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.

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.

Then there was the flip side – of scanning the room (or the bar!) feeling that “I’m sure I know that guy/girl” and then trying to spot who was who from their twitter avatars, scrolling through hundreds of Twitter profiles on my Blackberry (and of colleagues joining in). The place was packed with people I follow and that follow me, Tweetdeck had sprung to life. I’m not naturally a stroll up to everyone and say “Hi” kind of chap – so I didn’t speak to all of them – but it was a pleasure to meet the ones I finally did.

Plus of course the absolutely pleasure of finally meeting folks that I “know” well on social media – Irina Guseva and Scott Liewehr.

There was a plenty of food for thought and a more conscientious blogger would have been transferring those conversation and observations into a blog post on the plane home, mostly about the continued vibrancy of this pretty mature software market (or you’d think so by now) and the emerging trends. I’ll save those thoughts for another day, but seeing as I’ve started wanging on about social media, I might as well stay on that track.

This observation has been made elsewhere I am sure, but; social media, especially the broad adoption of Twitter in our industry (way more people tweet than blog and you can follow way more twitterers than bloggers) has changed these kinds events. You are walking into a pre-formed, pre-warmed community – the bar at the Westin Boston was like Cheers – where everyone knows your name!

In addition when you stand up and present to a stuffy, windowless room of  folks – you are increasingly feeding sound bites to the ‘back channel’ – your audience has grown from tens to the hundreds (thousands?). Gilbane chose not to beam the back channel during the sessions – thankfully – as I was distracted enough by the supplied laptop and projector never really figuring out if they really got along.

But, when sitting on a panel and not speaking, I was compelled to check the back channel on my BlackBerry (and contribute), but couldn’t decide if this was massively rude for my fellow speakers or the polite thing to do for the audience tweeting.

I think this broader impact should be embraced by event organisers, the community, the online reach of an event is soon going to be part of its value. Also the back channel generally is full of the good stuff, the food might be awful, the room hot – but the desire for most is to be thought provoking and to be interesting. (By the way, the food at Gilbane was very good, someone at Gilbane likes meat!).

On the back channel – this blog post is an absolutely compelling must read, in fact I think it’s a must read for anyone presenting anything ever in these social media enlightened times – as Danah Doyd reveals the anxiety of public speaking as well as revealing an experience of being basically flamed by the back channel during a presentation at a Web 2.0 Expo.

You may want to reconsider my use of the term “enlightened” when you learn about the abuse she got – but throughout the post she makes some great points about the interaction of the front channel (you the speaker) and the back channel. It is very curious, in my experience, that however much you invite personal interaction with the audience, these days some folks would prefer to tweet their feedback.

So, yes, social media and events – my experience of Tweetdeck coming to life and thanks to everyone that said hello IRL (in real life).

As Jon crowd sourced his presentation content, seemingly every element of a CMS procurement and project got a mention.

As Irina Guseva of CMSWire (who was at JBoye) points out in this post - the first point to consider is whether there is something that needs fixing?

Apparently at the conference – CMS Watch’s Jarrod Gingras was certain there’s nothing to fix and I have to agree. As a software genre it’s vibrant, there is a strong open source community and I reckon I could find a new vendor every week. I also discovered, meeting a new competitor at the last big Internet show I was at – there are VC’s out there still funding start ups (in Scandinavia!).

I have a small theory here (not about Scandinavia), but that in it’s most basic form a CMS is a database (or data store of some kind) with a user interface and a web application – it’s an accessible idea for developers (heck, I even built something in PHP for a personal website once) and this contributes to this diversity, despite the countless CMS options available – of folks continuing to build their own, in the shape of their own niche, geography or ‘unique’ requirements.

This leads me to the next observation made on Twitter, WCM or CMS is a broad church and many folks saw that terminology, the software classification as needing a fix – the fact that there was confusion initially on the hashtag, probably tells it’s own story as people moved from using #FixCMS to #FixWCM.

This discussion got more granular, the suggestion seemed to be that products and I guess their strengths and fit for niche should define them. Market niches have always been ‘crowd sourced’ as industry observers and analysts have defined them (not vendors) and the market adopts them, so it’ll be interesting if this idea gains any momentum.

There were very few suggestions of what we should call them, but it seems that this would provide more evidence that the industry being organised around tiers based around the size of the implementation (or budget) is flawed.

Talking of organizing the industry into tiers – analysts – they also got a few mentions.

What helps customers best; a simple magic quadrant or a weighty volume with detailed look at 41 vendors? Personally, I think this needs to be part of the mix, organisations should talk to the analysts about your own needs, analysts reports are written academically, independent of a real project.

As CMSWatch and Gartner got a nod in these discussions, I’ll mention Forrester, as I think their model serves customers well, they have a very transparent RFP like process, based around real life requirements (as they see them) and they score vendors against those and publish the scores – it irons out a bit of the analysts gut feel, emotion and how good a vendors marketing might be. It also gives someone trying to choose a vendor a matrix by which they can look at their own requirements and compare.

Hmm… matrix of requirements – could that form the new WCM niches?

Anyway, back to the subject at hand – requirements got more than a few mentions and the way organisations form them internally and present them during procurement.

RFP’s and sizing up a vendor for the job seemed to be the only thing that got a definitive agreement on – it’s about the organisations own requirements, not an IT wish list or a generic downloaded RFP  and these things should be presented as scenarios – with stakeholders and business owners.

I wholly agree with that, I would also suggest that if an organisations presents a well structured set of scenarios, requirements supported by business value, a clear objectives (and dare I say budget) – vendors will self determine if it’s for them or not. No vendor, agency or systems integrator wants to embark on the expensive process of bidding for business that they don’t fit, that they don’t feel they can win or enter into an unsatisfactory partnership.

Whilst much of the discussion was around the pre-sale, selection, procurement and the vendors offering. The implementation got a bit of focus, with some of the arguments getting some fresh debate – of whether a vendor should do the implementation, whether you should choose an implementation partner first, who should help an organisation choose a vendor and whether in fact the track record of the implementation folks was more important than the vendor.

I don’t think I agree with any of these exclusively, clearly the right combination of crew and technology is essential and partners provide a fabulously broad set of experience and skills that a web engagement project needs outside of the vendor software skills. Although I think vendors should maintain a professional services team, not to compete with implementation partners, but to provide subject matter expertise and a valuable direct connection between the product and it’s market.

There was also talk of pilots and proof of concepts, again from my point of view, an excellent opportunity for organisations to really get their requirements across and for the business partnership to be tested and forged.

So, what am I missing…? Oh yes… vendors.

It seems pricing complexity was the primary issue – I’d encourage folks to engage with their vendor on how they want to commercially partner with them – but it seems there are some complex models out there that are bending customers and their partners architectural choices to fit.

Thanks to Jon for being the catalyst of this discussion, I haven’t added links to everyone’s tweets as linking to all would render this post unreadable and I found it difficult to pull out one tweet over another – I would however urge you to check out the #fixwcm and #fixwcm hashtags on Twitter and the following posts:

• #jboye09 Web Content Management: Inconvenient Truths and Industry Challenges By Irina Guseva
• Let’s #fixwcm Before The Wheels Come Off by Jon Marks
• My JBoye09 Fix WCM Presentation by Jon Marks
• The World’s Worst WCMS by Seth Gottileb
• Rethink Content Management by Janus Boye

A long post, with lots of  stuff that hopefully I can mine in future posts,  but what do you think, what did I miss? Does WCM need fixing?

Image of workshop reproduced under Create Commons License courtesy of M J M

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.

So… here are 10 things about me…

1. I have very little education! I wasn’t focused at that critical point in my life, educationally torn between art and computer science – try a morning of deep computing theory followed by an afternoon of abstract impressionism – of say Mark Rothko – too much for my 17 year old mind. Combined with being from a modest family – I chose to work and got my education by teaching myself computing working the night shift as a compter operator in the UK civil service. I am kind of proud of that, which is why I blogged about Jacqueline Guichelaar Deutsche Bank Enterprise Services CTO, who started out the same way.
2. I have always liked tea, but now I am recent convert to leaf tea after a great experience being served ‘real’ tea at a meeting in a hotel. I recently got an infuser type tea pot from my wife and working through the range at Whittards of Chelsea – current favourite is Russian Caravan – which is a Yunnan blend – it makes a cuppa something akin to a good cigar.
3. Talking of Chelsea, I am a fan – as anyone who’s met me or sees me speak knows as I seem to sneak it into every presentation.
4. I am also a fan of F1 – wish they’d all stop making the sport look foolish and extremely happy with the success of Jenson Button, well until the next rule change.
5. I am apparently an ENTJ on the Myers-Briggs personality scale and I am a fairly good public speaker, I get a lot of energy from talking to people and yet I consider myself quite shy, hate using the telephone – use e-mail far too much. I read that Kas Thomas is midly agoraphobic when travelling alone, locking himself in his hotel room rather than being in the bar – I can understand that and yet if my colleagues are around then I’ll be in the bar first (and probably last!).
6. Currently one of my guilty pleasures is driving through tunnels! I have a previous shape BMW M3 and I love to open the windows and give it some beans, hear its evil howl and slow down and hear it pop on the downshift. (It also makes my kids scream!!)
7. So, I am a “petrol head” (despite living there, I am not sure what the US translation is, surely can’t be gas head!) and once sat next to Lord March on a transatlantic flight. Lord March owns Goodwood, I am a big fan of the Goodwood Festival of Speed and we got chatting, not realising who he was and his intro of being ‘something to do with organising events at Goodwood’ didn’t help – although the penny slowly dropped a few hours in. In my defence, you don’t expect to find aristocracy in Premium Economy.
8. I lived in the US for two years, in the DC suburbs in Virginia, had a superb time – confused everyone by driving a Camaro – with the license plate BRIT IAN
9. I have two lovely daughters, that I insist on calling ‘little fellas’ and ‘my boys’ – at 8 and 5 they are now old enough to complain about that…
10. Although I have travelled a fair amount in the last 10 years, I am increasingly feeling like a ‘home body’ and no longer travel well. I especially hate travelling economy long haul – but who doesn’t?

There done…

I also suggest checking out Julian Wrath and Jon Marks – who have also been drawn into Kas’ evil meme game.

As the rules of the game dictate, I need to tag some folks. So my colleagues who contribute to the this-is-marketing blog @mike_talbot, @joestanhope, @bob_barker consider yourselves tagged and I wonder if @dirkmshaw would like to play?

Lots of other vendors were soon in, having been tagged. This generated a lot of buzz on Twitter and the CMS blogging community, probably being best documented by Jon Marks on his blog “Jon on Tech”, Irina Guseva’s blog and Julian Wraith’s blog . Day also do a nice job of describing what the meme is all about.

So, I’ll avoid a commentary of what has happened and urge you to visit these blogs for the full story. I share some of the concerns of some of the other vendors – in that basically to describe the CMS software industry as a “broad church” is an understatement and so to try and get a picture of this industry through a few short questions is not going to suit everyone. Vignette put this very well:

It would be great if this meme could start to help all customers understand the broad range of solutions in the big space of WCM applications, and which ones best meet their Web experience needs.

The focus of the questions is on procurement and install, which in our experience (a sentiment shared by plenty of the vendors tagged) is only a small part of why an organisation would choose a vendor. Kas’s original article seems to me, to be focusing on this software as a commodity as a simple service or product who’s procurement should be accessible through the web, he suggests that the web software vendors are out of step with the world in which we sell.

I like Kas’ blog and that has a certain ring to it – but the truth is that implementation of a CMS system is not always about the end result – the website – but actually demands cultural and business process change that does require a much more consultative, solution – in person – sales process and sophisticated post implementation support that may involve multiple parties.

Splitting between the best vendor to fit your CMS needs also takes some thought. As Forrester comment, there is a gap that needs to be bridged between the technical tool set, marketing and the folks that they define as “knowledge and information professionals” – the people that know the stuff you want to get to your audience.

So, user adoption would feature much higher in most projects than how simple the install or software procurement process is.

This business vs technical debate interestingly manifested itself in the decision of where best to respond to this meme, I chose here as I am guessing this audience is more CMS technical focused – but it could have been our new official blog at http://www.this-is-marketing.com. But what would the marketing audience there make of all this techniness? Anyway, I have, as ever digressed…

In agreement with those that have gone before me – to get involved with something like this is a good thing – so, first off, I guess I ought to apologise for our tardiness (a week is a long time in Twitter) and lets get on with the games.

Let me also point out to those that don’t know us – we have two Content Management products aimed at two different markets – detailed here – and our Content Management functionality came by way of the acquisition of Mediasurface (detailed here) and I am going to answer for both products, or editions as we call them.

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Yes it does.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

I think I’d join the others that have answered this with a ‘why is this important’ – but in the spirit of it all – it might not. That would depend on the product and platform you have chosen. If you are implementing our Enterprise edition product for Java delivery on a UNIX box – probably not – if you are implementing on Windows then the pre-requisite software definitely will. If your organization has concerns about rebooting boxes, we or one of partners can host the whole thing for you.

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

As a content contributor yes, although some technical administrative functions have not been translated in either product (yet).

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

No, although partners do have access to demonstration software and we are pretty reasonable when folks ask for a hosted demo or a POC.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated “sample web site” and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

Yes

6. We ship a tutorial.

Both products have detailed in-context help for using the product, for developers we have developer documentation with examples, as well as the example sites.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

No, but that seems pretty neat – the slight problem would be that often first line support is offered by our partners or with an internal team. In the Enterprise product we do have chat functionality, so that you can quickly raise issues with a more experienced user or site administrator.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

Yes.

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

Yes, we are also implementing an integrated web application using to the rest of the Alterian platform – not just the WCM products – to include email and marketing analytics.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Yes, we have pretty mature, well established WCM sales channel who understand this space, many of our engagements are driven by partners who can also call upon years of experience with both our products and with CMS products in general. The recent acquisition means that we have a whole bunch of new folks to turn into CMS evangelists, but these guys are backed by an incredibly knowledgeable business consulting / pre-sales team.

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes – I thought Sitecore’s response to this was interesting – in that if you have a vibrant implementation channel, the onus is on the vendor to stay honest.

12. We don’t charge extra for our SDK.

No, we do not.

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

Yes, it’s basically a CPU model for Enterprise and a matrix of users and servers for Corporate.

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Yes, by product and geography to reflect local markets.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Yes, I’m here – oh hang on you said ‘top executives’ – our CEO and Marketing VP blogs on www.this-is-marketing.com. Our CTO blogs there too, as well as at Talbot on Technology and is on Twitter – www.twitter.com/mike_talbot

—- Update – been prompted to add this ID: 9c56d0fcf93175d70e1c9b9d188167cf as suggested by Bertrand Delacrétaz to help Google find related pages —-