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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, becoming a real boy?

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

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

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

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

Alright, I admit we didn’t quite plan it this way – but that’s the lesson of the new social media powered PR – you can’t always control it and it’s often a test of reactions – of ensuring you have the right tools, people and message to do that.

In this post (as I tend to on this blog) I’ll be focusing on my experience – you can read our official news release on Alterian Content Manager 7, it’ll give you some background as what I am going to ramble on about here.

Anyway, Tuesday a rumour is going around, I get a couple of DM’s – and Janus mischievously tweets:

sources tell that Alterian will soon discontinue Immediacy / Alterian CM Corp. Edition – wondering if customers will enjoy the sunset

Ah… not entirely true, but now it’s out there – so strap yourselves in folks – you’re launching a product strategy on social media!

The vigilant Irina Guseva of CMSWire clearly had her ear to the ground and grabbed me for an exclusive interview and in no time at all (how does she do that so fast?)  published – Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands.

In the meantime – and this demonstrates the diversity of this CMS community – there’s a CMS Haiku competition going on – Jon Marks (@mcboof) is offering free beer to the winners (yes folks, the stakes are raised, this isn’t about product marketing any more, it’s about beer) – he dares me to pitch in:

@iantruscott  Now that @irina_guseva  has broken the news (http://bit.ly/b8RQlO), can’t you re-break it in #cmshaikuform?

I quickly scan through the social media bibles; “Groundswell”, “Here Comes Everybody”, Jeremiah Owyang’s entire blog archive – no mention of haiku as a required skill of today’s social media marketer.

In truth, I admit, I did have to Google how exactly to write haiku – more on my first poetic foray later.

The next day starts with what we eventually agree was a Twitter interview (no doubt someone calls these “twinterviews”) by James Hoskins (@JamesHoskins) – long time social media agent provocateur – especially when it comes to all things CMS and Alterian.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to find this conversation, James and I didn’t hashtag it and twitter doesn’t lend itself to a Q & A structure, unless you want to read it backwards through replies – and I haven’t really got room for it all here. We have however ensured that the excellent points James has made are in our official communications.

This goes on all day and some of the next, with other folks now pitching in with questions – at the end, James pays me a huge compliment:

#followfriday @iantruscott  - raising the bar for other WCM vendor VPs in openness and engagement #alterian

Meanwhile – Adriaan Bloem (@AdriaanBloem) of CMSWatch got in touch, for a quick briefing, we have a positive chat and he quickly knocks up this blog post – provocatively titled “Alterian Drops Immediacy” and written in the house style, of a father warning his daughters to watch out for those vendor types, with their high-falutin’ words and fancy charming ways – nothing wrong with that – but please read my (admittedly lengthy) comment response.

Crikey.. now I’ve got Philippe Parker (@proops) encouraging me to haiku.

@IanTruscott impressed you can explain your strategy in #140 – now please do it as a #cmshaiku

So.. double dared… here goes.

C M C or E / Here me Alterian say / Autumn is Future

Which surprisingly made it to the short list and the community got to vote – it got a respectable 3rd, but no beer. (I could protest – the haiku rules I play by said it needed to include a season!).

So folks, that’s it. A few days in the life of product marketing via social media. It was fun – demonstrates that today marketing and PR is as much about listening and reacting as it is about planned strategies. It also sparked off a whole bunch of interesting conversations I’ve had with clients and partners since.

..and to whoever whispered that rumour in Janus Boye’s ear – I would genuinely like to thank you.

We have been executing a communication plan that started last year with our customer and partner events and we intend that the program will reach all of our customers and partners in the next few weeks. If you have questions about our strategy, then please contact me directly (ian.truscott@alterian.com), or your Alterian representative.

It was an incredibly absorbing meeting as we took a fast ride around all elements of where a citizen touches the government, (each of which I would love to have explored for longer than we had) and an interesting mix of mandatory policy, education and technical enablement that his department are driving.

David courteously and patiently indulged my interruptions and there is plenty to write about but, in this post, I’m just going to focus on one very interesting topic – the reduction in the number of government websites.

At first glance it’s easy to assume that this initiative is the old clumsy cost cutting exercise, a not terribly enlightened confusion between the words ‘platform’ and ‘website’,  which we’ve seen before. Whilst there is an understandable element of cost consciousness in this initiative – of recognising that a single WCM platform can manage multiple sites and a new website shouldn’t demand a fresh procurement process – I thought there was a more interesting driver behind it.

That driver is a recognition that the people look for information using search, not by turning up to the correct government agency website (or some obscure sub-site) and dutifully following the navigation. They are using Google and choosing from a list of results which is in direct contrast to the early days of DirectGov – of grouping information around ‘life stage’ on a single portal and assuming people will slot into the right shaped information hole. Today there is recognition that our lives are much more complex and subtle than that, and the way we access information reflects this.

Recognising that would not seem to be rocket science, ooh Truscott that’s SEO you say. But I say this is subtly different. It’s different because if you are looking for the cheapest TV or the information about Persuasive Content, the dynamic of sites competing for those clicks is different from if you are a Government hoping to engage with your people.

If you are a Government agency that provides services, advice or benefits for your citizen you are not competing for clicks – you are the authority, the source; you have the likely #1 search result the searcher needs. For example, there is only one definitive version of the truth when it comes to entitlement to state benefits, how safe a certain food is, the cheapest public transport to Manchester, whether it’s safe to travel to Uzbekistan and how to get a Visa.

What I think COI are saying is that by pruning the number of websites it avoids agencies and other government bodies, sub-sites and campaign sites from competing for those positions on the Google rankings, enabling the citizen to cut through the clutter to the single source of the truth.  They are looking to effectively manage that search page as our portal into government.

This then shifts their focus from individual website silos, to figuring out how search can bring together the information that the citizen needs – a single web page then needs to stand alone in terms of content and context.

To deliver this the UK government is on the vanguard of adopting the semantic web, standards such as RDFa and attracting the advice of Internet luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee (read about their call for developers).

There is plenty more to explore here, but first lesson of Citizen Engagement seems to me to be that the COI have recognised that Google is the new Government portal.

My focus over the last few months has been of transition from Mediasurface Morello CTO, through our companies acquisition by Alterian to my new role as VP Content Management Strategy – and suddenly those few months have turned into six!

Its a big acquisition – both physically for a business our size, with Alterian doubling in number and in terms of the opportunity we have with joining up these two product suites. I talk a lot about audience engagement and persuasive content in particular and the Alterian products provide the analytics - the intelligence to drive that vision.   

I have played in the crowded WCM space for almost 10 years and this will provide us with the capability to offer something different. Being part of a marketing platform also offers us a new audience – the people that use our products, not just the typical IT buyers, but to the marketers and communicators. It’s been great to start talking directly with these folks, to new (for me) partners and customers.

Anyway, my blog will also change – as you can see I’ve redesigned it and as I’ll be blogging soon on our corporate website, Persuasive Content is now my personal blog.

Hope you’ll find something here to enjoy.