Hovering Over The Back Button

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 ]

A couple of weeks ago Alterian aquired Techrigy who specialize in Social Media Monitoring and whilst its obviously exciting to be part of an organisation that is confidently aquiring and growing - it's even better when it's an absolutely gem that has everyone talking. So, I thought I'd better jot down a few thought on this - what does Social Media Monitoring mean for Web Content Management? [ read more ]

Had a few interesting experiences with commenting on blogs recently that got me thinking about blog comments and its still pretty patchy how we are approaching it. They are the essential lifeblood of audience engagement, especially for bloggers as they take the experience from a click statistic to a conversation. [ 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 ]

In a period of tightening budgets marketing leaders would seem to be at a crossroads, do they innovate and boldly engage with the audience to help shape their strategy or do they stick what they traditionally know?

Forrester observe that 25% of marketers, faced with the recession are choosing the latter and yet this could be the very time for going with the new and grasping these new audience engagement channels. 

In this article at MediaPost -Online Media Daily, Gavin O’Malley discusses marketing strategies as budgets are tightened, referring to the latest Forrester research by Lisa Bradner, following their survey of 102 marketing leadership professionals. 

“Consumer needs change rapidly in response to economic uncertainty .. Companies that track those shifts and respond to them quickly can find new avenues for growth.”

The Forrester report, as the article observes,  states that to stay current with these quickly changing demands requires embracing social media as a quick, inexpensive route to the hearts and minds of the consumer. 

Compared with expensive focus groups or surveys, social technologies are viewed as cheaper and able to give almost instant consumer feedback, while they embrace consumers as participants in the innovation process.

In contrast consumers are driven differently, feeling more conservative:

During this downturn, for instance, consumers have indicated a shift toward comfort and community, and away from uniqueness and variety.

So, it seems that the consumers might be viewing the world conservatively during uncertain times, but in contrast Forrester conclude that marketers need to be bold in how they stay in touch with those views.

The full report from Forrester can be purchased here.

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.

[ read more ]

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 ]

Is your website is a living thing? While I am sure you wouldn't cast your website in the role of a monster, this classic line from the 1931 Frankenstein film captures that moment, when your website bursts into activity, that blip on your website statistics graph.  "Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive..." Of course your website is not a monster – it’s a beautiful thing, someone in the web team has given you a puppy. [ read more ]