those positions on the Google rankings, enabling the citizen to cut through the clutter to the single source of the truth.  They are looking to effectively manage that search page as our portal into government.

This then shifts their focus from individual website silos, to figuring out how search can bring together the information that the citizen needs – a single web page then needs to stand alone in terms of content and context.

To deliver this the UK government is on the vanguard of adopting the semantic web, standards such as RDFa and attracting the advice of Internet luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee (read about their call for developers).

There is plenty more to explore here, but first lesson of Citizen Engagement seems to me to be that the COI have recognised that Google is the new Government portal.

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 ***