I say web engagement; some say web experience, Forrester say persuasive content and these guys are saying:

a customer experience management platform – that engages, contextualizes, and optimizes user experience and interactions to build brand awareness, loyalty, and revenue.

The Day FAQ can be found here and the press release from Adobe here.

In either case the idea is the same, using web analytics data to provide insight into your visitors to deliver relevant content – and I’ve got to say if its web analytics you want and a great content engine you need – then on paper it’s difficult not to be excited by what the marriage of Omniture and Day can bring to this space.

I obviously caveat that with ‘on paper’ – my experience of getting insight out of Omniture to deliver dynamic content was not easy (although I understand that Genesis has really come on since then) and I’ve witnessed first-hand the challenges of maintaining the post honeymoon sparkle of an ‘on-paper’ marriage made in heaven.

I’ve painted the Adobe role in this as merely paying for the wedding, which might be unkind and reflective of my bias/experience in viewing this space – I get the Omniture/Day thing, the Adobe strategy there, but from an Adobe product perspective I don’t think we are seeing that yet.

As an aside, and to torturously extend this dating/marriage analogy – this is an interesting observation from Jeff Potts (an active Alfresco community member) as we all wonder what this means for Adobe/Alfresco relationship:

I can’t help but feel like the proud parent who’s daughter brought home a keeper, only to find out the guy’s been dating a hottie from Switzerland the whole time.

So, first impressions – this looks positive, it could mean an injection of resources into recent resurgence we’ve seen of Day (certainly in the UK) – but, as ever, the opinions and experiences of joint customers will be the ones to listen to.

…and yes, I’ve busted my ‘not mention vendors’ rule on this blog, but these opinions are mine, etc..

Image of wedding cake couple courtesy of randomwire edited and reproduced under creative commons license.

• Moving ECM from “Point” to “Platform”
• Low Cost of Ownership
• Unified ECM
• High Return on Investment
• Leveraging Fastest Growing Middleware Stack
• Effective Standardization
• Content Platform for the Enterprise
• Improved Business Responsiveness
• Content Management for Enterprise Applications and Portal
• Risk Mitigation

I don’t think I am breaking any NDA by sharing that, as this says absolutely nothing.

Also, you may say – “but Truscott, you hilarious young man, you’ve taken it out of context” – but trust me. I didn’t.

The rest of the slides said it was big, enterprise, billions, DOD compliant and leading – with lots of architectures and TLA’s….

I can see the value in big, but being big doesn’t absolve your responsibility to be valuable and being able to put that in a form I understand – or more importantly in a form a business user, the guy that writes the cheques, a visitor to your website or shareholder understands.

I spent 30 minutes thinking – Yes, but what is it for? What does it do? How does it help?

What do you think?

Image of robot by KB35 reproduced under creative commons license.

Firstly, almost without exception the sessions talked about strategy – not always saying the word ‘strategy’, but certainly of taking a higher level view of objectives – whether we were talking about Intranets, Social Media, Web Engagement or User Experience – a pause for thought before diving into the tools seems the order of the day.

On ‘diving in’ – this conversation really started during the Industry Analyst Debate – sparked off by this post by Andrew McAfee on whether to or not to pilot new tools. It seemed in the end to end in a draw (or possibly with a fight with McAfee – who wasn’t there) depending on the initiative. Clearly some initiatives and tools are easy, low impact and  naturally infectious and others need a bit of work.

But, this idea of ‘diving in’cropped up in later discussions, for example on user experience when we were discussing the web customer experience (an excellent session by Melissa Casburn @mcasburn and Randy Woods @randywoods) - where the take away was to try stuff, even using a bit of good old fashioned gut feel – but to measure and test the results.

Measure, yes, but be a slave to the data – not so much – a point that came out a few times – but was extremely well expressed by Robert Rose (@Robert_Rose) in the last session of the last day (and to learn more about his thinking, I’d suggest reading this blog post).

I completely agree with his assertion that data is only there for efficiency – who cares how many visitors if they are not relevant to your business? (Or as I say, your website is not a popularity contest – umm… unless it is).

Tools didn’t get ignored, I really enjoyed being free to chat to the vendors (I’ve talked about this before) and one WCM got mentioned in more than one session and seems to be making a name for itself as a ‘marketing aware’ product. The fact that this year the WCM track was called “Customers and Engagement” I think says a lot about an industry that has move from IT, to users and is now focusing on the audience.

This audience focus is increasingly the remit of us as content management professionals and it really shone through in a lot of the sessions – whether you are talking about an Intranet, content technologies, web experience or analytics.

Plenty of folks covered the conference with twitter and blog posts, but I would really recommend Sue Ann Reed’s blog – this girl can type as fast as I can talk (almost!) and was astonishingly live blogging the event and won her attendance through the generosity of Robert Rose.  Also CMSWire did a great job too – here are a collection of Gilbane SF posts.

So, my take aways:

- Take a breath, think about what you are doing before choosing/blaming/changing tools

- Try stuff, but measure the results

- Don’t get too hung up on the numbers

- Find ‘marketing aware’ tools

Does that sound about right to you?

My observation is that the problem with pairing these two together is that while they both ‘manage’ assets, we define ‘manage’ differently in these two scenarios – in ECM ‘manage’ also includes the storage of the asset, whereas in ERP ‘manage’ is just to know about it. I think in the CMS world we should learn from that.

In other words – an ERP system isn’t the warehouse, it isn’t the specialist paint line, the drying oven, the big thing that goes kachugga-kachagga that spits out a new thing or the people that crank the handle.

In Enterprise Content Management (or whatever you call your CMS implementation) – it is often all of those things – it is the tool for creating content, for storing content, for checking,  and for publishing. We overlay onto management and understanding of the thing – with the doing things with it.

So, while making content has a small bill of material (people and knowledge) we assume that our systems will cover everything from harvesting the raw material to arranging it neatly on the shelves. It’s the combine harvester, kachugga-kachagga machine, the shelf, the store etc.

Whereas ERP just lets you know the cost of the thing, where it is, how many you’ve got, that it passed through testing, how many people bought one yesterday and what it will take to make another one.

If we think about what an ERP system knows about things, with content we obviously call that meta-data, work flow processes and web logs.

And when we talk about audience engagement or ECM – what we know about things is as critical as the thing itself.

But how many organisations know how many items of content they have that features the name of their CEO?

Or how many feature the main keyword that describes the thing they want to be known for?

Or have any description at all?

Or how many are incomplete or broken?

Or even simply how many content items they have?

Lets make it easier – lets ignore the morass of content stuffed into virtual cupboards in the office and think about the stuff that the audience can see.

How many do you think Google, your employee, or your customer can find of these?

It’s not ERP if you can’t do a simple stock take.

If you still can’t get over the fact that there is no ‘M’ in ERP, those guys have an identity crises as much as we CMS folks do – don’t believe me – read this!

“M” Image is from a Fritz Lang film  poster, read more about that film here.

Here’s the challenge from Jon’s post:

So, here is the deal. I challenge any CMS vendor to rate these in order of priority:

• Editors – A user interface that is a editor or publisher’s wet dream
• Performance – The fastest, most stable and scalable CMS in the world
• Features – The richest set of features any CMS could dream of offering
• Developers – An open, standard, extensible product that makes developers salivate
• Website – A product that can give you a kick-ass website, really really quickly

I recommend that you can read the rest of his post and the comments, as he invites CMS vendors to both naval gaze and offer up which one of these children is their favourite.

My take – I guess it goes without saying that in every R&D project office, of every vendor and for every open source developer – this argument is or should be happening – it was certainly my experience – but the frustration is that with a finite developer resource you end up with a compromise.

Compromise is a bad word and here and on Jon’s blog – we have the luxury of donning our smoking jackets, filling our pipes and pontificating on what’s right and proper and not have to deal with the grubby commercial realities. The truth of course is that a vendor has to prioritize based on return on that R&D investment.

But, let’s not let that stop us!

So, looking at the comments on Jon’s post as I write this – two experienced CMS practitioners, Philipe Parker and Zahoor Hussain both sat firmly on the fence, with a view that is was down to the project.

I think Philippe and Zahoor are right – client engagements vary and of course some clients need more of one thing than another, but I think what Jon is driving at is to look at this issue through a vendors eyes of building a single product.

But – is this a single product for a single market?

If my CMS is aimed squarely at the Mom and Pop store market, it would be wasted R&D effort to focus on performance or features, in fact if I focused my effort on the ‘kick-ass website’ creator requirement – I may not even need to offer much up to developers.

This hints at an issue in our market – bit like the WordPress debate… broad church.. big undefined market.. etc etc.. It’s also worth noting that Jon refers to a website, so you hear a collective sigh as the CMS crowd mutter – ‘a CMS is not just WCM’…  (a respectful nod to you folks, but I digress..).

Anyway, lets try and play the game – prioritize..

I agree with Adrian Mateljan, who in his comment defines performance to include stability and reliability.

I don’t think that every CMS should be efficient enough to run every News International website on a rusty old 486 under Rupert Murdoch’s desk – but having something that is there when the visitor or content author have the good grace to turn up has to be #1.

The problem with performance, for a CMS buyer is it is such a complex intangible, with a variety of factors at play – and for vendors, once you’ve got the basics right, squeezing out the extra horsepower is a difficult internal investment sell vs the sexy stuff that helps the product in a demo.

Also today, ‘throwing tin at it’ seems to be an economically viable scalability option for some – I was talking to someone involved in a serious government website project – using a large rollout of a LAMP stack open source product – who was scaling horizontally quickly and cheaply, cloning extra machines and replicating databases. And it was really, really working for them.

So, yes having a reliable platform is priority #1. After that, it gets hazy for me.

Starting with Developers – would seem to be a stuck on, no brainer #2 – right?

A WCM project is no longer ‘crank the handle and spit out a brochure’ – it’s build me a web engagement or experience platform, it’s integrate to social media, it’s show people my back office, it’s mobile apps, it’s marketing platforms, analytics, lead generation etc etc..

The problem for the buyer is that it’s a blessing and a curse, a good developer platform offers great opportunity, but can mask some of the missing ‘out of the box’ must haves for editors as well as product features.

The good news is if a pretty boy pre-sales hacker can build something that fits your scenario overnight, imagine what your crew can do with it in production? The bad news is the hangover of supporting and maintaining the bespoke work.

It is of course a trade off – in a previous life I saw a straightforward, but large government project turn to a behemoth as a systems integrator cut out the ‘out of the box’ vendor functionality (to the point that the software was a tiny bit of the solution) for something beautifully bespoke – but in the process turned themselves into a software developer with all of that maintenance and support responsibility shared by just one client. Bad news for the client as the budget ballooned.

I’ve also seen a client case study presented at an industry event, where the vendor and implementation partner (and presumably the client) were buoyant about a project that was based clearly on a developer platform CMS, the slides spoke of the thousands of lines of code and man years it took to implement – but, it’s a successful project.
There’s a balance here somewhere, can you build and support what you need more efficiently than taking the out of the box, possibly compromised feature?

Yes ‘possibly compromised’ – it’s hell for vendors to build broad adoption into a feature (rather than offering an API and saying get on with it) it means making decisions for the hypothetical customer. Those decisions are hard, the edge cases you need to build to, the current customers you need to satisfy, the future proofing, the support.. etc. This sometimes means that it might not fit your requirement exactly.

Take the example of Jon’s requirement “kick ass websites, really, really quickly”:

Vendor A has the sexiest website cookie cutter you have ever seen, hell even YOUR marketers could work it (but the geeks suspect some back end ugliness there somewhere) . Vendor B has the API that would allow you to roll-out your websites, your way (eventually). Which do you choose? Do you, take the big red D pill or is it a cocktail of E, F and W?

I also think there is a great discussion point here about the crew you have on-board, a debate Jon has championed himself. You want to be innovative and engaging – it’s not going to just come out of the vendors box, a well marshalled set of great, creative developers could be your projects rock stars – differentiating your business.

With my background, I have to talk about the E – Editors. As I’ve written previously, nothing is going to starve to death your beautiful website like a lack of content. Or shackle your progress to engagement nirvana if people are still emailing you press releases to post. But, without P or possibly D – where are you going to post to?

As I said at the outset, it is a compromise – I’d suggest that vendors really want to please everyone – but they have a certain skill set, inspiration, experience, set of customers or whetever that gives them strengths and weaknesses – and buyers need to match those with their requirements.

It would be nice if we could marshal this unruly market into buyer shaped niches, where short lists pick themselves. But, in the meantime in a procurement (boring old advice I know) it’s important that buyers get advice, look at reference sites, carry out POC’s, talk to an implementation partner that understand and have done this kind of thing  before.

Your choice, your compromise? What do you think?

I found this really interesting and it sparked a Twitter conversation with the most learned of my fellow content management professionals – Philippe Parker (@proops) and Zahoor Hussain (@izahoor) and I started to feel that 140 chars wasn’t cutting it and was inspired to blog.

There is a feeling of an industry coming of age in this story, that the implementation of our industries software has a marked and profound effect on organisations, this ‘C’ level attention I’ve been talking about recently.

I have used the industrial revolution analogy in the title as clearly one of the benefits of implementing a CMS system is around efficiency. The most basic ROI of doing more with the same or maybe less resources – the same crude metric for implementing spinning looms instead of spinning wheels – that revolutionised the textile industry and therefore presumably the clothes we wear today.

In addition easier to use tools enable artists with no craft skills to create stuff – move to today where even I can upload my company logo or a witty message onto a website and some machine somewhere will reel off a T shirt for me – I don’t need to know how to spin, sew, screen print or any of that stuff.

I can extend the analogy slightly further, in that the  industrialisation of making stuff created a more consistent quality product that was available to the masses. Much like CMS systems, being easier (and cheaper) to use than hand crafting html, with their spell checkers, accessibility compliance, metadata tagging, XHTML standards, navigation management  and work-flow processes – create better, more consistent content, delivered efficiently, at an acceptable price (maybe!) for the masses.

I feel sorry for the vendor involved, caught up on the front line here (and in the full contact sport that is being a CMS vendor, someone will score a cheap shot on this). I am fairly sure the Luddites really didn’t give a stuff about the make of loom they were destroying during their futile effort to hold back change.

(Clearly I could be wrong, it might be about the product and the journalists might be striking because the vendors product UI makes their eyes bleed – but I doubt it!)

Of course, there is something more subtle going on here than just Luddites burning computers and this blog post by Roy Greenslade – a journalist from the the Guardian Newspaper – touches on a lot of great points. The issue is far more complex than I could cover in this blog, in an industry widely commented as facing huge threats and change.

But, reading the Greenslade article you get an insight into not just the industrial relations faux par committed (the bit that’s making the mainstream news) – but also, reading it as a Content Management Professional (as Philippe and Zahoor pointed out in their tweets) about the CMS implementation Pandora’s box they have opened.

How many times have we seen CMS projects, with a super bit of software, lovingly moulded and crafted by some great folks in a project to fit their perception of the business – ultimately fail as there was no buy in from the people that use the thing?

A process that works best starting from the procurement – I’ve seen great projects, ambitious projects – build fantastic foundations for success by getting those stakeholders into the process early. Do know you what? Those projects are the ones that beat the widely quoted industry average of a 3 year project/software churn.

Those very efficiency savings and ROI figures don’t look so rosy if you factor in the real possibility of the users  hating it (even if they don’t officially go on strike) that only 50% of the team will adopt the software, that this will be the peak as those numbers dwindle as they either scrape together budget to do their own thing, continue to use existing tools, email you their content in word documents or work on a way to replace the system. Seriously, user adoption is the most critical factor in the success of a project, post the ticker tape parade of go-live.

That’s where my analogy falls apart, this is not the industrial revolution, we’re not implementing new machines, operated by less people with lower skills, – OK so they just don’t need to be HTML craftsman, but they still need to be good writers – as Greenslade puts it in his blog -

it is clear that “content” is not a substitute for “journalism”

I am not suggesting that in a single blog post  I have the answers to, what is obviously a complex issue for the Johnstone Press – but at face value, the story does highlight that implementing a CMS is an opportunity, but one that in every organisation must be considered seriously.

Whilst it does perhaps open up journalism or publication to the less skilled masses (as I demonstrate by writing this) -  a CMS is not a content loom churning out more content, it relies on the quality raw material.

That raw material is reliant on good quality, knowledgeable people that needs to be respected as you build the machine – it is, if you like a better spinning wheel, requiring deft operation by a knowledge worker – not by a sooty faced Victorian child.

Whilst, I’m accustomed to change, in the last twenty two years (OK, I started young and didn’t get an education!) I’ve only worked for five different employers (and the first eight years was as a public servant) – every year has thrown up new opportunities and change. (I’ve written a little bit about the start of my career here).

But this is different, I am really excited about making a significant, possibly life changing move – having spent the last 15 years representing a vendor – I’m leaving the tribes and just maybe becoming a real boy.

I once was accused – probably disparagingly – as “the king of analogies” in the Twitter back channel of a presentation I was giving – so hopefully you’ll excuse me for melding together these two..

Yes – it’s tribal – I’ve been to the sales kick-off where I have seen people dressed as competitors, dragged onto a stage as slaves and whipped (a homage to the film Gladiators), I’ve seen the logos of competitors chain sawed in half, I’ve seen a failing vendor that was being beaten and ‘gapped’ by their competition disrespectfully accuse them of having ‘a big hat and no cattle’ and I’ve seen vendors obsessed with their competitors messaging and pricing hire ex-CIA agents or set-up bogus procurement processes to find out what they are saying.

Yep, seen it and I genuinely still have the t-shirts..

It’s not just the vendors I worked in – I’ve spoken to colleagues that were former competitors, have the same experiences, as they revel in telling stories of putting up billboards outside the offices I worked in and of handing out cookies at the local railway station to make a point to the prospective customers. Hmm.. difficult to explain that one without naming names..

Admittedly, I’ve used extreme examples, in bullish American (sorry, it’s true) vendors during different days, the exciting time at the turn of the century with a dim regard for their competitors and perhaps their industry in what turned out to be at the start of the end of the boom.

No, this isn’t about me suddenly thinking that vendors suck, not at all – I am just trying to make the point that inside a vendor, with all that propaganda, whether it’s as extreme as some of my examples, it isn’t always the best place to be to view an industry and I am delighted and privileged to be given that opportunity with Gilbane.

All that propaganda? Yes, but I don’t mean to be critical – that stuff is worn like armour by a sales team, they have to believe that their way is the way of the righteous and I fully support that – hell I’ll beat my chest and daub my face with purple/red/orange paint with the best of them – that’s the best bit.

But, I’ve just never been all that comfortable when the attention turns to the competitors rather than what YOU are doing that’s right, different and exciting. Who wants to watch a competitors tail lights?

Anyway, as ever, I’ve digressed – my point is if asked by a prospective customer about this, that or the other competitor – and sadly as a vendor you do get asked – I’ve said that I was the worst person to ask  (of course, I am hoping that that’s all going to change now!).  They, the prospect, had seen more of the competitors products than I had, they can talk to references – they can call the analysts.

I believe that web engagement is on the cusp of something exciting and of course WCM is in the centre of that, as it emerges from the IT and marketing teams to be on the ‘C’ level agenda. Especially as, in general the management of content, the strategy’s and tools for doing it now has an enterprise criticality to it. There is a lot of exciting stuff going on – but not a fluffy web buzzword-du-jour kind of way – real, understood business value.

The excitement for me is that I don’t need to meet every tweet, press release or anecdote that says xyz vendor or their customers is doing something cool with a twinge of outrage, defensiveness or maybe even jealousy. I am free to enjoy and explore the innovation of this industry, that I love, from whatever corner it comes from.

So, becoming a real boy?

That comes from a tweet I posted when I was turned away from an analysts on-line community for being ‘a vendor’ – I indignantly tweeted that I’m not a vendor, I’m a real boy.

People who work for software vendors have important things to say, experiences folks and their CMS projects can learn from – they are not all salivating, lying, cheating, sales beasts.. (not all anyways) and I for one am looking forward to meeting and learning from them and maybe my experience can help.

So, maybe now I’ve left the tribes I can say that now I’m a real boy – or as Irina Guseva of CMSWire put it -”WCM vendors change jobs to become analysts”.

Image of Native American Teepee “Unauthentic” by quinn.anya reproduced under creative commons license.

I’ll obviously write more on my move – but more importantly – changing the name of my blog?

Why ‘Hovering Over The Back Button’?

So, I’ve just embarked on possibly the most exciting change in my career, since my first job in the commercial world from being a public servant fifteen years ago – and my first post is to explain a change in the name of my blog!

Well, that’s how it is in the post Social Media revolution – I feel that before I can do anything I needed to update the various breadcrumbs of me around the interwebs (LinkedIn, Twitter etc) and this blog before I can move on, clear my throat, so to speak.

So, why drop”Persuasive Content” after building it for close to three years? Well for a couple of reasons, firstly if I look at what I’ve been writing about maybe ‘persuasive’ content is not what comes to mind!

For starters I’ve been uneasy that calling a blog persuasive infers that I assume my content is persuasive, is written in a persuasive way and that I assume you will be persuaded. That’s not really my style, the name really came from wanting to write about Persuasive Content the discipline as defined by Forrester.

I’ve been a fan of the Forrester notion of Persuasive Content and the software and systems architecture that organisations should be putting together to drive that – but I don’t think I have rigidly stuck to that thinking in my writing.

Whilst everything I have written about can be loosely associated with the Forrester ideas, I think I have moved away slightly. It was pointed out to me that ‘persuasion’ is a little close to coercion for some folks, that really ‘engagement’ – the thing I do write and talk about a lot – is a err.. gentler, subtler thing.

Why ‘Hovering Over The Back Button?’ Well this comes from various presentations and articles I have written recently – I always use this phrase.

I’ve always thought that if you are going to talk or write write about web engagement, or I guess anything really, you need to present the audience with the opportunity you will offer them or the value of listening.

For web engagement, especially when you talk to marketers, it is of consent. A rare commodity that indicates the point at which your audience is willing to listen, be educated, communicated, persuaded or even sold to.

A website delivers that. This visitor sought you out, maybe sifted through a billion google search results and as they arrive they are engaged or at the least ready to listen.

The challenge with a website, is that this opportunity to engage this visitor is extremely brief, there is the simplest barrier for them to leave – as they hover over the back button.

Now I agree we need to draw the line somewhere, you describe ‘content’ and ‘management’ loose enough and suddenly every RDBMS could consider itself a CMS – especially if your pet part time geek has slapped a PHP front end that adds rows – I quite like this from Robert Rose, in his post – Why every CMS fails:

Wikipedia defines content management as “a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment.” Put simply, a CMS is a process meant to grease the workflow skids for managing web content. It doesn’t matter if it is a million dollar software tool or some dude named Sergei FTPing files from Dreamweaver, every organization that updates a website has a CMS.

I am going to skate over the academic discussion over what we ought to consider a Content Management System to be, by hiding behind the excuse of brevity and not having the room here or to presume that you the reader has the time to indulge me.

I am just going to say that I am not sure that we can define it, it’s the market that decides and there’s a lot of stuff out there packaged up with the CMS label. Perhaps we even run the risk of saying there is everything labelled CMS (good, bad and ugly) and there is WordPress. My concern here is the if we get snooty about what constitutes a CMS – we could be missing something or failing the folks that are confused by this software space.

WordPress is a specialised CMS (or WCM). But blogging platforms (or might I add wikis) are just CM systems, simple ones – with specialist fancy user interfaces and web applications, that have carved their own CMS niche in all the excitement about Web 2.0 – are they not?

I think perhaps our industry needs to take a look at why people are reaching for these tools instead of “traditional” CMS products. It’s not just because they are free, plenty of open source alternatives around – it’s about the ease of adoption, perhaps the very lack of governance, the basic ease at which you can just get publishing? Maybe these are requirements we need to be listening to as an industry – rather than try to exclude them from the club.

Folks suggest that WordPress is not a CMS because you can’t create content types, that it doesn’t have a multi role approval process or whatever – but if I only require a single content type (or a page based CMS) and you only have a couple of excellent trusted authors – maybe it fits the requirements?

It also doesn’t have in-context editing or multi-site functionality, but then neither do plenty of commercial and open source established CMS products – so where do we draw the line? (Nice conversation happening now about Drupal vs WordPress going on Twitter as I write this – being driven Jon Marks).

There’s a law when CMS folks are having a discussion, that it will come to a car analogy (what is it with CMS folks and cars?) and in this case Scott Liewehr did this – by comparing WordPress with a scooter. But, I’d like to think of as a car - the Tata Nano. I believe that the Tata Nano is the words cheapest and (arguably) the most basic new car on sale today.

If you are a family in India, used to loading your family precariously onto a moped the Tata Nano is a revelation, access to a new freedom in transportation – although a Tata Nano won’t meet a rural farmers requirement to get a lamb to the end of a muddy lane and it certainly won’t meet McLaren’s requirements to have the Mercedes and Vodafone logos dancing on the top step after a formula 1 weekend. But, it’s still a car.

These analogies often don’t really work very well, as we don’t buy cars for the same reason as we buy software, but if I may try to extend it – there are governing bodies that defines what is a car, a van, or a truck.

I guess in software, that’s what analysts are for? In any case, without that trying to hold back the tide of content management systems that don’t meet this or that ideal for a CMS has a whiff of Canute about it – there are so many of them and who can tell them whether they call their offering a CMS or not.

Maybe a cheese analogy would be better here, if I want to produce English Stilton, some nice man, probably in the EU needs to approve, telling me and my market that my product is Stilton. In the absence of this (or the crowning of a benevolent CMS dictator) – it’s beholden on CMS practitioners to educate the market, to understand, own and define their requirements and understand what it really takes to meet them.

You could argue that blogging platforms, in the same way as the Tata Nano will revolutionize access to transportation in India, have revolutionised people’s access to being published, prepared a generation of new authors to contribute content – that I have referred to as democratized content authoring.

They have also prepared folks for consuming a new kind of content, informal stuff that comes from knowledgeable folks – rather than what sales and marketing say in their (I should say ‘our’, as I am one of them) business speak, jargon littered ‘on message’ sales messaging. This is an opportunity for anyone driving a web content management (or dare I say engagement) project today – I maintain that it’s ongoing success will rely on fresh new content and those contributors.

I’ve digressed, I’m supposed to be talking about tools and we’ve seen what a CMS means change hugely over the last 10 years, from an IT enabling rag bag toolkit of API’s and you build on yourself over a painfully expensive year long project – to an expectation of business user driven, easy to install and implement tools that deliver value in weeks.

I’ve talked here about how the titans of our industry got distracted by ECM, while a vibrant community of new vendors delivered what the web content management systems that actually everyone wanted.

Lets’s not do the same thing here, with CMS – sure WordPress is barely a CMS – implementing it for a decent sized site could catapult you back into the dark ages of web content management, like I imagine that jumping from your Prius into a Nano would be. You’ll also get very expensively stuck if you try and adapt your Nano to do the job of a Land Rover or the McLaren MP4-25.

- But it’s teaching us lessons on what the people want and we should respond and welcome it into the club..

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.