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 was asked to talk about website proliferation; a subject that one would have thought had been pretty much covered by many who would have gone before me on this. But, it’s still a business pain that is capturing the attention of the information and IT leaders.

People want to be published and the ease for internal business users or part time semi-technical staff to quickly generate simple internal websites, blogs or to share and collaborate on content ideas is fanning the flames of a fire that never really died down and IT is struggling to control.

The new versions of Microsoft SharePoint, especially the (WSS) stuff you get for free on Windows Server 2003, is an excellent example of a product that is creeping under the radar of IT, proliferating content silos throughout these organizations. You also still can’t underestimate the amount of content that is still being shuffled around and stored by e-mail.

In addition the audience for these organizations is growing ever more sophisticated, demanding content to be delivered in a variety of different ways and on a variety of devices. We have a customer (Astra Zeneca) who while promoting their global brands and products have an initial plan to roll out over 250 websites.

Organizations are using separate URLs to personalize their message, AstraZeneca will, around one product, create a lifestyle site to help you manage your condition, information sites for healthcare workers and promotional sites in geographies (like the US) where they are allowed to advertise directly to patients and consumers. This is done globally, with each site having to adhere to the regulatory regime of the territory. It adds up to a lot of sites.

In my presentation I looked at how to overcome this, how to avoid the natural reaction to wall everything in and tame this raging beast, but to build a technical environment that enables and encourages it. The IT pain is around the support of tools, of some half backed solution built by an intern suddenly becoming business critical – the pain isn’t the amount of content or the number of authors.

The focus of my presentation was on setting good foundations for a project in the procurement phase, with good requirements, of involving the business and demonstrating delivery.

The catchy title must have worked as we had a great attendance, with people standing at the back of the room and in the aisles.

We’re going to turn this into a white paper, which I’ll post a link to on this blog and I’ll probably be revisiting this presentation in the future.