Observations
Hovering Over The Back Button?
April 7th, 2010 - 4:53 pm § in Observations | | 2 Comments
As a fresh new broom sweeps through my professional life as I transition from years of vendor representation to that of an analyst - I've changed the title of my blog (and the URL).
I'll obviously write more on my move - but more importantly - changing the name of my blog?
Why 'Hovering Over The Back Button'?
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Is WordPress a CMS? Hardly? Barely?
March 3rd, 2010 - 2:54 pm § in Observations | | 13 Comments
The perennial "what is a CMS" debate broke out this week, with a fairly innocuous tweet from Dirk Shaw, "I am sorry but wordpress is hardly a web content management system." that many of our CMS community waded into and included this post on CMS Myth arguing in favour and just about everyone arguing against... and crikey I might not be standing next to my on-line friends on this - now Dirk knows what he's talking about, as a Vignette alumnus and blogger, maybe the key to the phrase he used is the word 'hardly' - could I suggest we should say 'barely''?
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On Strategy, Twinterviews and Haiku
I think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I've tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – I say “we took” but @janusboye certainly had a hand in igniting it.
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What's the big deal about Coke?
It was recently reported in New Media Age, picked up by the Hubspot blog that Coca-Cola were moving their campaign sites from "traditional" websites to social media platforms and they are not alone, Pepsi recently created a stir as they announced a move from big budget Super Bowl ads to investing in their social media community. So what does this mean for "traditional" web content management?
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Joining the Trend for WCM Trends
I'm going to kick off 2010 with a blog post about Web Content Management, enough for now of my wittering on about my place in the social web or even web engagement.
Content is still king and as I catch up with three weeks or so of my RSS reader, it seems that at the end of last year - the decade - that there was a new CMS blogging trend and it's for talking about trends, the CMS blogosphere was alive with predictions. All worthy of comment and I thought maybe I can chuck in some thoughts of my own.
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Tweetdeck Springs to Life at Gilbane Boston
December 10th, 2009 - 12:55 pm § in Observations | | No Comments
Last week I attended the Gilbane Conference in Boston and have finally found a few minutes to blog about it, we exhibited and I was invited to speak in a couple of sessions and as I'd been contributing to the 'back channel' through Twitter (#gilbaneboston) I thought I'd expand on some of the those thoughts.
First observation is a personal one - this was the first event that I'd been to where there were a lot of people that know me through this blog or twitter - and initially it was slightly unnerving having people leap straight into conversation with me and thank you to everyone that did.
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Does WCM Really Need a Fix?
As part of preparation for a presentation he gave yesterday at Jboye '09 - a few days ago Jon Marks set a challenge to his Twitter community; to give him examples of where Web Content Management fails. I admit I am not at the JBoye event, so I have missed seeing Jon in action - but as a blogger on this sort of thing, let alone as a WCM vendor it would be rude to ignore the wealth of great points this process threw up.
As Jon crowd sourced his presentation content, seemingly every element of a CMS procurement and project got a mention.
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I Predict A (CMS) Riot: 1 hour, 6 People, 1 Wave, 1 Post
Today we embarked on an interesting social media challenge, a few folks that I've started to hang out with virtually (and more recently in the pub) agreed to meet at a designated time in a Google Wave and set about writing a blog post - in an hour. There was no pre-determined title, no prep, just a blank bit of virtual paper and half a dozen scribblers…
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The Web Analytics Revolution
October 21st, 2009 - 8:11 am § in Observations | | No Comments
The Web Analytics Revolution
Eric T Peterson, a veteran of the web analytics business, Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified and author some of must read books on Web Analytics has published a report on what he sees as the current revolution in Web Analytics.
This report focuses on the needs for businesses to not just create reports but to develop insights and recommendations from the data – something that when I am talking about web engagement I have referred to as ‘actionable insight’ and it’s about more than pretty graphs.
Peterson also discusses the data that organisations are capturing and reporting on, the wealth of data available to organisations, from web analytics, to credit card transactions to observations about location – GPS data. He also covers the privacy issues wrapped around that – that people will give up their data, but it has to be in exchange for something valuable to them.
I like Peterson’s analogy of it being like money – the difference between using the money you have and just storing it – in terms of the potential rewards. As the report says:
If today’s business leaders want to take advantage of this treasure trove of intelligence about customers and prospects, a new approach is required. First and second?generation analytic vendors are good at what they do, but mining for correlation and causation within massive, disparate online and offline data sets is simply not what they do. To take the next step, business owners need to explicitly recognize the inherent limitations in these systems and augment them with appropriate systems that are built to extract, transform, load and analyze data regardless of the source.
With certain symmetry with our own Customer Engagement vision, he refers to a third generation of analysis tools that are bringing this together – that companies who treat offline and online as separate data silos will concede ground to their competition that look at this more holistically across their enterprise.
As the report concludes:
The only thing worse than not having data, is having data and not being able to use it.
You can download a copy of the report here.
Eric T Peterson – a veteran of the web analytics business, Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified and author some of must read books on Web Analytics – has published a report on what he sees as the current revolution in Web Analytics.
This report focuses on the needs for businesses to not just create reports but to develop insights and recommendations from the data – something that when I am talking about web engagement I have referred to as ‘actionable insight’ and it’s about more than pretty graphs.
Peterson also discusses the data that organisations are capturing and reporting on, the wealth of data available to organizations, from web analytics, to credit card transactions to observations about location – GPS data. He also covers the privacy issues wrapped around that – that people will give up their data, but it has to be in exchange for something valuable to them.
I like Peterson’s analogy of it being like money – the difference between using the money you have and just storing it – in terms of the potential rewards. As the report says:
If today’s business leaders want to take advantage of this treasure trove of intelligence about customers and prospects, a new approach is required. First and second?generation analytic vendors are good at what they do, but mining for correlation and causation within massive, disparate online and offline data sets is simply not what they do. To take the next step, business owners need to explicitly recognize the inherent limitations in these systems and augment them with appropriate systems that are built to extract, transform, load and analyze data regardless of the source.
With certain symmetry with our own Customer Engagement vision, he refers to a third generation of analysis tools that are bringing this together – that companies who treat offline and online as separate data silos will concede ground to their competition that look at this more holistically across their enterprise.
As the report concludes:
The only thing worse than not having data, is having data and not being able to use it.
You can read more about what Peterson has to say or download a copy of the report here.
Inside the Google Walled Garden
October 16th, 2009 - 12:40 pm § in Observations | | 2 Comments
I admit I am a big Google advocate, I have spent a fair amount of time at their cool European HQ In London, at partner events and I even coded the first shipped iteration of our Google Search Appliance Connector (thankfully now looked after by proper developers!). Also, I admit I've only spent a few hours with Google's latest offerings, SideWiki and Wave, but I have the feeling of being in a privileged walled garden, rather than on the crest of a mainstream wave. Why does is it feel like that?
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About Me
Hi, I'm Ian Truscott, VP Products, North America - SDL Tridion - passionate about web content management and how we engage with folks on-line.
Yes, my work defines me - or does it? Read more about me here or get in touch.
