I don’t often talk directly about my day to day work here on this blog, but I’ve just come back from a management team meeting and as we discussed our messaging and our own customer engagement journey, I found myself using a simple word time and time again and it was credibility.

This then got me thinking about the Forrester term – Customer Experience Management, their flavour of defining an engagement solution strategy.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll also know written about these various engagement flavours (WEM/CEM) before (for example here).

As you probably know I now work for an enterprise software vendor. Our customers are making a significant partnership decision. When you are dealing with someone’s future on the web, you might as well start messing with their plumbing, their email system or the power. It’s that important. A website down is a revenue-losing-CEO-calling-you-at-2am-to-fire-your-ass type of event.

Maybe I exaggerate  a WCM’s place in the world slightly, but you get my point. It’s a business relationship that requires trust.

To be trustworthy you need to be credible.

Yet, credibility is not a word I hear very often in the context of WEM, CEM or CXM.

We talk about a process of creating advocacy, engagement, measuring levels of engagement and words like that. But, what really leads us as consumers to engage with a brand, buy a product, to spend time reading a blog post or follow someone on Twitter?

It’s credibility.

An engagement strategy is therefore about enabling your audience to experience your credibility.

Your credibility to solve their problem.

Each touch point to your audience is adding (or possibly subtracting) from that credibility score.

How you manage and publish content is core to this.

The website down event I referred to earlier, is going to drain credibility.

A slow or poorly designed website is going to make you look untidy – not credible.

A spelling mistake, a simple error in governance will make you look sloppy – not credible.

An inconsistent message between channels.. not credible.. etc.

Credibility is also a good litmus test to be applied to how you engage with your audience. Some folks think they need a Facebook page – but will this add to their credibility? A CEO twitter account? Same.

Then after you have made these choices about channel, does what you post and how you respond to the social channel add to this credibility score? Does it pass that test?

How does everything, on every touch point with your audience add to your credibility?

I’m not seriously suggesting a new acronym – but is the C in CXM “Credibility”?

Picture of  ’C’ neon sign by M.V. Jantzen used under Creative Commons License.  

It is not quite the night before Christmas, I am standing in one of the big barn electrical stores and I have in my hand a piece of paper. It’s a list. But, not any list, the handwriting is a little crude and in the very deliberate hand of my youngest daughter it is addressed for the attention of Mr S Claus. I may not be the jolly red fellow, but I have been entrusted to deliver.

As I look down the list, my daughter’s fervent wish is that she is delivered a ‘Wappy Puppy’. Through sketchy knowledge of the world of my daughters and a little eavesdropping I believe it is a game for the Nintendo DS. Hence I find myself staring at a crumpled piece of paper in the Nintendo aisle of this vast electrical emporium.

As a fairly tech savvy chap, who enjoys a gadget and a video game – I think I know my way around an electrical store. Big as this one maybe, I can normally deftly navigate my way around and I scan the game shelves, here we go… W… Wappy…. Nope.

Ok, so it’s just before Christmas and the shelves are a little dishevelled, I excuse myself around an equally confused looking father and zero in on the P for Puppy.. nope… between the boy trying to negotiate his mother up from one game to two… ‘Latest Games’… nope… another quick swerve… ‘Most Popular’… Nada.

Take a step back, deep breath and circle again. Nope.

A text message from my wife confirms I am looking for W.A.P.P.Y puppy (as in dog).

At this point I would like to claim I took the desperate measure (for me anyway) and actually asked someone for direction – but the truth is that a kindly store assistant recognized a man down in the field of retail battle and above the pre-Holiday bedlam asked me if I needed some help.

Sadly, my rescuer also had not heard of the Wappy Puppy game and having attempted the same desperate search I had done moments earlier, came up empty handed. The problem here was that neither of us were 7 year old girls, or had been paying attention to the same commercials and the more I confirmed it was ‘Wappy’ the more ridiculous it sounded.

So I reached into my pocket for my smart phone.

I Googled this mythical Wappy Puppy beast.

I saw a picture of my prey.

And a moment of clarity appeared on the face of my hunting cohort, now locked into this mission.

It’s not a game. Well it is. But it comes with a robot puppy and because of its size it’s not where we were looking in the uniform racks of DS games.

Our thrashing around in this sea of shopping chaos was over, we went straight to the little critters, the last two in the store (I have two daughters) and Christmas was saved.

Why did I share this heart warming message of holiday retail and fatherly ineptitude?

Well the true hero of this piece is my smart phone and the content it gave me access to.

Mobile plays an increasingly critical role in our retail experience. In this case seeing a picture of the product and being reassured that the store sold them, clinched a little bit of revenue for this business.

I could have shared a number of personal stories where this has been true, where a quick look on my phone has confirmed an in-store sale. One day it was an exact laptop specification when my father was ready to make a purchase and just last week it was my sister-in-law buying a new camera lens.

What do you do?

Talk to a bored looking teenage store assistant, who’s inexperience will probably mean the response to your question will be a blank look, or a vague “I think so, I’ll.. umm ask..”

Or do you reach into your pocket for that shiny portal into a world of information and others experiences of exactly this product?

When we are making big decisions, we research, we Google. There is nothing new in that, data from Google notes that 71 percent of smartphone users use their mobile phones to search for more information on a product seen on TV or in magazines and newspapers.

But with mobile – we can all do it in-store at the point of sale.

Therefore, how a business or a product represents itself on-line on mobile devices is now a business imperative, how a business offers this information and how they use tools that recognize location (that you are in-store) is going to change the way we shop.

It certainly changed my daughters Christmas.

This week I had the pleasure of returning to an old haunt as I was asked to present at Gilbane Boston.

I say ‘old haunt’ as I was actually completely blindsided by the fact it was not at the Westin in Copley Place – which, by my reckoning, it had been there since before Vignette was founded (or when we were all children). Therefore my cunning plan to stay in my current favorite reasonably priced hotel in Boston (the Colonnade), positioned just outside the Copley place action was a bad one.

Anyway, besides my mistake, the venue was actually great and better than the half mall/half hotel that is Copley…

…..but this is not a travelogue, I am here to write about my presentation.

At Gilbane you always present with at least one other speaker, which can result in a fabulous lottery where you toss your speaking proposal hat in the ring and sometime later you find out who you got paired with and how the Gilbane programme will describe the performance that this new double act will perform.

On this occasion my new best friend for the afternoon was AJ Gerritson, founding partner at 451 Marketing -, the lovely folks at Gilbane billed our matinee debut as: Building an Integrated Marketing Campaign for the Digital World and my friend Scott Liewehr (who was running the track)  had already insisted I write some new material – so here was what I talked about:

All the cool web kids are social, is your CMS ready to hang with them?

· The ‘social web’ is now just ‘the web’, many websites today and all of our websites tomorrow will be social community spaces.

· Our platform for marketing, PR and engagement will not be limited to a fixed URL, but a broader social media, multi-channel experience.

· Today organizations are taking a tactical approach to these challenges, with niche tools and loose business practices to augment their tried and tested web content strategies.

· As the requirement to socialize becomes a mainstream business imperative, is it time to evolve from WCM to a Social CMS?

Now reading that last point you may be thinking “Bloody hell Ian ‘Social CMS’ you vendor guys inventing another category?” (or words to that effect) – but that is certainly not the case. My big finish was (*warning spoiler ahead*) how actually all these new channels need a mature content management strategy and systems.

That, as content management professionals – our time has come.

I was videoed and I am sure Gilbane will post a link (follow @GilbaneBoston ) – I’ve also posted my slides on Slideshare here.

This week I was at Gilbane Boston and as I gorged on the bountiful smorgasbord of ‘key takeaways’, inspirational quotes and great conversation at this CMS industry love-in – I was disarmed by possibly the quote of my week. As I sought out my buddies Robert Rose and Scott Liewehr for mentioning me and my blog in a workshop they gave at the event – Robert said to me “yes, that great blog you used to write”.

My immediate reaction was obviously “OUCH!” as I zeroed in on the “used to”, completely ignoring the fact he said “great” – and then I thought about it and hey, here is someone that pays attention, he’s noticed that I haven’t blogged in two months and for that I am incredibly grateful! And dammit I better write something..

Well…. it is true that my social media engagement has slowed a little since joining SDL, I lost a little of my social media mojo. One thing – and I realize that social media lesson #1 is that putting yourself out there, you are going to have to handle some negativity – but I was tired of the few people that were constantly throwing stones at work I was passionate about.

But, new job, new role means a period of adjustment of my online voice. I’d moved from being an analyst free to tweet and re-tweet joyously about whatever and whoever I chose, back to the fun of the vendor politic. You may think that “a period of adjustment in my online voice” may seem like I’m some sort of sell-out – surely a new employer and change of industry role shouldn’t mean that my views and principals have changed.

A couple of years ago when I got on-board with Twitter I wrote a bit about this in a post – The Tweet Effect – Who am I?  – which seems naive and a bit embarrassing now as I figured out Twitter back then, but it’s still basically true. Facebook is me at home, Twitter and this blog is the “work me”. The “work me” has to be sensitive to litigation, buggering up a software deal and generally embarrassing myself and my employer.

Here I feel my voice should be slightly less formal than what I might say in a business meeting, probably nearer to being what I might discuss with someone else in this industry or a client over dinner. I’ll never be a PR mouth piece – that narcissistic desire to be respected and read sees to that! – plus, I’ve been in the industry too long and people that know me would see straight through it. It’s a balance and I needed to tune into my new surroundings.

Of course I’d hope my views are well aligned with those of my employer, or they wouldn’t have hired me. My views are my own as expressed here and a tiny slither of my value to SDL is in the work I do here and on Twitter.

Plus… I’ve been busy – in the last month I’ve moved to New York!

Anyway, enough with the excuses of why I haven’t written here for a couple of months. I have, however been writing!

In October an article I wrote about social media and content management was published in Media Post. With the title “If Your Message Isn’t Socialized, Is it heard?” I wrote about the importance of having your content curated by the social media crowd, which expanded on my previous post here. It’s something I also talked about at Gilbane this week and I am going to write about that here too.

I have also been recently published by the Cloud Computing Journal, in an article titled “The Cloud and the Perfect Marketing Storm” I wrote about  “being in the cloud” is not a business requirement, but that the business needs of the marketer are driving the adoption of software services that are offered ‘off premise’. You can read the full article here: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2076039 – (golly, it’s had over a thousand views!).

So, if like Robert you noticed I’d gone a bit quiet, thank you for following, I really appreciate it and I hope you like these other articles.

Image of cobwebs and bottles by Librarian In Black shared under creative commons license. 

According to the latest Social Media Report by Neilsen (respected monitoring/research company) Americans are now spending more time on Facebook than they are on any other website. American internet users spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook during May 2011, far higher than the next most visited site – in fact more than the next four most popular sites combined. Commentators are pointing to these numbers and referring to the shrinking web, that to an increasing number of folks Facebook is the web.

Is it really? So what does this mean for content management professionals and content marketers?

I wonder what has all this Facebook time come at the expense of? One could ponder that the idea that the web is shrinking would need to be based on the assumption that the same amount of folks are spending the same amount of time online. The truth of course is that internet adoption, especially on mobile, is increasing.

When I refer to adoption I don’t just mean the number of people connected and have access, I mean that our engagement with the web is deeper and longer – it’s a more pervasive part of our lives

My guess is that the figures actually mean that the minutes that the US population are spending on Facebook is growing faster than the minutes spent on Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN (the next top visited sites according to the research).

This further underlines the impact of the mainstream adoption of social media, these are “new online minutes”, new people that were not especially active online, (although they were physically connected or able to connect) are now on Facebook, spending time there and this is the stepping stone to the rest of their online activity. It’s a must do daily task. It’s email.And the people doing it are my Mum.

In my opinion having helped my Mum rip her first CD to her MP3 player a few weeks ago, she’s a pretty good yardstick of digital mainstreamness.

There have always been these gateways to the web, from AOL onwards, that have now become just homepages that people click through – Facebook offers something that we’ve banged on about for years – stickiness. (or what some folks call engagement today). AOL and MSN provided this through email, but Facebook has that trumped.

I guess that if you sell high end gadgets – you could argue that your audience has always been there – on the ‘early adopters social web’ of bulletin boards, discussion groups, Twitter and seeking you out with Google.

But, lets not get sniffy about “the mainstream”, assuming its just my Mum, teenagers or a bored housewife – your early social media adopters are also there – avidly checking it everyday. These time poor professionals slotting in a slither of their day to share something with their friends.

All the while we we are increasingly becoming consumers of prepared, curated and recommended content through these channels, rather than the content hunter gatherers riding the plains of Google. So will we soon be saying that if your content is not recommended through likes and Tweets – does it even exist?

Is the path through the keyhole the socializing of your content, not the platform itself? Could be an important distinction, do you need a Facebook page or just to be liked?

As usual, I’ve probably digressed – I started out with some questions:

So… is the web effectively shrinking? 

Possibly, there are some of us that have reached a saturation point of internet minutes, that earning a living and maintaining our relationships with our loved ones means that no amount of furtive tweeting during a meal when your partner is in the rest room or a sneaky email check during their favorite soap is going to extend that. Maybe Facebook and Twitter time is eating into channels we might have enjoyed, like our RSS Reader or a bit of Googling.  But, for everyone else this is just the start.

What does this mean for content management professionals?

This stickiness is driving the social web; engagement with a community is shaping our future websites – and therefore how we view content management and publishing. In his paper “Systems for Engagement” for AIIM the writer and commentator Geoffrey Moore writes that our content systems will move from systems of record focused on process and governance to collaborative community tools.

Not quite sure that’s all true, I’ve worked with organizations where governance is a serious business, but we certainly need to make our content easy to like,  easy to share and facilitate that conversation – the recommendation and the curation – to be seen through this keyhole.

Yes, our CMS tools (and the beautiful web applications we build on them) must be open,  friendly and very social.

Picture of the keyhole courtesy of katerha shared under Creative Commons License.

I admit, I have been neglecting this blog over the summer. It’s a combination of time spent writing elsewhere, a busy work schedule and a social media writers block as I figure out what I want to talk about next here and who I am on this blog. It’s the same story on Twitter, my Klout score has crashed!

So, as I took the kids for their first day back at school I resolved I too would return and whilst I was tempted to write a thrilling introspective of my social media writers block, I thought I’d kick off with a kick-off – Dreamforce, seemingly the daddy of all customer day shindigs for the billions of happy Salesforce.com punters. To be precise, I want to write about the  keynote, by Mark Benioff – CEO and Chairman.

Part of my writing angst has been to add something new to the excellent writing out there, so having picked this subject I probably need to warn you that I am unlikely new insights. While I am busy apologizing, I probably should point out that I wasn’t one of the fifteen thousand people who were in the room to witness it live.

Forgive me and get yourself over to the Salesforce YouTube channel, play it on your biggest monitor in full HD and hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Firstly as an occasional public speaker, to see Benioff wander the room (yes, sure, probably heavily rehearsed and scripted – but none the less impressive for that) was a billion miles away from someone standing reading the slides and anyone who presents anything ever should take a look (however good you think you are). The occasional “Hey Bob, good to see you” as he strode the aisles or his little banter with the Cocoa Cola CTO might seem cheesy, but he owned the room. A room of fifteen thousand people. Nice.

Maybe that’s what one expects of your modern day CEO, but I was impressed – and content wasn’t too bad either.

The theme of the opening keynote was ‘Welcome to the Social Enterprise’ and you may be thinking “ho hum, yes – who isn’t talking about social?” and as he continues to speak perhaps you might think “Ah huh.. a reference to the Arab spring.. so, who isn’t referencing the Arab spring when it comes to social?”.

But, Benioff concludes his reference to the Arab spring with “No one ever held up a sign and said ‘Thank you Microsoft’” – yet the protestors during the Arab spring did thank Facebook.

BTW – If you’d like a reference to the protestors thanking Facebook wander over to Social Times.

Good point – nicely encapsulating why social is different from our progress from mainframes (and a handful of vendors), to the Microsoft desktop, through mobile to this social revolution.

Benioff continued on the Arab spring theme, talking about a “Corporate Spring” or “Enterprise Spring” – in that, in the social media age how will CEO’s face the challenge of employees and customers rising up?

Benioff also referred to the “social divide” – I was expecting a reference to the exclusion of folks that don’t have access to the Internet, but in fact it was about whether our enterprises are social. He referred to knowing more about people in social networks than his customers or employees, about the easy collaboration over social networks – compared to enterprise systems.

All this was a pre-amble to a product launch, but none the less, all good points about how folks like me that bang the web engagement drum, of engaging your web audience that we should forget the folks closest to us, our colleagues and employees.

The power of the connected consumers has been much discussed – but it got me thinking more about employees and how underrepresented employee engagement is in our discussions. Yet, we see examples of the value and influence of the individual employee on social media and it’s potential to overtake their pay grade. As much as we bang on about customer engagement – the damage an unengaged employee can do is probably far greater with a swift blow below the waterline.

Anyway there is plenty more in Benioffs keynote worthy of note as plenty of folks have err…noted. Benioff moves on to outlining three steps to the social enterprise and what the cloud really means. I’d encourage to watch the full thing. (Also, you can find a good live blog of the session on Enterprise Irregulars blog).

It’s at this point, like any good blogger I should cleverly reference back to the title – from a public speaking perspective I’m back to school, inspired I’m off to practice wandering amongst the relative handful or so people that might come to my next speaking engagement (please go along with it if I call you Bob, I’m terrible with names) and maybe I might try learning and rehearsing the content of what I’m planning to rabble on about…. you never know.

I have learnt from my American colleagues that according to some the end of the world is nigh, or the 21st May to be exact – so as the big day approaches let me be the first to proclaim that WEM is dead.

Really? Well, maybe, OK, probably no. I just thought I’d get in there early. Plus, on the first day at blogging school they tell you to have a sexy title, so BAM here’s mine and what’s better than to claim that something is dead? So…

As a moniker WEM (Web Engagement Management) is widely recognised is flawed. Not just because it has been cynically abused to dress up any tatty old thing that publishes a web page, but it’s problem (as I’ve blogged about before in lots of posts) is the W.

In WEM the W should also mean e-mail, it means social channels, it means mobile apps, TV apps and maybe (gasp) personalised print. Plus of course whatever other IP based communication application that some college kid is beavering toward his first million on today. None of this is technically speaking the web, which to Wikipedia is:

A system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots

You knew that (has anyone ever pasted in something to a blog post that was so superfluous to their reader?) But, I pasted it in as ‘technically speaking’ really? Is that the best argument?

There’s lots of discussion around what WEM should be called, perhaps we should loosen our technical tie a little bit, worry less about the order of the pens in our trusty pocket protector and go with it.

We should worry more about how  we really engage across this pervasive web of IP linked devices – all of which  marketers need to recognize as part of their *EM strategy. As an industry we need to clearly identify why you can’t just search and replace “WCM” for “WEM” in our requirements or product brochures.

Let me share something I’ve observed here at SDL. When we sit around in rooms (that used to be described as ‘smoke filled’ when life was more dangerous)  where we plot our product course to providing tools for these new requirements – you will see scribbled on flip charts not ‘web’ – we say “the multi’s”.

The Multi’s are of course multi-channel, multi-language, multi-device, multi-visitor segments – basically managing multiple content variants  delivered dynamically across multiple channels.

Sooo… There we are, WEM isnt dead, but the future is The Multi’s.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the news that  Klout and Radian6 are working together having seen my friend @Robert_Rose tweet about it and I seem to have an obscure English 80’s new wave song “Living by Numbers”by New New Musik lodged in my head. I imagine that very few people reading this will remember it (or lucky for you, even heard it), but it sprang to mind and stayed there, let me explain..

If you don’t know Klout it attempts to score the impact that you as individual makes on social media – or more specifically Twitter and Facebook and if you don’t know Radian6 they are the cool kids on the social media monitoring block, recently acquired by SalesForce.com. Anyway in this song I have echoing around my head, they sing such prophetic lines as

So you’re living by numbers
And numbers you answer to
You can count all the numbers
You bet that someone’s counting you

And that’s kinda what I have been thinking, that it’s easy to think of these tools and technologies in a personal way, in our individual Klout scores, our individual tweets and the various crumbs of likes and dislikes that we sprinkle around the web. But, I think that while organisations should be paying individual attention to us on the social web, as it becomes an extension of customer service, this young industry is trying to make sense of all the noise. It’s trying to derive some algorithms and systemize the whole affair and aggregate us into numbers.

I see a parallel in where I started my commercial career in Supply Chain Management. Excuse me while I wildly summarize, but in SCM the basic objective is to run the business as lean as possible and as a purveyor of SCM software your USP was an algorithm that predicted demand and enabled the business to have just the right number of that oh-so seasonal widget to be on the shelves at the right time. The whole thing is run by the machine, with only human intervention required to manage exceptions.

The key is ‘manage the exceptions’ to find those outliers, discrepancies from the norm and focus your resources on those, not the rest of the ka-chugga-machine that is stamping out widgets within an industry tolerance at a predictable level to meet demand. I think this is what is being attempted in social media and for good reason; any organization with an audience of even a modest size cannot afford to distract their business with a colony of folks mainlining on Tweetdeck and responding in person.

I’m sorry if that dings at the ‘social’ in social media, but let’s be honest about this, the volumes are getting bigger by the day (it’s not hard to find stats like this from @MyCorporateMedia). Folks say that content publishing is everyone’s second business, where does that put participation in the social web, today, a year or five years from now?

So.. You like a product, here is an (automated) coupon – hate their service, your kids are stranded in Pittsburgh – here is a person.

That’s sentiment analysis, of course. We could stop there, but I think this Klout thing (and plenty of other services that are trying to rate us as social beings) is adding an additional dimension of understanding the value of that outlier and what companies should invest in fixing it. The idea of overlaying how socially valuable someone is (I guess) is that a lot of people may have kids stranded in Pittsburgh, but you probably want to make an extra effort if it’s Ashton Kutcher’s kids (or if I am getting my Hollywood Today references right Demi Moore’s) rather than mine.

I read a lot of Seth Godin and he talks about influencers in a network as ‘sneezers’ – people with a natural disposition and the network to take and share your message. Kids stranded in Pittsburgh is obviously a negative customer service example, but from a marketing perspective, as you try to measure the engagement value of your brand (and justify the investment in minions strapped to Tweetdeck), it’s clearly going to be valuable to identify what proportion of your audience are sneezers. Being a sneezer is clearly not binary, we all sneeze a bit, so we want to measure the level of someone’s sneeziness, the level of respect they have in your community.

Hmmmm… ‘your community’ – this is where I think valuing someone by these crude followers/tweets metrics falls down a little bit. If Tony Byrne (respected CMS Analyst and founder of Real Story Group) tweets that he quite likes John Deere tractors, would that tweet be of the same value of one where he states that he’s fallen deeply in love with XYZ CMS vendor? As a member of the same CMS tribe, no, not to me.

That might be an easy distinction, maybe you can analyze Tony’s community and find we are not farmers, but what if it was me and Tony? At the time of writing I have a slightly higher Klout score than he does, we both talk about CMS and WCM, we probably share a lot of the same followers. But, if I were to say “I love SDL Tridion” it has a slightly different resonance to our CMS tribe (and therefore value to a marketer) than if Tony says it. Even in this fairly crude example, to systemize understanding this subtle difference seems very sophisticated to me.

So… measuring sneeziness and overlaying it on your social media monitoring and audience analytics to build a good picture of the engagement value of your audience – I get it and this is the direction for this industry. In addition, the size of the job at hand for coping with the volumes of social data will mandate this automated triage, it’s something this industry has to do. But, are we there yet? I don’t think so.

So, excited as I maybe by the potential here – let’s be cautious about living by numbers now.

A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend SDL’s Return On Engagement Summit both in Boston and in New York. As part of these events we had Brian Solis as our guest speaker (as well some fine case studies presented by our partners).

While this isn’t one of those fancy live blogging posts of the event, I was inspired to write a ton of notes and thought I’d share some of those.

If you don’t know Brian’s work, on his blog he describes himself as:

..principal at Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm. Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. A digital analyst, sociologist, and futurist, Solis has studied and influenced the effects of emerging media on business, marketing, publishing, and culture.

Which basically means, he talks a lot about web engagement, the impact of social media on businesses and his book “Engage” (which we were handing out signed copies off) is right up there as a leading reference on the subject. I have to admit, I have had it in my Amazon basket for roughly forever so I’ve only just started reading my own (signed) copy.

I don’t want to steal his thunder for the next time you get a chance to hear him speak, but here are a few of his points that resonated with me from my notes:

Our own media eco-system – One of his first points that I enjoyed was the idea that we all have our own media ecosystems (which, I think is interesting as I’ve had a few conversations about “echo chambers” in a negative sense). The point Sollis made was to just deal with them, that if you want to get heard you need to break into these, to be invited into these trusted inner circles, by competing for relevancy. It also reminded me a bit of Seth Godin talking about Tribes, in that we have a hard wired limit on the number of people we can truly engage with and I think Solis was extending this to messages and channels. I had an image of people in a bubble, of a finite size filled with influences, people, messages and stuff.

Psychographics vs Demographics – The next is that demographics are less important than psychographics – I could pretend I knew what psychographics meant, but hey, if you read this regularly you’ll know my level of literacy (and I certainly won’t share how I spelt it in my notes!). This is about finding that people with common interests can be far more closely connected as a target group than people linked by class, income, age etc. Like a lot of good observations, this makes obvious sense. Meaning that data about the links between folks, these communities, could be just as valuable to marketers as the kind of demographic information that companies (like Experian) trade in today. For example, a Hemi powered American muscle car makes me grin, but I’m not going to find people that also get weak at the sound of that rumble by looking at their income or if they live in a house like mine in my neighbourhood. Nor, as it turns out, discussing it over dinner with other software execs – they look at you funny.

Millenials and Connected Connected Consumers – This point I think underlines the previous one about demographics, there are a lot of statistics about how marketers need to engage this generation, but Solis interchanged the terms ‘millenials’ and ‘connected consumers’, indicating that while there is a new generation of consumers that only know this digital world, this isn’t an age thing, many of us are connected consumers that exhibit the same behaviour. Sollis neatly described this behaviour as viewing the world through a social media lens, each element of their world labelled as the next Tweet, Facebook update, user generated review or foursquare check-in.

Definition of Engagement – I’m not going to run through his complete definition of engagement (although if you are curious, I’d wander over to his blog – his post about 21 rules of social media makes some of the same points). Although I enjoyed each of the points, I think (from my notes) it was the last one that summed it up for me “understanding the value of being linked in” – in other words the value of breaking into this bubble of influencers, trusted messages and channels, these personal media ecosystems. This last mile of engagement is the hardest, needs to be the most personal and of the highest quality.

Those were my top four from a whole host of great points he made and I think I successfully avoided spoilers and punch lines, as I would encourage you to see Solis speak.

One last point I noted, something that I think highlights the shift in a traditional marketers view of brand definition, of control their over such things and the way brand perception is shaped today:

Can (or more importantly would) anyone tweet your corporate mission statement?

You know, without giggling?

(I admit I added the ‘giggling’ bit)

So, today Salesforce.com has moved to acquire Radian6, a respected and possibly ‘leading’ vendor in the relatively new space of Social Media Monitoring (SMM), a rival to products like Alterian’s SM2 product that I knew relatively well.

For anyone interested in digital engagement whether you call it web (WEM), customer (CEM) or pervasive (PEM) this looks to me like a significant move.

Here are the details of the acquisition (from the Saleforce.com website), for folks that are interested in the numbers:

..today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Radian6, the industry-leading social media monitoring platform, for approximately $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock, net of cash acquired. The transaction is expected to be completed in salesforce.com’s fiscal second quarter ending July 31, 2011, subject to customary closing conditions.

From the perspective of web engagement listening is an essential part of the mix, it is one of the five pillars of Web Engagement that we identified when I was at Gilbane, as part of the capability model developed with Scott Liewehr.

Not claiming we invented it, SMM features in engagement models documented by other folks that follow a listen,understand and execute type cycle. A cycle where you use what you learn from social media and website analytics to build visitor/audience/customer models and then execute dynamic messaging, campaigns and web content based on that insight. So, it was interesting to read this in the press release:

“Social media has made every business recognize the value of paying attention to the voice of the customer,” added Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBru. “Radian6?s technology is built for the new norm of customer engagement – real time, two way conversations that includes social channels. Joining the salesforce.com team will allow Radian6 to grow faster to meet the demands of our rapidly expanding customer base.”

What’s interesting is who owns this ‘voice of the customer’, as an industry I think we have been wondering about where this customer and audience data would sit. As various folks from WCM to web analytics packages have been laying claim to it. It was always the elephant in the room – what happens when the CRM folks wake up to this? Well, I think it has happened. Kudos to my friend Scott for speculating on this – on Twitter:

*Just* told someone this would be an interesting merge. Wow.

http://twitter.com/#!/sliewehr/status/53085338779910145

I am looking forward to seeing some more informed analysis of this move than mine, but I think it shifts the bar of who should owns the digital customer and it will be interesting to see if this becomes a CRM trend and enters the mainstream requirements of that software space.

Update: I am not going to try and list all of the articles that mention this, but today I have come across some nice observations. I liked the Social B2B news site where they outline four reasons why B2B marketers should care about this acquisition. Eloqua also chimed in with this, I especially like their comment “The gate has been lifted, the bull has entered the rodeo”.