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.  

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.

As you know I have recently joined SDL and I have been delighted to find a new twist on the business of engagement that I write about on this blog, something we call Pervasive Engagement.

Ah hah! I can already hear the cynics pursing their lips and maybe clicking on the back button as you suspect that I’ve either over done it on a new brand of Kool Aid,  my transformation to the dark side is complete or perhaps here is another vendor trying to carve a new segment – but please hear me out.

I think the monicker ‘pervasive’ is interesting. It’s a difficult word, like the feedback I got when I used refer to persuasive content, that it kinda has a darker side – but content is all around us, it is pervasive, it is the fabric of our increasingly digital lives.

From Merriam-Webster:

Definition of PERVASIVE

: existing in or spreading through every part of something

We’ve struggled to describe this digital engagement thing. Its not ‘web’ exclusively as it covers email, mobile, etc so folks have questioned the WEM acronym, but ‘digital engagement’ doesn’t quite work.

I had an entertaining conversation with Laurence Hart (@piewords) on this subject on Twitter last year after I wrote Web Engagement – The-Emperors New Clothes? – (it’s a shame that search on Twitter is so poor, as I can’t find it) but I recall we were discussing how far down the TCP/IP stack one should go to describe it accurately – if it’s not Web, not Internet…

As I have discussed before, from my perspective I don’t think I can really call what I write about ‘customer engagement’ either as I think that’s a broader discipline as this could include the business of store loyalty cards, product placement in a store, big CRM etc etc.. Whilst it’s true, these are feeds into a digital engagement strategy and of course the folks you are engaging over these digital channels are often customers, but unless you are a 100% online business, it’s just part of the story – and in my mind, it’s a bigger thing than reformed WCM’ers can tackle.

I also think that when you talk about customer engagement, perhaps you are no longer talking about engaging with audiences that may call themselves something different (like citizens) or the subtly of acquiring and nurturing advocates that is beyond the ‘simple’ acquisition and execution of a customer sale. I wonder if when people see marketers use the word ‘customer’ they immediately assume it’s not for them.

I’ve digressed… back to pervasive..

I’ve talked about these different business practices as Russian dolls (in my previous post You say tomato, I say tomato, you say WEM, I say WEM..), in that these things fit within each other. Web experience is a part of web engagement, which in turn is part of the customer experience, that forms customer engagement.

It seems to me that our doll, our pervasive doll, sits around web engagement. It is about a digital multi-touch experience that has both a holistic digital view of the audience, but also a multi-channel execution capability to be wherever they are.

As a content management guy I believe that engagement starts with content and that these multi-touch, multi-purpose requirements will mean we need to deliver on the decade old promise of this industry, the value of good content management and delivery as we move away from the principle business objective of just publishing pages.

As I wrote in Who Will Buy This Web Engagement? :

Yes, yes, we’ve been wanging on about the core competencies of web content management; separation of content from presentation, the componentization of content, understanding the content through metadata, the democratization of content authoring, dynamic delivery etc etc… for a billion years. I really think that publishing to this multi-channel, multi-destination splinternet really brings these needs to light, maybe it flushes out those webpage or website publishing tools from content management.

I apologize for referring to lots of my own posts here, rather than the work of others, but I want to contextualize Pervasive Engagement into what I’ve written before, you know, look like there’s a plan here or something…

This isn’t a new segment, but I think it is worth exploring as it is more than just a different way  to describe web engagement. Perhaps the difference appears subtle and I certainly won’t stop talking about web engagement, but I hope to explore this pervasive idea in more detail in coming posts….

Image of Russian dolls by Rdoke reproduced under creative commons license

As the holidays approach, my SKY+ hard disk (PVR/Tivo thing) is brimming with movies ready for the onset of quality time with my young family. Perhaps our viewing pleasure as I recuperated from what I anticipate to be a fine lunch could be an old movie that I think will entertain the girls – the musical Oliver!. In it they sing “Who will buy”, something I have been hearing on blogs and twitter about Web Engagement.

OK, so as festive holiday themed posts go, this is tenuous. In fact, in a fit of self doubt I am now not even sure the film Oliver! is that well known outside the UK, so if you too would like to have the song playing on loop in your head as you read this, you can go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4gzmoUHrQ4

Anyway… let’s press on…

So, who will buy this web engagement?

To me this is like asking the question “who will buy customer satisfaction?”

Of course the answer is nobody can.

Everyone would want to wave a magic dollar bill, watch the world go fuzzy and instantly see service metrics hockey stick up and to the right – but of course the truth is as fanciful as buying “this wonderful morning”. The same is absolutely true of web engagement, being satisfied or being engaged is not something you can choose for someone else – they’ll decide.

If I look at this blog for example if I talk about WordPress or social media these pages become popular – but is being popular about WordPress the engagement objective of this blog? There are also people that end up this site looking for information about ‘The Yes Man’ book or film, I feel for them as it was an analogy I used in an early post – but I am not going to culture engagement with those folks. To me their clicks are just noise, to them my content is noise and please bounce on, sorry to have troubled you.

As I think I’ve probably mentioned once or twice before, we need to get smarter about understanding the level of engagement we have with our visitors beyond the crude counting of clicks or bounce rates. Our websites are not popularity contests.

I recently wrote about providing customer service over our websites and in that case the number of clicks and pages viewed in the session may actually be the symptom of a pissed off visitor, caught up in a maze of content, frustrated that they can’t get the answer they are looking for. Of course, it may not, it maybe your next customer eagerly consuming everything you’ve written on a subject. The point is, you don’t know and counting clicks won’t tell you.

Think about the decision process that went into the last page published on your website, was it in response to a need of the visitor, was it an act of vanity, was it because you’ve always done that, or that everyone else does that? What information do you have that help inform that decision?

But every conversation about engagement cannot be solely about just understanding the visitor, the reason why I get so excited about web engagement from a content management professionals perspective is that it drives organizations to look closely at the life blood of the web engagement thing – content.

Yes, yes, we’ve been wanging on about the core competencies of web content management; separation of content from presentation, the componentization of content, understanding the content through metadata, the democratization of content authoring, dynamic delivery etc etc… for a billion years. I really think that publishing to this multi-channel, multi-destination splinternet really brings these needs to light, maybe it flushes out those webpage or website publishing tools from content management.

I think to do this engagement thing properly start with a decent WCM and content management strategy before you start rushing to provide your visitor with a personalized view of your grubby, out of date under garments. Basically, if we understand web engagement as a business objective, then we can start describing the capability of the tools in a business context and get people to pay attention to the important conversations we have, like why WordPress is not a terribly good CMS…

Anyway, I should get back to my point – Who will buy this web engagement? You can’t – but will they buy the tools to execute a web engagement management strategy – absolutely.

By the way… analytics and content are just two of the five things that we at Gilbane think are important for folks to look at for web engagement, the rest are here.

Recently I’ve been seeing ‘an examination’ shall we say of the term Web Engagement Management and the acronym WEM. There is a suggestion that it’s a figment of the fervid imaginations of software vendor marketing departments possibly in collusion with certain analysts and that dreadful things should be done to it’s proponents.

In addition, this week I gave a presentation at GXConnect 2010 – ‘Web Engagement, Marketing Buzzword or Business Imperative’ – and whilst this isn’t a transcript of that presentation I wanted to air this debate. So, is this WEM thing the emperors new clothes, a sharp marketing suit or the boiler suit of the workers on the coal face of getting web stuff done?

I’ll attempt to keep it brief(ish) and I apologize if you are familiar with the subject and I stray into the area of stating the bleedin’ obvious – but bear with me, I wanted to get down the basics.

Let’s start on what I think is the safe ground with E – Engagement. As I have previously said on CMSWire in “Have the Buzzword Magpies Stolen our “Engagement” the word engagement is perfect to describe the the difference between a casual ‘bounce’ visitor and someone who’s listening and interacting with you. The difference between standing on the street corner, shouting random thoughts into a loud hailer and conversation.  If you have ever thought about your audience before tweeting, blogging or publishing content – you have thought about engaging them. Heck – you may even choose to rant against WEM, because that’s what you believe your audience need to hear to engage with you. Extending this to a business context, engagement describes an objective, the reason why you create a website, why you blog and tweet.

So, engagement is about being relevant and to be relevant you need to understand your audience. Understanding is where WEM departs from the mechanics of publishing. This idea of listening is something that is covered  by every contemporary marketing commentator from Seth Godin, David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan etc etc. These are not snake oil salesman. The level of engagement is also measurable, that helps to make it a business practice. This isn’t new – I’ve also previously referred to the book “Web Engagement” authored by Bill Zoelick (with a forward by Frank Gilbane), published in 2000 and now sadly out of print (mine is a second hand copy). The tools have changed, but it talks about understanding as an essential element of engagement.

As Jeremiah Owyang stated in his blog post in 2007 “Defining “Engagement”:

My working definition:“Engagement indicates the level of authentic involvement, intensity, contribution, and ownership”

It’s possible for me to shorten it to: “Apparent Interest”

I say apparent because someone can be interested and never act on it, measuring that will be difficult. If they act on it, say it, or gesture, then we can measure. I say interest, as I really see engagement the verb of interest.

Engagement Formula:“Attention + Interaction + Velocity + Authority + Relevant Attributes (variable)”

By the way, I could have plucked plenty out of his article, to support this post – I suggest you read the entire thing

This understanding doesn’t necessarily (or maybe very rarely should) come just from a visitors experience with you on the web. Very few organizations communicate or transact with their audience solely over their  website. Therefore the feedback we need to listen to about our brand, product, service, our message (etc) comes via a variety of sources; the social web has gone mainstream and most of us have a story of dealing with an organization over the phone and feeling like what we told them during a web experience went unheard. Understanding our audience is a multi-channel discipline. In writing this I am using feedback from Twitter direct messages and conversations in the pub.

Do you agree so far that we can describe engagement as a measurable business practice and goal?

I’m saving web until last, so what about M for Management? Clearly if you are going to listen and speak, you need some thinking in-between. We need some orchestration that takes what we’ve heard and apply it to what we are going to say. For a multi-product, multi-national company this is complex. A large audience, lots of places to listen, lots of information to process, lots of segments, communities, lots of systems that hold some useful information and lots of places to converse. Like any complex business process or practice there is an opportunity to systemize it, to build processes, to make it repeatable, understood, measureable etc etc.

If we agree that this is true, then, like any complex business problem, we can apply computers. It is therefore perfectly feasible for vendors to claim that they do more than publish content, that their software has this kind of orchestration. That the software can apply insight from data on the audience and manage the way it is published to make it engaging.

So… Engagement Management. Does this sound real and reasonable? Would you agree that it’s something that real people would want to do and would want systems to help them do and not just a marketing hallucination brought on by a Kool Aid sugar rush?

Finally. The W. Web. I use the term Web Engagement as I talk about how we make our websites more engaging and whilst the data that feeds the insight might be multi-channel, the delivery is predominantly over the web.Not necessarily just the corporate website, but to any of the web properties where your audience might be hanging out and the devices they use to access them.

I am also personally wary of alternate terms, like referring to Customer Engagement, not because I consider this term invalid, but because I specialize in a  sub-set of customer engagement, I don’t know how to make a loyalty scheme work, how to do IP warming for an e-mail campaign, where to put a pop up stand in a store or that we should put nappies on a shelf near the beer (or something). But I do know that an engaging and satisfying web experience, is essential to customer service, satisfaction and retention. (I talk abit more about that in You say tomato, I say tomato, you say WEM, I say WEM..)

So far I’ve described WEM as bringing together a number of existing disciplines and technologies, not replacing them. If  WEM isn’t the right term, what do you think we should call this convergence?

From a Web Content perspective, I think we’ve long known that the dynamic delivery or a relevant, engaging web experiences places a special focus on the capabilities of your WCM system. For example you need lots of content, you need metadata, to get lots of content you need something your authors can use and integrate to other systems etc). I agree completely with Jarrod Gingras (of Real Story Group) that vendor claims of WEM capabilities should not dilute, distract or compromise an organizations requirements when selecting a WCM. (I recommend reading his article: Call me a Grinch, but Web CMS is not dead) to engage over the web, you need to get these basics right.

So, as I try and draw this long rambling post to some sort of conclusion – the question I asked at the top of this post was Is this WEM thing the emperors new clothes, a sharp marketing suit or the boiler suit of the workers on the coal face of getting web stuff done?

Emperors new clothes – I don’t think so. I agree that vendor marketing and analysts can whip up the perfect storm that becomes separated from the real needs of the market – there are lots of smart folks that put ECM in that bucket – but I talk to marketers that are facing the challenge that WEM aims to solve, to deliver an engaging experience for the visitor and to feedback valuable marketing data in the process.

A sharp marketing suit – Maybe. I say maybe, because I think it depends on whose wearing the suit. We need to define the business practices that WEM touches, develop a benchmark set of requirements that organizations need and then we can contrast the capabilities of software vendors, systems integrators and agencies against those. We’ll then be able to say for sure if someone is just wearing a new suit over some tired old software, or if they have the boiler suit that the marketer needs.

A boiler suit – I think so. People are living and breathing this stuff, some of them may not call it Web Engagement – but they sure as hell care about their audience, how to offer great customer service, how to differentiate from their competitors or maybe how to get you to spend a few extra dollars.

At the Gilbane group we are embarking on something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time and define the requirements and capabilities of web engagement. (To get a high level of what we are thinking, take a look at: Introducing the Web Engagement Capability model). As you will see in this research, this isn’t just about buying software products, but about organization preparedness, the integration of business processes, data and expertise.

In closing – as an industry we understand the requirements, scope and how to compare content management solutions, but I think today WEM is slightly nebulous and we need to work on that. We need to figure out what the requirements are for ‘the thing between our content and our visitor’, what the market has to offer to satisfy them, how we measure the success of these solutions and how software buyers should compare them. If we can’t do this, then I’ll concede that a bunch of us are wandering down the high street naked.

I have run long here as usual and if you’ve stuck around to read this far – thank you, I really appreciate it and would very much like to hear your comments.

When you say WEM, do you say Web Experience Management or Web Engagement Management?  What does it mean and does it matter and what about CEM? Well, in this  post I want to explore that, in direct response to a couple of things – firstly I promised in my latest post over at the Gilbane blog to tackle it and secondly Irina Guseva asked the question over Twitter and I needed more than 140 characters…

Web Engagement Capability Model by @IanTruscott and @sliewehr - Considered the broader #CEM? http://bit.ly/bxFzn0 #wem

October 20, 2010 4:45 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@irina_guseva

Irina Guseva

In Introducing the Web Engagement Capability Model over at the Gilbane blog I said:

I am using the term ‘engagement’, not ‘experience’ – in my opinion the experience is a vital element of engagement, but it’s not the broader topic – maybe more on that in a later post.

I define engaging over the web as an objective, it’s the process of getting someone from an unknown visitor, to a lead, customer, advocate, educated citizen or whatever your reason is for having a website.

It’s something that could happen over a series of visits and it might pull in other bits of the digital marketing arsenal, like social media, email, pay-per-click etc. etc. I think a web engagement strategy is the plan and Web Engagement Management is the orchestration of all of that.

I think the experience is a fundamental part of the engagement strategy – how we make each web visit compelling and relevant and on that my Gilbane colleague Mary Laplante put this really well in her paper “Engage Me!” that we published in 2008:

If engagement is the outcome, then web experience management (WEM) is the practice… Web experience management is a business practice that formalizes an organization’s approach to relating to its audiences through web-based channels.

So, Web Experience Management is specifically focused on optimizing the website visit – although clearly to do that you need to reach outside just delivering dynamic content, you need to understand your visitors and bring to bear all of the moving parts of your web engagement strategy.

Tweeting back to Irina, I suggested that comparing the two is like saying a good conversation (experience) is the same as a friendship (engagement). I am not completely happy with that analogy, but I think it makes the point and one is clearly a critical part of the other.

So where do both of these terms sit with CEM – the ‘C’ is customer, although we have the same confusion of terms in that some folks talk about ‘E’ for experience and some ‘engagement’.

Personally,  as I  peg out my little claim of coverage as an analyst  – right now I am shying away from leaving my web comfort blanket and talking about customer anything. Although it’s intensely interesting and relevant, I think customer engagement is the broader subject and like Russian dolls it’s the one that everything slots into, the same way that web experience sits in web engagement, they both sit inside customer experience/engagement.

For example, if I am talking to a supermarket, or any business where their customer engagement is in large part down to the experience of personal interaction or bricks and mortar stores, I’m going to run out of road. There’s plenty of overlap – but customer engagement involves loyalty schemes, vouchers, call centres, customer relationship management etc etc.. and while I think these are all essential feeds to the web experience, of delivering a coherent, consistent cross channel customer experience, right now – I’ll leave the detail of covering those for others.

I’d recommend reading this on Customer Experience Management, a pretty good Wikipedia entry that I think demonstrates the holistic nature of the discipline.

The image of Fred Astaire is from Wikipedia and probably only OK to reproduce in the US, if I understand copyright notice correctly…

I’m doing some work for a new client, who look at optimizing customer service across multiple channels using, rather interestingly – artificial intelligence. In my research on this I find myself observing an interesting convergence with the Web Engagement / Web Experience mantra that I’ve been peddling here and that there is perhaps something here that we often overlook.

The audience that we are often playing to are the black framed glasses of the digital marketer, but I think when we talk about engagement we should be paying attention to the customer service professionals within organisations and give more consideration to good customer service as a driver for adopting these strategies.

Recently Gerry McGovern wrote for CMSWire  ‘Web Engagement: Web Customers Crave Speed, Not Emotional Experiences’ and he makes a great point, that in a nutshell your site visitor are often here to get something done, not to be entertained and I’ve talked often about how the visitor attention is fragile (hence the rather cumbersome ‘Hovering over the Back Button’ moniker for this blog).

I am not as convinced as McGovern that every visitor wants as efficient an experience as possible all of the time (although they should be when we need them to be). I’ve stood in line in the bank watching a customer ahead of me who clearly enjoys a chat with the teller as part of her engagement experience and I must admit to have passed the time with my dry cleaner talking about past visits to Stamford Bridge (the home of Chelsea). The marvellous thing about the web as a customer service agent is that there is no queue, take as long, or as little time as you like – the experience can be yours.

Our websites are more than just brand beacons; the thing that embodies who we are, what we stand for and what we do to our customers, our citizens or our employees –a shining pretty thing. They are here to do something  -  I often refer to this in my analogy of a man walking into a suit shop – the objective of that story being to buy or sell a suit (depending on who’s perspective we are looking at this from)  and our website strategies should have this same clarity – what does it do for me and for my visitor? The advice is that when you develop your websites, to think about these web engagement objectives.

Of course in the social web fuelled consumer revolution, good customer service takes on an added significance – organizations are looking to not just harvest fresh new customers, but there is a new imperative to create advocacy. Advocates drive positive buzz, write reviews that’ll sway the undecided, to sneeze (in the words of Seth Godin) and take your products and ideas viral. That’s the high of good service, but of course the low of providing bad service and for folks to start tooting on that horn, is a bitter, long remembered hangover.

But, if you read this blog, you know all that, so back to this AI thing that I’m up to my eyes in at the moment. When we discuss web engagement and web experience, we talk about relevancy. In the world of automating customer service they talk about intelligence, of being cognitive. So, aside from both operating in this same social media fuelled world, what inspires this blog post is that I am thinking that these are the same thing. Is it such a leap from the science being applied to predictive modelling to figure out which page, product or service I might be interested in reading or buying next to real artificial intelligence?

I agree for a sports website to learn that I am interested in Chelsea football club takes a low amount of intelligence, but – to me if someone can remember my sports team that might be all I need to have a great conversation. But imagine if I am filling in my tax return – the level of help I’d need would be beyond being relevant.

Equally the challenges that face the digital marketer on the customer acquisition trail are the same as the customer service professional maintaining customer satisfaction levels – these ‘experiences’ happen across multiple communication channels and there are lots of them. Both sets of folks are figuring out ways to triage this deluge – to offer the very best service they can, consistently across these channels, without hiring a cripplingly expensive army of folks to do it.

Perhaps we should consider each digital engagement in terms of a customer service conversation, maybe we should strive to make that web experience cognitive – not just relevant. – and give that website a name badge.

Image of an elevator light by gruntzooki reproduced under creative commons license.

I was delighted to recently be asked to comment on a paper by Robert Rose over at Big Blue Moose as he dives into the waters of analysis and research with his first paper – Marketing From The Cloud – How Digital Marketers Are Using Software As A Service. It’s a subject I’ve been thinking about, as I continue to research the Engagement Tier and it’s constituent components.

I should point out that as Mr Rose has entered into the world of white-paper wordsmithery, it seems he has, technically speaking, set himself up as a competitor to my day job -therefore this post is by me, not the Gilbane me and these views are my own.. etc… etc..

So, if you read my tweets you’ll know I am already a fan of his writing, I have an embarrassing blog crush on  Robert’s Adaptive Marketer blog and this paper is true to form – it’s a crisp nine pages, sharply observed and based on research that shows that today’s digital marketer is relying on services outside the server room to engage with their audience – from the mainstream of content management or web analytics, to test and target and lead nurturing.

At the Gilbane Group we have (oh heck, should that be they have if I am blogging as me) observed the trend for our clients to reach for SaaS solutions for some time. Mary Laplante published a cracking paper at the beginning of 2009 that concluded that this was driven by two pressures; tight fiscal control over capital expenditure and a drive to quickly deploy innovative technical solutions.

Whilst clearly financial prudence is a continued pressure as we crawl out of recent recession, SaaS based solutions and other services available outside of the server room are an increasingly essential part of the marketer’s solution palette as they strive for agility to keep pace with the changes in the way we engage with consumers over the social web.

So, why is that? SaaS lowers the barrier to entry for digital marketers, often poorly served by long standing enterprise procurement and information technology implementation processes more suited to the provision of infrastructure, than providing for the subtle, fluid and dynamic needs of customer engagement today.

This low barrier to entry of adopting services provided outside the server room enables marketers to quickly add the pieces needed for web engagement, but critically the lower barriers to exit, removes risk and enables marketers to be innovative. They are able to take a ‘suck it and see’ attitude and experiment with new technologies and engagement channels, knowing that they’ll quickly get a measure of their success, with a near instant return on the value of the tools or alternatively to try something else.

That’s not to say that SaaS solutions should not be procured without due diligence, they are still a significant investment in internal commitment, if not capital costs. The advantage is that during that process of due diligence questions like hardware procurement, technology support, budget for upgrades etc. dissolve and the focus returns to functionality and business value. Procuring the right business solution – uncompromised by whether the techies like the colour of the database.

It’s not a silver bullet, lots of options and discussions I’d like to explore here – but as we build out our persuasive, relevant engagement tiers, hubs or web experiences – SaaS clearly has it’s place.

Image of a cloud courtesy of akakumo and reproduced under creative commons license.

Further reading:

• Marketing From The Cloud – How Digital Marketers Are Using Software As A Service.
• Communicating SaaS WCM Value – A Guide to Understanding the Business Case for Software-as-a-Service Solutions for Web Content Management (PDF)
• Into the Engagement Tier…

Alright, hands up who didn’t approach the Adobe acquisition of Omniture with some puzzlement and surprise?  Well, now it’s making sense as these proud parents arrange the wedding of their blushing analytics bride to a handsome CMS beau that should deliver the web engagement off-spring that they crave.

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.

Next in my occasional series where I refer to a different to letter to the one in a TLA (after discussing the R in ECM) – I wondering if it’s time we took the W out of CMS and thought about management and delivery as separate disciplines. I am not the first to think like this, obviously, but it’s something I wanted to explore in this blog.

To know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM teepee.

I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

The difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – is that it was a web site centric world and in most applications the term CMS was interchangeable with WCM. Our digital engagement activities were single threaded in a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

Also, mainstream requirement trends like dynamic delivery with the content editorial usability requirement for in-context editing mean’t a preference for management and delivery to be tightly coupled.

I am summarizing wildly – but the supposedly ‘niche’ WCM vendors then went on to rule the school.

Is it now time to unpick that? I think so, but why?

I think there are two pressures and they are content and delivery.

Starting with delivery, even if we are only concerned with web engagement, we are in the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff)

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web [..] our site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

But it’s not just devices, our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from various places – Facebook and Twitter to name two.

Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

So, we have a fragmented communication channel and across these we need to be consistent and if and when these folks do get to our websites, they are expecting a compelling, relevant web experience. Your brochure is not welcome here.

You quickly start to build a set of complex delivery requirements, that appear (I stress appear) to dwarf those of your content production.

Could we call this the engagement tier? Where we pull this stuff together, of understanding the context of the user, the device – finding the right content and delivering it. (No, no, not a portal, this could be an e-mail, a tweet or an iPad application)

So, that’s delivery – I talked about two pressures – what about content?

Content no longer forms an orderly queue out of our marketing and communication organisations to be fed to our cradled audience through a teat.

Content production is being equally fractured, with content to be marshalled from more internal sources as we find the voices that can respond across these channels and an ever increasing volume of external content being produced about our products and services.

To deliver these relevant, engagement experiences, we need to make it easy for our contributors, we need to know our content, where is it, what is it about and whether it’s fit for purpose? Sounds like getting back to some down home, good, honest content management?

If we are going to start talking about this tier, this could also make our ECM and CMIS discussions more interesting, if we start to figure out how we surface our enterprise (small e) content into that engagement tier.

I’m not sure we’ll buy these from different vendors, I’m confident we already have. I am also fairly sure an engagement tier is about as heterogeneous as they come, with specialist vendors both large and small playing a role.

I think we are going to have to start to watch this space, what do you think?