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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or have any description at all?

Or how many are incomplete or broken?

Or even simply how many content items they have?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Lets start with me stumbling over whether this is a “holiday” post or a “Christmas” post. In the UK it’s firmly Christmas and calling it a holiday post would demonstrate that I am talking to a US audience. Writing and delivering persuasive, engaging content even in a shared English language is a subtle business.

Back to the topic – regardless of your tradition, I think we can agree that Christmas (or the holidays) is pretty much about some omnipotent being watching your behaviour, seeing if you are bad or good and making a judgment on what you can get in return (hopefully comparing a god with Santa isn’t too offensive, undoing my good work on the ‘holidays’ thing).

Anyway, in our house, the tradition is firmly hallmark, cocoa cola or Turkish saint (whoever you blame for a jolly red Santa) – it’s family, food and presents and whilst we may not be omnipotent, we do the same thing – looking for clues on what will make our loved ones the perfect gift.

Despite this, we have cupboards and shelves that hide tucked away dusty, untouched gifts from me to my wife over the years – indicating that I am not that good an observer of her want, need, taste or behaviour. I am clearly rubbish. How could I improve?

I could invisibly watch her wandering into shops lingering over a scarf or handbag she likes, but doesn’t buy. I could listen as she tells me, she’d much prefer me to spend the money on the children. I could monitor what she tells her friends and family. I could test her reaction, comparing the successful gifts with the dusty rejects. Is this starting to sound familiar?

Well yes, all this is an analogy of how we should be delivering content to our web visitors. They come to us expecting a content gift, tailored to their specific requirements and not in the least bit interested in the holiday tradition of the moment of “surprise”.

There are thousands of little gift givers in the pages of Google search results that this visitor has just come from and one dud pair of socks or an ill judged kitchen implement is going to send them scuttling off to see what everyone else has to offer.

Don’t get me wrong, I think your visitors will love a surprise, a little bundle of content they hadn’t thought of or a special offer on the very thing they wanted to buy – but it needs to be perfect for their needs – your website as a secret Santa – not a lucky dip.

It doesn’t need to be complicated, I often use the analogy of my daily visit to my favourite news site; clicking on sport, clicking on my favourite sport, clicking on my favourite team. I am telling them what I want, I am introducing myself to this site on a daily basis. You wouldn’t need to do that in real life.

So, great Auntie BBC, this Christmas, like every other Christmas I am a Chelsea fan – please remember me.

Image of Christmas presents published under Creative Commons License, courtesy of  allerleirau

A multi-national, multi-discipline CMS cast of characters was formed; a rough blend of implementation consulting, product marketing, industry commentators and CMS geeks from vendors, systems integrators  and analysts – Jon Marks, Irina Guseva, Adriaan Bloem, Andrew Liles, Justin Cormack and a chap who found himself without a wave account, through some cruel misunderstanding with Google (do you know who he is?) Philippe Parker who I attempted to link into the mayhem through Goto Meeting.

We learnt a lot about the tools (as I tried to work both Google Wave and simultaneously hook up with Philippe in Goto Meeting) – but I found the process just as interesting and the way people interacted, disagreed and eventually collaborated in this new social space.

The tools, I’ll leave for others to chat about and focus a bit on what we did.

The action began on time– with a flurry of simultaneous typing – as the crowd tapped away at suitable titles.

Impressively, well I think so anyway as a chap who still doesn’t find the process of blogging easy,  it took about 15 minutes for a theme to emerge and coalesce into a title. The crowd was in the mood to rant and the title was eventually toned down to “Things We Hate About Content Management”.

It was probably at this point that I felt like the bloke that drinks beer and finds himself in that young and trendy vodka bar, it’s kicking off, the cool kids are dancing and I am asking for the music to be turned down – “errmmm, you can’t say that!”.

The really weird thing was that it was silent, we are having a  pure Wave experience with no VoIP to aid the discussion and Philippe and I had abandoned getting him dialled into the Goto Meeting session and had resorted to me sharing my screen and the chat window in Goto meeting (which annoyingly I couldn’t copy and paste out of) and yet I felt a strange sort of sensory assault, like being in a room where everyone is talking at once.

The discussion was conducted by the six of us simultaneously typing, as the wave got bigger, it was five other people typing on different parts of the screen, bits of the screen scrolled out of view and I had to scroll up and down to see the action and inject my own thoughts.

Those of you who have not tried the Wave experience, it’s people typing at the same time, you see each letter they type as they type it – not like IM where you type in a private box and then post. (Now there’s a statement that’s going to date fast as this this way of working takes off – really, six people typing at the same time – wow!)

Meanwhile Philippe typed stuff into the chat window and I tried to reflect his thinking and my own in the tide of updates.  This wasn’t crowd sourcing or even content collaboration – it was a furious riot of ideas and opinions, being offered, edited, added to, toned down, expanded upon and sometimes deleted (no you definitely can’t say that about marketing). Sometimes people working in different parts of the article and sometimes three people working on the same sentence. There was even time for a bit of badinage.

At some point, I think it might have been Irina that started bringing order to the chaos, as we decided to flesh out the bullet point style that had formed and turn it into a grown up article.

As Irina started working on the introduction, I noticed one of the interesting things about Wave – not only can you see people type,  how good they are at working a keyboard, or spelling, but also how they form their sentences and self edit. To that end Irina definitely demonstrated her accomplished writing style as perfectly formed sentences sprang seamlessly onto the page.

The blog post forms into a coherent whole as we flesh out the points – too quickly time is called, as Irina (hang on – who made her boss?) – tries to attract everyone’s attention and stop people typing.

When I read it I can sort of hear the voices of some of the authors in some bits, but the collective seemed to have smoothed that out and I think it reads quite well. I think being strict about stopping to time also preserved it’s freshness, it’s rough edges haven’t been edited out, and we haven’t collaborated it to death and made it sound like something agreed by committee.

A few more minutes might have given us a better conclusion, but that was it – done. 1,662 words of crash, crunch, slam, crowd sourced blogging – or whatever moniker the cool kids give it.

We start chatting, in the wave, about publishing it – I’ve already blogged about the lack of publish button in Wave, so using cut and paste Irina immediately published the result here (I was marginally freaked out as I have a cautious approach to hitting publish with my own stuff )  and for Google Wave users Jon posted it by embedding the Wave into his blog.

As people drift out of the wave and I disconnect from Philippe, virtually looking over my shoulder – I am left with a weird feeling, thinking that everyone can see everything I can type regardless of the application (Wavanoia?)!

Even since publishing it’s remained interesting (I think I’ve said interesting about a dozen times in this post), as the Wave is not done, it’s not baked or dried – or whatever analogy we might want to use – it’s a Wave so remains editable, Jon opened it up to everyone to scrawl over – the riot continues. Not in the orderly blog post way, of I’ve said my bit now you can comment, I mean scrawl all over it.

Picture of Lego riot policeman reproduced under Creative Commons courtesy of Dunechaser.

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.

I admit, I haven’t exactly taken to blogging like the proverbial duck to water and I gave a lot of thought about comments; what to use, whether to moderate and all that when I started to blog and I wrote about my thoughts in previous posts - Community and Comments and Any Comments.

I gave Reddit a go and Disqus, both excellent – but I have settled on using the functionality built into WordPress and a bit of spam filtering –  which is working for me.

The first thing that jogged me back into thinking about comments was Chris Brogans blog, his article on Audience is King – he describes the fact that the value of a blog is all about the audience. In the comments the value of the discussion at some point probably outweighed the original few paragraphs that Chris penned – nicely making his point.

(Ironically in researching the opposite opinion, that content is king, I found a blog about content without a comment function at all).

Clearly neither Content nor Audience is really ‘king’ – a point that then comes out in the discussion around that article, it’s a symbiotic relationship – the content sows the seeds for the community or an audience that forms around it.

Content also has a pivotal role in search engine optimisation and you got to have a bit of that to be found by your audience via Google.

Anyway, back to my point – the next experience that had me thinking about comments was when I commented on a blog post at CMSWatch. Like a good CMSWatch tribe citizen, I authenticated with IntenseDebate (who I’d previously registered with, so that I could leave a comment there) and typed away.

Job done, right? My brilliantly crafted contribution to this subject inserted – let the engagement begin. But no. Hang on. It needs to be moderated.

Hmm… a moderated conversation, not really in the spirit of social media, but I can understand why I guess, I too have had that ‘moderate posts’ box ticked, as I felt my way with this blogging stuff.

The trouble was that it then took six hours for the comment to be moderated and the moment is lost. We are all so used to Twitter I guess that this just seemed like an enternity. So if you need to moderate, you need to do it fast (I have switched off moderation).

I also felt that having to jump through the hoop of registering, the login process and the fact that I’d commented before should have made me slightly more trusted than ‘anonymous’. This is not the way to build trusted engagement communities.

I also think (hope!) that there is something you can show your audience about yourself by skillfully handling unfavourable posts, or maybe (even better) that your community will do it for you.

Third thing, I read this article on The Next Web by Mike Braco, that talks about cross posting – in it he writes:

the more places you submit your content, the more spread out and less valuable the conversation around it becomes.

Which I have found to a certain extent – reposting on the this-is-marketing blog and here, although I would say ‘fractured’ rather than less valuable as I have appreciated the feedback in both places. There are two audiences for these blogs, but it would be great to merge the discussion.

It’s something to think about when reposting, maybe it’s something to think about ahead of generating the content, where do you want to have a conversation about this?

But hang on… you can’t control the centrality of the discussion, it’ll happen somewhere else whether you like it or not – Twitter? FaceBook? LinkedIn? I think the key here must be to let your audience know where the conversation might be – where you and your audience digitally hang out.

So, comments – feels to me like you should open up and not moderate comments, but reserve the right to delete. If you insist on moderating, do it quickly and consider trusting folks that have commented before or bothered to authenticate. Think about your audience and any possible discussion when deciding where to post.

The news of OpenText planning to gobble up Vignette and the recent Interwoven acquisition by Autonomy sees a new chapter for these grandees of content management and I think is further evidence in the shifts that have been occurring in this market around Enterprise Content Management and what organisations really want to do.

I’ve often described ECM as turning your organisation into a filing system, a necessary activity that keeps everything neat, ordered and regulatory compliant. It brings operational efficiencies and it can even help save the planet as you de-dupe and remove all that redundant server room kit.

The functionality and products of an ECM suite are all about that business function of keeping stuff ordered, records management, document management, asset management etc. Over the past 5 years this is the path that both Interwoven and Vignette set themselves strategically on, mainly through acquisition.

This was the path to becoming the new SAP or IBM and to becoming the System Integrators friend through alignment with big business change and major IT projects. Documentum, arguably the ECM pioneer was swallowed up by a storage company EMC (which kinda emphasises the point).

In the meantime, specialised Web Content Management vendors had stuck to their knitting, detected the shift toward agile solutions for business users and away from big IT projects. Technically organisations started to go “small IT” to bet their on-line business on Open Source, SaaS, Microsoft and away from the traditional platform of the web (Sun/Oracle).

Many vendors have prospered in a vibrant space that Vignette and Interwoven originally helped shape, driven by new business focused mantras of “ease of use” and “quick time to value” – of engaging the marketer, the communicator or anyone outside IT who has a message to deliver over the web.

These are things that I have always considered as delivering on the promise of content management software – yes you need the IT stuff to work, yes you need governance, but to truly deliver it’s about democratizing the contribution and user adoption. The web site as a business tool.

To put it very simply, you have a divergence of ECM and WCM – but I don’t identify myself with you as a brand because you have a neat and tidy warehouse or you are Sarbanes-Oxley complaint – it’s good to know, but it’s not what I like about you.

The challenge to the marketer is not about simply publishing content, it’s about what our websites are for – the audience – or more specifically the websites role in persuading, encouraging, educating, communicating – engaging the audience to act.

This is a trend that really came through at Internet World this year in London, with vendors and speakers talking engagement (some based solely on a screenshot of Google Analytics).  

So, what interests me about the two acquisitions (so far, it’s still early) is that the OpenText path appears to be doggedly ECM (with a bit of social media), whilst Autonomy is talking the language of engaging with the visitor making the Interwoven acquisition look far more interesting.

Also published on our corporate blog.

Joe it turns out is making lots of professional contacts through Facebook and ponders on the future of LinkedIn, which I found interesting. In turn Joe wondered why I had two Twitter accounts, the professional me and the friends and family me?

I have very few business colleagues on Facebook and feel a bit uncomfortable with the few that are there, who I would not now consider friends.

LinkedIn on the other hand is exclusively business contacts and I wouldn’t post anything chatty to LinkedIn, staying close to professional matters.

Twitter is currently work focused, although I do share some ‘water cooler’ type chit-chat on the tea I am drinking or the weather (come on I am British!). I am sort of business casual here, I guess.

Facebook updates are much more personal and the audience (of predominantly old friends and family, who have no idea really of what I do) would think me dull if I post “Ian is thinking Seth Grimes ‘snarky’ (his word) observations on semantic web practitioners are interesting”.

So, it seems that Joe has a very different experience, and it got me thinking why would that be? I am no social software expert, but in mind this picks at something deeper - (that someone else has probably commented on more authoratively and at this point I should Google furiously and find out who…).

It could have something to do with my personal journey through life, that as I have discussed previously, the place I am in now, is not the same as 20 years ago – or especially at school (you don’t meet many software company execs in our alumni and I (cough) skipped on university). Yet the social web has allowed me to span these ‘lives’ and be in touch with people who have followed their own journeys. Maybe Joe (and I haven’t asked him) finds that his Facebook directory of old school friends, siblings and in-laws is full of similarily bright, successful professionals who know the Joe of 2009 very well.

Or could it be that Joe’s relationship with the online community is more open than mine, that the cultural difference between the US and UK plays into that or that (gulp) he is ever so slightly younger than I am!

Or is it that we choose our identity? But – hang on – I don’t choose who follows me on Twitter, who wants me as a contact on LinkedIn or as friend on Facebook. I haven’t turned down a single friend request on Facebook, yet it’s a veritible high school reunion in there.

Why haven’t my professional colleagues found me there like Joe’s experience?

The dynamic at work here is interesting, I do very little to promote my profile on social networks, but the little I do has the effect.

A school friend finds me, I say hello, all of the school friends who know them find me, as do all of the school friends that know them, I get engaged and wonder what happened to that truck mad kid I used to hang out with and suddenly I have a small hockey stick effect of school friend adoption. I do nothing to seek out colleages on Facebook, so that snowball never sets off – yet on LinkedIn and Twitter I do seek out those folks and in turn, etc etc…

Interesting – or is it just me? I tried hard to tweet back at them on this, but as you can see – couldn’t fit it into 140 characters!

Richard talks about being seduced by the creative process and that you can become incredibly wedded to and precious about the presentation and sharing of your ideas.

It got me thinking about this from web content perspective, as ‘knowledge workers’ we are not just producers - we are also intellectual content consumers. Our raw material is someone else’s fresh idea, we embellish it, with other knowledge and experience and trade it. We are information and knowledge traders – so never mind the content owning me – who owns what I think?

The article makes a number of good points and advises on the techniques for releasing that grip on your creative ideas and the rewards of doing that, but I especially like this quote:

“We view communication as proprietary, not open-source. The open-source concept, long fostered by software developers, is simple and uncomfortably counter-intuitive: give away your work to increase its worth. You come up with an ingenious original, but rather than protecting it as your property, you share it with others so they can add to and benefit from it. Your reward is that you started the value-adding chain.”

Although, do any of us come up with an “ingenious original”? We are all constructing ideas, creating content from a concoction of ideas and experiences not all originally ours.

Richard doesn’t talk about bloggers specifically, but here is a community that are already there or at least if you intend to blog you need to be thinking this way. Here are people freely sharing their intelectual value with an often anonymous community, within some loose open source framework of good blogging etiquette. As I refered to in one of my posts about the community of comments you can also extend this to the comments and contribution of the community around a blog.

The way we mix these ingredients of how we interpret this input is our contribution to this value-adding chain. Whether it’s bloggers or software developers writing code, the search for inspiration often involves Google and yet it’s a difficult balance where I have read blog posts and talked to colleagues incensed that someone has grabbed a bit of their intellectual property and applied it to their own.

So, I’d add to Richard’s advice that we should expect our content to be just one step in the middle of the value chain and to respect those folks that fed our own inspiration – in the same way we would hope that the people in next value chain link respect ours.