To know me professionally, is to know that when it comes to the tribes of CMS folks, I am firmly in the WCM teepee.

I disagreed the first time this discussion rolled around, as the millennium clicked over – we were all going to use portal platforms and content management functionality would be in our application server infrastructure (we don’t and it didn’t).

The difference between the systems we are building for tomorrow and then – is that it was a web site centric world and in most applications the term CMS was interchangeable with WCM. Our digital engagement activities were single threaded in a website groove and the end was very much the driver for the means.

Also, mainstream requirement trends like dynamic delivery with the content editorial usability requirement for in-context editing mean’t a preference for management and delivery to be tightly coupled.

I am summarizing wildly – but the supposedly ‘niche’ WCM vendors then went on to rule the school.

Is it now time to unpick that? I think so, but why?

I think there are two pressures and they are content and delivery.

Starting with delivery, even if we are only concerned with web engagement, we are in the age of the ‘splinternet’ (in this context, a term coined by Josh Bierhoff)

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web [..] our site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don’t work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don’t work anywhere else.

But it’s not just devices, our websites are less the single and only web destination, folks consume information about our products and services from various places – Facebook and Twitter to name two.

Plus, of course the needs of customer, consumer and citizen engagement means that we can chuck in multiple touch points, in e-mail, call centres and real life.

So, we have a fragmented communication channel and across these we need to be consistent and if and when these folks do get to our websites, they are expecting a compelling, relevant web experience. Your brochure is not welcome here.

You quickly start to build a set of complex delivery requirements, that appear (I stress appear) to dwarf those of your content production.

Could we call this the engagement tier? Where we pull this stuff together, of understanding the context of the user, the device – finding the right content and delivering it. (No, no, not a portal, this could be an e-mail, a tweet or an iPad application)

So, that’s delivery – I talked about two pressures – what about content?

Content no longer forms an orderly queue out of our marketing and communication organisations to be fed to our cradled audience through a teat.

Content production is being equally fractured, with content to be marshalled from more internal sources as we find the voices that can respond across these channels and an ever increasing volume of external content being produced about our products and services.

To deliver these relevant, engagement experiences, we need to make it easy for our contributors, we need to know our content, where is it, what is it about and whether it’s fit for purpose? Sounds like getting back to some down home, good, honest content management?

If we are going to start talking about this tier, this could also make our ECM and CMIS discussions more interesting, if we start to figure out how we surface our enterprise (small e) content into that engagement tier.

I’m not sure we’ll buy these from different vendors, I’m confident we already have. I am also fairly sure an engagement tier is about as heterogeneous as they come, with specialist vendors both large and small playing a role.

I think we are going to have to start to watch this space, what do you think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, becoming a real boy?

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

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

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

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

I’ll obviously write more on my move – but more importantly – changing the name of my blog?

Why ‘Hovering Over The Back Button’?

So, I’ve just embarked on possibly the most exciting change in my career, since my first job in the commercial world from being a public servant fifteen years ago – and my first post is to explain a change in the name of my blog!

Well, that’s how it is in the post Social Media revolution – I feel that before I can do anything I needed to update the various breadcrumbs of me around the interwebs (LinkedIn, Twitter etc) and this blog before I can move on, clear my throat, so to speak.

So, why drop”Persuasive Content” after building it for close to three years? Well for a couple of reasons, firstly if I look at what I’ve been writing about maybe ‘persuasive’ content is not what comes to mind!

For starters I’ve been uneasy that calling a blog persuasive infers that I assume my content is persuasive, is written in a persuasive way and that I assume you will be persuaded. That’s not really my style, the name really came from wanting to write about Persuasive Content the discipline as defined by Forrester.

I’ve been a fan of the Forrester notion of Persuasive Content and the software and systems architecture that organisations should be putting together to drive that – but I don’t think I have rigidly stuck to that thinking in my writing.

Whilst everything I have written about can be loosely associated with the Forrester ideas, I think I have moved away slightly. It was pointed out to me that ‘persuasion’ is a little close to coercion for some folks, that really ‘engagement’ – the thing I do write and talk about a lot – is a err.. gentler, subtler thing.

Why ‘Hovering Over The Back Button?’ Well this comes from various presentations and articles I have written recently – I always use this phrase.

I’ve always thought that if you are going to talk or write write about web engagement, or I guess anything really, you need to present the audience with the opportunity you will offer them or the value of listening.

For web engagement, especially when you talk to marketers, it is of consent. A rare commodity that indicates the point at which your audience is willing to listen, be educated, communicated, persuaded or even sold to.

A website delivers that. This visitor sought you out, maybe sifted through a billion google search results and as they arrive they are engaged or at the least ready to listen.

The challenge with a website, is that this opportunity to engage this visitor is extremely brief, there is the simplest barrier for them to leave – as they hover over the back button.

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

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.

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.

Using that phrase does rather alienate half the population and maybe doesn’t even translate that well into US English but, forgive me, you know what I mean – it’s the most basic, fundamental fear of most normal people in most social situations, and social media is the most extreme of social situations.

I thought for a bit that this was a peculiarly English trait, that we are slow to embrace the ‘paradigm shifts’ of ‘Personal Brand’, we have a terribly over acute sense of… well.. being British about the whole thing and “after you, no.. after you”, a debilitating cynicism and apologizing for being in the way, but it transpires that my modest US colleagues feel it too.

Take Twitter for example, here you are in 140 characters or less trying to be interesting, whilst negotiating the subtle niceties of ‘twittiquette’. One chap who confidently writes excellent, witty, entertaining blog posts was agonising over whether he should tweet them twice, for the UK and US time zones of his followers – or if double tweeting made him look like “a douche bag”. I’ve met the fella, he doesn’t seem to be a douche bag.

I’ve agonised over it in a couple of blogs posts, I’ve tried to figure out who ‘I’ am and who the ‘you’ should be when representing your companies – heck, I may not even publish this post as the mortal fear of ‘cockness’ overcomes me.

But, the fact is, I think you need to be yourself, as Oscar Wilde said:

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Alright so sometimes that needs to be corporate you, but you none the less, the ‘you-ness’ is important. (For more on this, Chris Brogan makes a great point in his post about being aways ‘on‘).

I can’t believe that anyone can maintain a Personal Brand for long; people are not products. Nestle can reinvent their chocolate and make it tasty with two glasses of milk and make that their thing, their brand. Toyota can make owning a car cool for Californians again with the Prius, by adding a slightly more efficient engine. But surely we are eventually going to come unstuck, by making promises our talent, knowledge, coolness – whatever – can’t keep?

(Sorry to keep throwing links at you, but there’s a great discussion on that here, on David Spinks’ blog)

Surely your personal brand is your aspiration to be good at what you do, but recognising that you aren’t quite there yet? By trying too hard to be cool, by subtracting the real ‘you’ out of your social media persona – you’ll really end up looking more of a cock? Or way worse, bland and uninteresting – part of the echo chamber, rather than saying something new.

Lets look at the superstars of this stuff – take for example Seth Godin – in this inteview with Josh Berhoff he talks about his secret – which is to love what you do and write about it. It’s effortless for him, as he’s found that magic formula. Seth can write freely and without shame, galvanised by the love and enjoyment of the thing.

Someone once said to me after I came off stage at a conference, “You looked like you enjoyed that, you didn’t care if anyone else was watching”. I took that as a compliment, I do deeply care about the audience, but any nervousness or anxiety was carried away by enthusiasm for the subject and the opportunity to spend half an hour talking about it.

So maybe it’s time we all just relaxed, admitted that being a bit of cock sometimes is actually part of our personal brand. Yes, maybe I’ll commit some sort of embarrassing Twitter faux pas, but surely if I admit my mistakes and come over all human – my little community will forgive me?