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.

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.

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.

I admit, I haven’t exactly taken to blogging like the proverbial duck to water and I gave a lot of thought about comments; what to use, whether to moderate and all that when I started to blog and I wrote about my thoughts in previous posts - Community and Comments and Any Comments.

I gave Reddit a go and Disqus, both excellent – but I have settled on using the functionality built into WordPress and a bit of spam filtering –  which is working for me.

The first thing that jogged me back into thinking about comments was Chris Brogans blog, his article on Audience is King – he describes the fact that the value of a blog is all about the audience. In the comments the value of the discussion at some point probably outweighed the original few paragraphs that Chris penned – nicely making his point.

(Ironically in researching the opposite opinion, that content is king, I found a blog about content without a comment function at all).

Clearly neither Content nor Audience is really ‘king’ – a point that then comes out in the discussion around that article, it’s a symbiotic relationship – the content sows the seeds for the community or an audience that forms around it.

Content also has a pivotal role in search engine optimisation and you got to have a bit of that to be found by your audience via Google.

Anyway, back to my point – the next experience that had me thinking about comments was when I commented on a blog post at CMSWatch. Like a good CMSWatch tribe citizen, I authenticated with IntenseDebate (who I’d previously registered with, so that I could leave a comment there) and typed away.

Job done, right? My brilliantly crafted contribution to this subject inserted – let the engagement begin. But no. Hang on. It needs to be moderated.

Hmm… a moderated conversation, not really in the spirit of social media, but I can understand why I guess, I too have had that ‘moderate posts’ box ticked, as I felt my way with this blogging stuff.

The trouble was that it then took six hours for the comment to be moderated and the moment is lost. We are all so used to Twitter I guess that this just seemed like an enternity. So if you need to moderate, you need to do it fast (I have switched off moderation).

I also felt that having to jump through the hoop of registering, the login process and the fact that I’d commented before should have made me slightly more trusted than ‘anonymous’. This is not the way to build trusted engagement communities.

I also think (hope!) that there is something you can show your audience about yourself by skillfully handling unfavourable posts, or maybe (even better) that your community will do it for you.

Third thing, I read this article on The Next Web by Mike Braco, that talks about cross posting – in it he writes:

the more places you submit your content, the more spread out and less valuable the conversation around it becomes.

Which I have found to a certain extent – reposting on the this-is-marketing blog and here, although I would say ‘fractured’ rather than less valuable as I have appreciated the feedback in both places. There are two audiences for these blogs, but it would be great to merge the discussion.

It’s something to think about when reposting, maybe it’s something to think about ahead of generating the content, where do you want to have a conversation about this?

But hang on… you can’t control the centrality of the discussion, it’ll happen somewhere else whether you like it or not – Twitter? FaceBook? LinkedIn? I think the key here must be to let your audience know where the conversation might be – where you and your audience digitally hang out.

So, comments – feels to me like you should open up and not moderate comments, but reserve the right to delete. If you insist on moderating, do it quickly and consider trusting folks that have commented before or bothered to authenticate. Think about your audience and any possible discussion when deciding where to post.

My focus over the last few months has been of transition from Mediasurface Morello CTO, through our companies acquisition by Alterian to my new role as VP Content Management Strategy – and suddenly those few months have turned into six!

Its a big acquisition – both physically for a business our size, with Alterian doubling in number and in terms of the opportunity we have with joining up these two product suites. I talk a lot about audience engagement and persuasive content in particular and the Alterian products provide the analytics - the intelligence to drive that vision.   

I have played in the crowded WCM space for almost 10 years and this will provide us with the capability to offer something different. Being part of a marketing platform also offers us a new audience – the people that use our products, not just the typical IT buyers, but to the marketers and communicators. It’s been great to start talking directly with these folks, to new (for me) partners and customers.

Anyway, my blog will also change – as you can see I’ve redesigned it and as I’ll be blogging soon on our corporate website, Persuasive Content is now my personal blog.

Hope you’ll find something here to enjoy.

In this post he’s found that most blog readers use an RSS aggregator or reader of some kind to stay current and that rather interestingly he feels that the comments on his blog are in fact a valuable, if not the most valuable part of what he is presenting and encourages us to drop by his site from time to time.

This is a great point, about what your blog is for and I guess for Jeremiah, as an industry observer, the feedback and participation he gets from his community is critical and viewing his community through an RSS reader is like standing way back from a presentation and then leaving before the Q&A slide.

Jeremiah wants to give you the opportunity to engage with his community and get involved. I simply think it’s a courtesy to drop by the website of the content you are consuming, to get some context or even to view the ads that might be helping the author devote time to it – not all content is free – and I think a quick trip down someone’s link is a small price to pay. There’s not much to see at persuasivecontent.com, but a good blog article has taken me to plenty of interesting places.

The alternative is that bloggers will start to follow the practice of only including a one line teaser in the RSS and to read the whole article you have to click on the link – and that’s just annoying….

Genuine feedback is useful and can be very rewarding, but a quick poll around our office shows wildly different views – and these folks are seasoned web professionals.

Firstly, why not? Well Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent article about this, building on an article by Dave Winer to make a pretty compelling reason for not having comments and encouraging people to share their views through their own blog.

Seems very straightforward, he basically argues against anonymous comments and suggests that people should engage through the blogging community and share their views and be accountable for them through their own blog (please read the articles as I am summarizing wildly here). I agree whole heartedly, his example of a community conversation on a real estate blog degenerating into, well, the worst kind of hatred and bigotry makes a pretty convincing case. In any case, throwing up a blog is simple and free for most people

On the flip side this article from Jeff Atwood, a well articulate opinion that “a blog without comments is not a blog” – a position apparently completely opposed to that of the Dave Winer view that a blog is “one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think”

Jeff’s lucky, he then gets a stream of fairly well ordered comments from his audience and all seems well, until 24th April Jeff reveals he’s been deleting comments.  So, without his moderation what would that conversation have looked like?

I agree with Joel that when a comments spiral out of control an article can be “followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.” I personally find that distracting and I’ll take this opportunity to add my personal annoyance; someone who comments and freely admits they didn’t bother reading the previous comments. That’s not a conversation that’s barging into a discussion, covering your ears and shouting.

I am also in a slightly different position in that I am using our product (Morello) to write this and I’d like to show off its community features. I could compromise, have moderated comments, using workflow approval to display only those comments that I like. But that’s not really going to make the comment camp happy as they want a free and open discourse.

I also found parts of this article interesting on ReadWriteWeb, the 5 Tools Everyone Working Online Should Have, specifically of relevance here is the view that everyone should have a blog and the authors experience of including all of his contact details on his blog.

So, I settled for agreeing with Joel and use reddit,  so if you find the discussion of an article distracting you can ignore the reddit link,  if you want to contribute you have a public forum. But, I also include my e-mail address if you want it to be more personal.