Hovering Over The Back Button » Jeremiah Owyang;

On Strategy, Twinterviews and Haiku

ian — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:00:02 +0000

I think we can safely say that the last two week have been quite lively for Alterian Content Manager, as after an incubation with partners, customers and analysts we took our product strategy and roadmap to the social web. I’ve tweeted, interviewed, commented, posted and now (finally) blogged our message to the CMS community – I say “we took” but @janusboye certainly had a hand in igniting it.

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.

Inside the Google Walled Garden

ian — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:40:19 +0000

I admit I am a big Google advocate, I have spent a fair amount of time at their cool European HQ In London, at partner events and I even coded the first shipped iteration of our Google Search Appliance Connector (thankfully now looked after by proper developers!). Also, I admit I’ve only spent a few hours with Google’s latest offerings, SideWiki and Wave, but I have the feeling of being in a privileged walled garden, rather than on the crest of a mainstream wave. Why does is it feel like that?

Sidewiki first, I’ve claimed this blog (our own Connie Benson blogged about that), but in order to use it, you need to download a browser plug-in (not available for Google Chrome, but I am not exactly in the majority with using Chrome as default browser) and the comments that folks make are then locked away in the Sidewiki, only available to others with the plug-in – and a Google account.

There is plenty written about the contribution of comments to a blog, I don’t have the audience (or possibly subject matter) to attract a lot of comments – but the big blogging guns out there like Chris Brogan and Social Media commentators like Jeremiah Owyang – freely admit that the conversation that their blog posts attract is a big part of the value to their readers – of forming the engaged community around them. This is important and why I choose to blog about these technologies here, community = engagement.

Anyone who has a blog has to give careful consideration to providing the ability to comment, I’ve gone in a few different directions on this blog – experimenting with some excellent tools like Disqus – before finally settling on what comes out of the box with Worpress, unmoderated with a bit of spam filtering. I did this, as it was easy, familiar and open for the reader, providing the fewest barriers to a hoped for conversation.

In order to share the SideWiki contribution to folks without the plug-in, a Google account or are using Chrome I have experimented with the supposed RSS functionality with little success, but even then I wouldn’t be able to slot this into a comment conversation.

I therefore don’t yet see how Sidewiki benefits the blogger or the community they are trying to form, it’s kind of stuck to one side, out of context of the discussion that is being had (who would force their reader to use SideWiki only?) and only open to the few. There is also no capability for the author to be notified if someone does pen a SideWiki entry – not conducive to a conversation.

Perhaps I am missing the point – this isn’t about conversation, but of folks freely adding to the subject at hand. But, it’s only slightly less anonymous than an anonymous comment as you do need to sign in with something. (An absolutely marvellous example of how being anonymous attracts the brightest and most articulate here). I have also focused on blogging, whereas it’s an even bigger issue for brands (being variously described around the web as graffiti, an example in this blog post) – and another reason why brands need to reach for social media monitoring tools such as our own.

Maybe it’s called “wiki” for a reason, but whilst you can report abuse, it doesn’t seem to have the community authoring features – the crowd sourced truth. If someone was to write a Sidewiki entry on our product website that said our product only ran on AS400′s, me or the community couldn’t correct that – only add another entry disproving it.

So, I am not quite feeling Sidewiki – what about Google Wave then?

There is lots and lots being written about Google Wave as the interweb struggles to comprehend it. I don’t pretend I do and after a couple of hours of playing I have very little to add, but firstly note, I am using Google docs to create this post, not my shiny new Wave account.

The first obvious reason why – is that I am not collaborating, I am writing this alone – but secondly there doesn’t seem to be a publish button – in fact there is no button for extracting the contents of a wave into a different shareable form, like a document.

CMSWire talk about Google Wave and the future of Content Management – something two of their authors collaborated on in real time using Wave – but I am hazarding a guess that some cut and paste lay in that process. In addition noodling through the API documentation it would seem it’s structured for sharing content between Wave users – for inserting into a web page a Wave – not collaboratively generated content.

I am in complete agreement that this is theoretically a great opportunity for content collaboration, helping during that stage that takes place prior to the formal content approval/publishing process. But, it doesn’t seem that this is what it was built for, it seems to be built as a communication and collaboration tool for Wave users only – now admittedly that’s an artificially small community right now and presumably it’ll open up for all folks with Google accounts (hmm… what does it mean for paid for apps? An Enterprise version?) – but that’s still a walled garden, described by Microsoft as the anti-web.

The Waves themselves are not just about content, they are platform for applications and gadgets, it’s really early for that stuff – with very little available. I was using it with my colleague Keith Tsang and we were almost using it like Instant Messenger.

So rather than the future of Content Management, maybe this is the future of Social Media platforms, maybe it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and those guys that need to look out. Maybe as a content authors we should think of this as a publishing platform, rather than content publishing collaboration.

None the less, are we looking at a Google account becoming a passport to the Internet?

Image of walled garden courtesy of recursion_see_recursion.

Who am I – Part II

ian — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 04:49:30 +0000

Inspired by a tweet by Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) about people creating two Facebook accounts for business and personal, plus the resulting feedback from my colleague Joe Stanhope (@joestanhope) got me thinking about my previous post on who is the online me?

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!

Community and comments

ian — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:23:05 +0000

Last week I read a blog post by Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester (an analyst focused on social software), that added another angle to the comments/no comments discussion on blogging.

In this post he’s found that most blog readers use an RSS aggregator or reader of some kind to stay current and that rather interestingly he feels that the comments on his blog are in fact a valuable, if not the most valuable part of what he is presenting and encourages us to drop by his site from time to time.

This is a great point, about what your blog is for and I guess for Jeremiah, as an industry observer, the feedback and participation he gets from his community is critical and viewing his community through an RSS reader is like standing way back from a presentation and then leaving before the Q&A slide.

Jeremiah wants to give you the opportunity to engage with his community and get involved. I simply think it’s a courtesy to drop by the website of the content you are consuming, to get some context or even to view the ads that might be helping the author devote time to it – not all content is free – and I think a quick trip down someone’s link is a small price to pay. There’s not much to see at persuasivecontent.com, but a good blog article has taken me to plenty of interesting places.

The alternative is that bloggers will start to follow the practice of only including a one line teaser in the RSS and to read the whole article you have to click on the link – and that’s just annoying….