I try and bring the thing to life with personal experiences – on the ‘back channel’ of one of our events someone referred to me as ‘the king of analogies’ – is that good?

Anyway – in this case I talked about web engagement being like buying a suit (yes, I’ve done this before and you might have read about this in a guest post I did for CMSWire).

The story I tell is of walking into a suit shop – the guy in the store taking a look at you, guessing your size and taking you to the right part of the rail (possibly paying you a compliment along the way) and as we subtly move to suits that would really fit – he asks a question “What’s the suit for?”

He suggests a suit, we talk about the colour, the style and begins to compare my reaction to one suit or another. Eventually we hit on the perfect suit, it’s not on the rail it’s “out back” and he disappears, returning with a flourish and a sale (of a suit that is probably more than I wanted to spend).

The sale is great, but he’s also learn’t something about a customer like me – next time he might be able to narrow down to the requirements quicker or if he hadn’t made a sale that he needed to stock a certain kind of suit or maybe there is a big wedding in town.

The point I try to make is that this is analogous to a visitor coming to your site and the relationship we should have. The way they arrive, the search terms they have used, their first few clicks, their behaviour, we should use multi-variant A/B testing to compare those reactions – to learn what they want and equally we should understand our content well enough to match it to those interests. The same way that the suit guy knew what he had ‘out back’.

This understanding of our objectives and the audience, feeds our content strategy – what content do we need? The presentation builds on this premise, you need to understand your audience and have a large canon of well understood, relevant and fresh content for your visitor to consume – delivered to the channel, social media platform or website of their choice.

To build that content repository you need to get closer to the folks with the knowledge, the people that your visitors want to talk to (not necessarily sales and marketing) in order to be persuaded, engaged, communicated with – maybe even sold to.

Adoption into your web content strategy by ”Information Knowedge Management Professionals” as Forrester refers to them – the interesting people that really know stuff – will be a key success measurement of your digital engagement strategy.

A super sexy website on launch day one is going to be worthless  if in 6 , 12 or 18 months it’s barren of content or if you are unable to react to your market or the needs of your audience. The same of course is true if you embark on a social media engagement strategy, not just a website – they need to be nourished with a reliable stream of fresh content.

These folks don’t give a stuff about the high principals of content management, they want to use tools they are familiar with or tools they can easily adopt.  But… “easy to use” isn’t just it. I promised to talk about governance and as you can see in the slides – I refer to this as an enabling  environment, of building trust, of devolved approval – who needs more bottlenecks? Who can spend a week going through a process to respond to a tweet?

Anyway, if you were there – hope you enjoyed the presentation - otherwise the event was videoed by the event people, so maybe at some later point I can add a link.

Updated 7th April 2010: Here is the video from the event, but they don’t show the slides!!

From a content publishing perspective (rather than a marketing trend) this isn’t really a big deal is it? Surely these guys have merely changed platform – moving to platforms that have greater focus on community tools. Should we now consider YouTube and Facebook as web content management systems or at least web publishing platforms?

Well.. I think.. yes.. and errr.. no.

The core functionality of any content management system, whether its digital assets, structured text content or documents – are the principles of not just authoring/uploading and publishing content – but of governance, permissions models, brand protection and approval processes – stuff these social media platforms simply don’t have.

Does this move suggest that perhaps Coke has surrendered all that back end control for some community features? I think, probably not.

The key I think is the quote from the New Media Age article where Prinz Pinakatt, Coke’s interactive marketing manager for Europe says:

“We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform.”

They want to publish content to where their audience is – and their community hangs out on Facebook and YouTube. Of course it’s the community that these platforms have attracted that is their value to these brands, rather than their functional and technical capabilities.

Build it and they will come. That’s the normal mantra of community building on the web, build a fantastic destination, invest in attracting visitors and encourage them to interact, engage and form your tribe.

But, hey with these social media networks – someone else has already built it and the people have already arrived.

As I referred to in my last post, there is a lot of talk about the redefinition of WCM, of separating the management bit from web delivery - publishing to social media networks could be a strong use case of that. That organisations are increasingly going to think of these sites as part of their multi-channel publishing strategy.

Of course the nice thing about the “build it and they will come” philosophy is that you exclusively own that community, you can listen to their interactions through web analytics and personalize or adapt your content and delivery in response.

A social media publishing strategy therefore needs a social media listening strategy to build that insight – but more of that in future posts.

But for now, as web publishers, looking to engage our visitors we need to rethink our idea of what the ‘destination’ is.

Coke Triumphant image courtesy of Oliver Scott reproduced under Creative Commons License.

Later on I found myself flicking through the pages of an old June edition of Information Age and this jumped out at me: “online gadget retailer ‘I Want One of Those’  has merged its marketing and systems development departments”.

Just to give the Information Age article the correct context, it was titled “Welcome to the Service Department” and was using ‘I Want One of Those’ (IWOOT) as an example of SOA (Service Orientated Architecture) and that it “spells the end of IT departments as we know it”.

It’s the IT press so excuse it’s SOA geekiness – but it made an interesting point: Aside from mixing the seemingly oil and water of developers and marketers (a combination we call Alterian!) that a company’s technology experts are becoming focused on helping execute business processes and more specifically (as in the article from the FT) these guys are the differentiation in marketing communications. According to Tom Bedecarré, chief executive of AKQA:

Software engineers are the new rock stars of marketing

In the context of persuasive content, or web engagement – I talk about the fact that marketing should think about having the same relationship with IT as they do with a printer, that they own the website, the same way as they own a brochure (the printer doesn’t own it).

This sounds a bit dull, for any techie folks reading this – being compared with what we have come to think of as a ubiquitous, inanimate object – a printer. Or maybe you thinking of the chap that does your printing, that hurries over to marketing with some proofs and with whom you compare pantone colours with.

But if the bright geeks like the ones at Siemens hadn’t invented the color ink jet in the 50′s (more here), paving the way for color printers for the masses, then every brochure would be bespoke, created by a different kind of dull stuff geek, forged through a rigid process and extraordinarily expensive – especially when your CEO, the market, the competitors, whoever – decides that just as they get delivered – actually blue is the new black.

Nowadays the brochure printing business is driven by creative business users, with desktop tools and an Internet connection or a USB stick. Marketing and advertising collateral can be personalised, with specific offers, specific products and seasonal greetings. The high end brochure guys are still doing expensive bespoke stuff, that your printer can’t do – but now your brochure is sprung loaded box with rabbits coming out of it.

The same is true of digital marketing technologies, of course we’ve been through the phase of the geeks doing the dull stuff, (like marking up text into HTML and arranging those pages into websites) they’ve created tools that business users can use for that. We are in a new age of web personalisation, where the business user, the visitors behavior and preferences can drive their experience. Meanwhile the equivalent of that bespoke brochure box with rabbits jumping out of it – is the coolest Flash thing you’ve ever seen.

The geeks have also been hard at work with building new platforms and channels – like social media – and tools for how we make best use of those channels with social media monitoring tools. Access to these tools, the democratisation of the channel means that according to the FT – “digital is only just emerging from the basement” and “only now are digital agencies taking the lead on large client accounts”.

They can do that now as the creative folks can mix it up with the geeks, they’ve got the tools and a common platform. Information Week might call it SOA and we might call it a Web Content Management, Twitter, Integrated Marketing, YouTube, Dynamic Messenger, Adobe InDesign, Social Media Monitoring or an “automated system for planning and buying media space” – they are all tools that the empower the business user and make the developers and implementers of these tools essential.

Yes my friends, treat your geeks like rock stars – and I am off to get that quote enlarged and framed, hang it outside the kitchen of all of our offices…

The picture of the non conformant XML tattoo comes from here reproduced under Creative Commons License.

I am guessing that you can guess who we believe are the ‘who’ is of Web Engagement (sorry to spoil the ending for you!) – but on your way there you’ll get some really nice quotes from analysts, our customer and other industry experts, wrapped up in some text from me and the team that we hope will help and inspire you.

The books will be used as part of a marketing campaign pretty soon and when that starts you’ll be able to register for one on our website – but if you are interested in getting one in the meantime let me know (it’s free!!).

*** update 16th September 2009 – You can now register to have the little book sent to you here ***

So, I thought I’d better jot down a few thought on this – what does Social Media Monitoring mean for Web Content Management?

Well, we are in the business of publishing  persuasive content – content that achieves your objectives as a communicator or marketer. Content that engages and persuades your audience into completing your engagement objectives, whether that is to answer your call to action, buy your product, be educated, and become a brand advocate – whatever it is.

As I’ve discussed before, engagement, or persuasion, is a conversation, and how can you enter a conversation by just speaking? Social Media Monitoring (SMM) gives you the opportunity to listen to what your audience needs. It gives you the insight to react to audience feedback, to plan and develop content that fits your audience as you create new campaigns, launch new products or grow your site.

This makes your content more relevant, persuasive and engaging. If your content is written for an audience you know and understand, they are now your community.

The stakes are rising for our websites as they become the front line for customer service, studies show that customers now prefer to try to self serve their enquiry through online FAQ’s and forums - rather than call the call center. I can understand that, I know that even in-store I would prefer to use an iPhone to look up technical specs than talk to some kid in PC World (or Best Buy).

It’s not about what people did, but what they thought or wanted to do

SMM is the missing piece of the puzzle that traditional web analytics can’t solve; an insight into the reaction of your audience. It’s not about counting clicks, downloads or how often they visited – but what they thought of you, your service and your website. What people are saying across the social web is the undiluted, unsolicited voice of your audience rather than the result of you asking for them to fill in a questionnaire or give feedback.

It’s not just about finding these conversations, there could be hundreds, thousand, even hundreds of thousands of mentions of your brand, product or service on the web. Searching for stuff isn’t that hard on the Internet – finding what’s relevant is – and it’s no different when monitoring Social Media.

Techrigy SM2 allows you to understand the sentiment of these conversations by applying language analysis to prioritise, to focus your social marketing efforts and to give you something you can measure.

Actionable Insights.

The value of gaining visibility of the sentiment of your audience grows ten fold if you also have the power to make that insight actionable, for a business user, for example, to be able to quickly change the website to react to ‘the buzz’. Being able to do this with an easy to use WCM tool (like Alterian Content Manager)  has a clear business value in demonstrating that you are agile and in tune with your community.

People’s connectivity through social media means feedback travels quickly and you need to be empowered to be relevant in the moment . For example, you read a question about your product on Twitter, people are tweeting that they don’t know if your product connects to their toaster – that this is a killer feature. You are now enabled to engage with those folks directly, but also to promote your toaster connectivity on your website and in your marketing campaigns.

Optimise the message

Where your audience are hanging out online could be just as important to understand as what they are saying.

People often put the social web or social media (Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc ) into a box, separate from the serious business of corporate websites. But the majority of Tweets contain a link to some content and that content is increasingly corporate even within the realm of social media. Opinion-driven websites such as blogs are adopting a corporate agenda, bloggers are becoming sponsored, Facebook fan pages are being set up as organisations who are keen to engage through real people, and hearts and minds are being won and lost as the lines are becoming blurred.

Do you need to tweak your content promotion to make it more prominent in these places? Do you need to consider having a voice in that community, or changing the tone of voice to fit in better with your community or the context of the place they are? Perhaps you have the wrong people writing your content – if you have a community of engineers on a developers’ discussion group, having marketing shout at them in ‘business speak’ isn’t going to start a conversation.

So – what does SMM do for WCM? Well, the phrase “people buy from people” – never seemed more relevant in these connected times. I’ve discussed on this blog about your brand being ‘you’ and this insight helps you know which ‘you’ you need to be and where that ‘you’ needs to hang out.

Picture of ear trumpets, courtesy of make money not art.