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 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

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.

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?

Well, we are in the business of publishing  persuasive content – content that achieves your objectives as a communicator or marketer. Content that engages and persuades your audience into completing your engagement objectives, whether that is to answer your call to action, buy your product, be educated, and become a brand advocate – whatever it is.

As I’ve discussed before, engagement, or persuasion, is a conversation, and how can you enter a conversation by just speaking? Social Media Monitoring (SMM) gives you the opportunity to listen to what your audience needs. It gives you the insight to react to audience feedback, to plan and develop content that fits your audience as you create new campaigns, launch new products or grow your site.

This makes your content more relevant, persuasive and engaging. If your content is written for an audience you know and understand, they are now your community.

The stakes are rising for our websites as they become the front line for customer service, studies show that customers now prefer to try to self serve their enquiry through online FAQ’s and forums - rather than call the call center. I can understand that, I know that even in-store I would prefer to use an iPhone to look up technical specs than talk to some kid in PC World (or Best Buy).

It’s not about what people did, but what they thought or wanted to do

SMM is the missing piece of the puzzle that traditional web analytics can’t solve; an insight into the reaction of your audience. It’s not about counting clicks, downloads or how often they visited – but what they thought of you, your service and your website. What people are saying across the social web is the undiluted, unsolicited voice of your audience rather than the result of you asking for them to fill in a questionnaire or give feedback.

It’s not just about finding these conversations, there could be hundreds, thousand, even hundreds of thousands of mentions of your brand, product or service on the web. Searching for stuff isn’t that hard on the Internet – finding what’s relevant is – and it’s no different when monitoring Social Media.

Techrigy SM2 allows you to understand the sentiment of these conversations by applying language analysis to prioritise, to focus your social marketing efforts and to give you something you can measure.

Actionable Insights.

The value of gaining visibility of the sentiment of your audience grows ten fold if you also have the power to make that insight actionable, for a business user, for example, to be able to quickly change the website to react to ‘the buzz’. Being able to do this with an easy to use WCM tool (like Alterian Content Manager)  has a clear business value in demonstrating that you are agile and in tune with your community.

People’s connectivity through social media means feedback travels quickly and you need to be empowered to be relevant in the moment . For example, you read a question about your product on Twitter, people are tweeting that they don’t know if your product connects to their toaster – that this is a killer feature. You are now enabled to engage with those folks directly, but also to promote your toaster connectivity on your website and in your marketing campaigns.

Optimise the message

Where your audience are hanging out online could be just as important to understand as what they are saying.

People often put the social web or social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc ) into a box, separate from the serious business of corporate websites. But the majority of Tweets contain a link to some content and that content is increasingly corporate even within the realm of social media. Opinion-driven websites such as blogs are adopting a corporate agenda, bloggers are becoming sponsored, Facebook fan pages are being set up as organisations who are keen to engage through real people, and hearts and minds are being won and lost as the lines are becoming blurred.

Do you need to tweak your content promotion to make it more prominent in these places? Do you need to consider having a voice in that community, or changing the tone of voice to fit in better with your community or the context of the place they are? Perhaps you have the wrong people writing your content – if you have a community of engineers on a developers’ discussion group, having marketing shout at them in ‘business speak’ isn’t going to start a conversation.

So – what does SMM do for WCM? Well, the phrase “people buy from people” – never seemed more relevant in these connected times. I’ve discussed on this blog about your brand being ‘you’ and this insight helps you know which ‘you’ you need to be and where that ‘you’ needs to hang out.

Picture of ear trumpets, courtesy of make money not art.

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.

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.

A puppy?

Sure, you didn’t want a stuffed toy did you? 

They could have made you a teddy bear, a very expensive teddy bear. Something that is static, is the same every day that you look at it.

It’s charming enough on day one, but it’s reliably similar on day two and no-one is going to ask you how your teddy bear is by day 3 and I am certainly not making a special trip to see it.

You could of course call up Steiff (your expensive Teddy Bear makers) and tell them that your visitor now needs to see it differently, a new bow or a slightly different pose. Maybe add something, a waistcoat or a hat. Maybe the visitors will swing by if we had a new hat?

But – making those changes is expensive.

No, what you wanted was something alive, dynamic – a puppy. 

If you look after it, your puppy will charm, interact with and engage  your visitor – it will try to please them, as you do. After all, we all know that dogs reflect their owners. 

If treated badly it will – like an unruly dog – upset your visitors, neighbours and friends, financially ruin you, destroy your house and control your life!

Of course you must treat it well and it will also change, grow and evolve – it will adapt to it’s surroundings – your puppy, I mean website, will dynamically reflect changes in your industry, events, breaking trends, product launches and competitive threats.   

So, you have something charming, fresh, dynamic – engaging.  Your website. 

So much for the content and our audience – what about the reader? It’s easy to get advice on the content, the tools you should use, the right title, how to leverage the social web, SEO to drive traffic to your site.. etc etc. But… a visitor is not a reader, web analytics will tell you how many people arrived at the site, but statistics say that 2/10 visitors won’t get much further than that catchy title of yours. In this post, I think about the reader – the one that hangs in there and wants to read your content.

Recently I have realised I am a bit of Luddite, anything beyond five paragraphs of tightly set text and it’s uncomfortable, over eight or nine paragraphs and I have to print it out. I spend the majority of my life sat in front of the LCD screen of my laptop or my desktop PC and I find neither is a comfortable reading experience – but then I don’t have a lot of off-line reading time – so a well meaning pile of undigested great content results. 

Some websites are a joy to read, the combination of compelling, tightly written persuasive content and a beautiful site design can hold my screen attention for longer. Eight paragraphs of tightly written prose by Jeffrey Zeldman about himself, posted on his gorgeous, poster child of a well designed site had me absorbed, but Propelling Brands is full of fantastic, information rich, well researched content and I find myself reaching for the print button each time I come by.

 “Reading is a necessarily solitary experience—like dying, everyone reads alone—but over the centuries readers have learned how to cultivate that solitude, how to grow it in the least hospitable environments.” 

And it’s true, as the author observes, people will read in the most incredible, seemingly uncomfortable places – but totally absorbed by the content. 

As a content author I don’t think we can presume that our reader will make that commitment. Well written, targeted, persuasive content, aimed at a well understood audience and the tools to produce it – is not the whole Persuasive Content picture. Unsurprisingly, as experts on site design, both Zeldman and Mandy Brown demonstrate that it’s also about a clear, easy to read, accessible site.

Well.. this is my eighth paragraph and you are still here, although having read these articles I think I need to give my site design a bit of thought and I wonder if you have printed this out?

In my day to day life, I am usually approaching Persuasive Content from a tools perspective – talking to organisations about understanding and engaging with their audience and enabling the folks with the knowledge and information to translate that into published content. The Persuasive Content architecture as Forrester refer to it.  But, of course all this is all for nought, if the currency of this transaction – the content – is not engaging, educational or persuasive and does nothing to further the objectives of your website.

I have previously talked about the value of well written content in my original Persuasive Content article – but today I came across an excellent article if you are looking for a good place to start. 

In this article, writing for a user experience website I’ve not read before, Colleen Jones  details “Ten Recipes for Persuasive Content” – it’s well written and has advice ranging from talking like a person, in an appropriate tone for your brand, service and audience, to establishing credibility, to tips on the sort of content to include. 

Update: 29th Jan - You might also want to consider having a look at this article by Richard Skaare. I have blogged on one of his articles before, they appear in the Content Wrangler LinkedIn group discussions. In this he discusses finding your voice and some simple tecniques for doing so. 

While on the subject of content, a critical bit of content that is often neglected is the snippet  that attracts people to read your persuasive article, to give you that opportunity. If you are active in the blogging community, that that could be your comments on other blogs, maybe the summary text you choose for your post – but it’s more likely to be the few lines that appear under your link in a set of search results.

People talking about page “meta tags”, the description that you can add to your web page, normally added by a techie or by the tool that you use to create content. This isn’t the complete picture, not all search engines will display the content of this tag in full – but you should pay attention to how your website looks to a potential visitor when you crop up in their search results.

A chap called Kraig Kleemen got my attention today, whilst peddling his ”Must-React System” for sales, he put this post into a Content Management forum on LinkedIn.  In it he refers to a story about how he attracted the attention of Bono, with a targeted message during a chance meeting – which resulted him endorsing his product and writing a forward to his book. 

“While sitting and relaxing I heard a voice not far from me shout, “Hey Bono!” As is natural, I looked in the direction from where I heard my name. I locked eyes with an American man who then stated, “I appreciate so much how you defend the poor of the earth!” Oh my! This American had my undivided attention. The poor of the earth has become a very important, if not vital phrase in my global humanitarian efforts. No one has ever approached me using that phrase. My interest in this American had now piqued, simply because he used the very language that embodies my passion. The American went on to say, “I was formerly on the Board of Directors of an outreach to abandoned children in South America. I appreciate your efforts at getting the modern world to understand the pain and challenges that exist in the rest of the world. Cheers to you, Bono!” Wow. No one had ever approached me like that before. I am accustomed to people approaching me about my music, certain lyrics in a song, and things of this sort. But this man had my attention immediately because he approached me about what is core. What I value. What keeps me up at night. What is central to my goals and purposes in life. I was hooked! I asked my assistant to invite him over to my area of the lounge. Kraig and I visited for nearly an hour, and we have maintained a friendship since. Little did I know that Kraig has developed a powerful selling system entitled The Must-React System, and that he had utilized the principles of The System to lure me into a dialog. I take my hat off to Kraig Kleeman! In a funny sort of way, I guess I am a target who succumbed to The Must-React SystemSM.”

It was posted to “CM Pros” and the first comment from a fellow CM Professional got straight to the point:

Not really seeing the link to content management, here…

But, I got thinking about it, then the next comments popped up the next day:

“this is more of a marketing spiel”

“We call it a Troll.” – from someone working for a bank!

I can sort of see their point but, it seems a bit harsh – if the story is true, then Bono doesn’t feel duped – he seems pleased that someone who provided him with something he values was able to attract his attention.

It’s not clear whether the reference to the cause ‘duped’ him into a friendship or if Kleeman actually was able to benefit one of his causes. But it is clear that Bono values that ‘transaction’.

The story for Content Management practitioners and those of us who care about Persuasive Content Management is that organisations create and manage content for a reason – to be persuasive, engaging, to educate etc.

That is exactly what Kleeman did – through knowledge of his audience – he communicated with Bono, with some compelling content when it seems plenty of other people had failed.

But, the comments demonstrate what a fine line personalisation/persuasive content treads – by placing the story out of context into a CM forum, he aliented this audience, who now feel negative about Kleemen and his company (Blair Group).

Aside from being the name of this blog, what really is Persuasive Content?

The well documented profileration of web content, fueled by increased access to social software and content management tools, tell us that people want to be published, to share their thoughts and participate in on-line communities. Often the publication of content is about more than just a desire to be read, the author wants to encourage site visitors to do something, to participate in their community, to visit their site again, to think a certain way about their company, to participate in a marketing campaign or maybe buy something. The term Persuasive Content has been coined to describe this, typically  well written, relevant content that will persuade your site visitors to do something,

So, can we create Persuasive Content by having a knowledge of our audience, an excellent writing style and access to Blogger.com?

I am not naive enough to believe that if you publish it they will come, but if you’ve got nothing to say or can’t articulate your ideas, values or even describe your product in a coherent way, what is the point of publishing? Google will tell you that relevant content is the most important part of any SEO strategy and the purpose of any web strategy is to get a message across. So we need to start with content contribution, to create persuasive content, we need good copy to work with.

Although of course there are plenty of gifted bloggers out there, who can nail a great piece of content that’s spot on for their audience, it’s not always the case. Let’s imagine our goal is to write an article about a new product. The techie guys that built the product probably can’t articulate it’s business value and the marketing guys don’t really know how it works, so.. they’ll need to collaborate. We’ll need a framework to do that and good corporate governance dictates that in these litigious times we’ll want to get the copy checked – not entirely true for a blog or one persons view on the world, but a necessity for a serious website. It would therefore seem that in order to produce persuasive content, we’ll need at least a basic content management process – even if it’s just a peer review.

At this point you’ve created some great, approved content, that’s accurate and well written, but how do you know you’ve hit the spot and people are coming back to read more? We need to do some website analytics, to see who is coming to the site. Therefore, in order to produce Persuasive Content, it’s helpful to have a publishing process and some website analytics – or maybe we need to identify whether this content really is as persuasive as we thought!

This touches on one of the problems, the definition of what content is persuasive is fairly subjective, we need to have metrics to understand the purpose of the copy we are writing and then define it’s success, how it encouraged or persuaded the visitor to meet our goals. It could be that this is fairly loose, how many visits, track back links and comments you have on a blog or maybe it’s a more sophisticated conversion of visitors to prospective or actual customers. Whatever they are, it’s good practice of any web content management strategy to define and measure against some goals. It may also be that the location of the content in the site or page improves or decreases it’s ability to help meet those targets, there is an art to the analysis of those web logs.

I talked earlier about relevance, we may already be communicating to a well understood audience, but perhaps we do our analytics and we identify some trends. Perhaps through following click path data (the route that someone took through your site) you identify that there are two different audiences.There are the technical guys that are really interested in what the guys who built it have to say and the end consumer who wants to know how it will make their life better. Or maybe you find a community that are commenting on your content.

OK, so in my example of a product company, it’s more likely that someone told you they needed the technical specifications and perhaps I should tangent off to CRM systems and the importance of gathering intelligence on the folks you are communicating with, the single, holistic view of the customer across multiple touch points.

In any case, we need to split our content by audience, to highlight or mark the content as being about a specific subject. This requires us to tag the content so that we can identify which content is for which audience, to enrich it with meta data. This can be automated to a certain extent, finding relevance in the text through algorithms (like Google) or to automatically find keywords, but we’ll need an extensible system to do that. There is plenty written about this subject, about getting users to do this essential step, some of it in the context of search – for example Here is a quote from a piece by Tony Byrne at CMS Watch: So the enterprise that cares about the usefulness of its documents will give you the skills, tools, and incentives to drag them, frag them, flag them, and yes, tag them — if only so information managers can ultimately ultimately bag them…legally.

We would also need to identify our audience, or have some way of enabling them to segment themselves, either through site navigation or user profiling. Once we have that we can personalize the delivery, so that the right content can be matched with the right audience. So our content management system needs some concept of a visitor, some way of storing preferences and a way to deliver dynamic personalized content. This personalized delivery needs to extend to the device they choose to use, to the channel or site that they want to view it on.

So, in addition to identifying good content as “Persuasive Content” – it seems that Persuasive Content Management is about the process of creating the good stuff, a cycle of content production, of adding intelligence with meta-data and analyzing/refining it and delivering a relevant personalised user experience to multiple sites and devices.

A Persuasive Content Management System is a solution that provides all of this and is something our example business users, or even better our gifted authors can actually use, or even love to use. Your Persuasive Content Management strategy is going nowhere without business user buy in. A system that itself encourages, dare I say persuades good content, best practice adoption and adherence to process – a persuasive Persuasive CMS?  I should stop there, but if you are looking for something that’s easy to use, please stop by our demos.

One thing though, am I missing something, isn’t that content publication process cycle what content management professionals have been talking about since the early days of this industry?