Now I agree we need to draw the line somewhere, you describe ‘content’ and ‘management’ loose enough and suddenly every RDBMS could consider itself a CMS – especially if your pet part time geek has slapped a PHP front end that adds rows – I quite like this from Robert Rose, in his post – Why every CMS fails:

Wikipedia defines content management as “a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment.” Put simply, a CMS is a process meant to grease the workflow skids for managing web content. It doesn’t matter if it is a million dollar software tool or some dude named Sergei FTPing files from Dreamweaver, every organization that updates a website has a CMS.

I am going to skate over the academic discussion over what we ought to consider a Content Management System to be, by hiding behind the excuse of brevity and not having the room here or to presume that you the reader has the time to indulge me.

I am just going to say that I am not sure that we can define it, it’s the market that decides and there’s a lot of stuff out there packaged up with the CMS label. Perhaps we even run the risk of saying there is everything labelled CMS (good, bad and ugly) and there is WordPress. My concern here is the if we get snooty about what constitutes a CMS – we could be missing something or failing the folks that are confused by this software space.

WordPress is a specialised CMS (or WCM). But blogging platforms (or might I add wikis) are just CM systems, simple ones – with specialist fancy user interfaces and web applications, that have carved their own CMS niche in all the excitement about Web 2.0 – are they not?

I think perhaps our industry needs to take a look at why people are reaching for these tools instead of “traditional” CMS products. It’s not just because they are free, plenty of open source alternatives around – it’s about the ease of adoption, perhaps the very lack of governance, the basic ease at which you can just get publishing? Maybe these are requirements we need to be listening to as an industry – rather than try to exclude them from the club.

Folks suggest that WordPress is not a CMS because you can’t create content types, that it doesn’t have a multi role approval process or whatever – but if I only require a single content type (or a page based CMS) and you only have a couple of excellent trusted authors – maybe it fits the requirements?

It also doesn’t have in-context editing or multi-site functionality, but then neither do plenty of commercial and open source established CMS products – so where do we draw the line? (Nice conversation happening now about Drupal vs WordPress going on Twitter as I write this – being driven Jon Marks).

There’s a law when CMS folks are having a discussion, that it will come to a car analogy (what is it with CMS folks and cars?) and in this case Scott Liewehr did this – by comparing WordPress with a scooter. But, I’d like to think of as a car - the Tata Nano. I believe that the Tata Nano is the words cheapest and (arguably) the most basic new car on sale today.

If you are a family in India, used to loading your family precariously onto a moped the Tata Nano is a revelation, access to a new freedom in transportation – although a Tata Nano won’t meet a rural farmers requirement to get a lamb to the end of a muddy lane and it certainly won’t meet McLaren’s requirements to have the Mercedes and Vodafone logos dancing on the top step after a formula 1 weekend. But, it’s still a car.

These analogies often don’t really work very well, as we don’t buy cars for the same reason as we buy software, but if I may try to extend it – there are governing bodies that defines what is a car, a van, or a truck.

I guess in software, that’s what analysts are for? In any case, without that trying to hold back the tide of content management systems that don’t meet this or that ideal for a CMS has a whiff of Canute about it – there are so many of them and who can tell them whether they call their offering a CMS or not.

Maybe a cheese analogy would be better here, if I want to produce English Stilton, some nice man, probably in the EU needs to approve, telling me and my market that my product is Stilton. In the absence of this (or the crowning of a benevolent CMS dictator) – it’s beholden on CMS practitioners to educate the market, to understand, own and define their requirements and understand what it really takes to meet them.

You could argue that blogging platforms, in the same way as the Tata Nano will revolutionize access to transportation in India, have revolutionised people’s access to being published, prepared a generation of new authors to contribute content – that I have referred to as democratized content authoring.

They have also prepared folks for consuming a new kind of content, informal stuff that comes from knowledgeable folks – rather than what sales and marketing say in their (I should say ‘our’, as I am one of them) business speak, jargon littered ‘on message’ sales messaging. This is an opportunity for anyone driving a web content management (or dare I say engagement) project today – I maintain that it’s ongoing success will rely on fresh new content and those contributors.

I’ve digressed, I’m supposed to be talking about tools and we’ve seen what a CMS means change hugely over the last 10 years, from an IT enabling rag bag toolkit of API’s and you build on yourself over a painfully expensive year long project – to an expectation of business user driven, easy to install and implement tools that deliver value in weeks.

I’ve talked here about how the titans of our industry got distracted by ECM, while a vibrant community of new vendors delivered what the web content management systems that actually everyone wanted.

Lets’s not do the same thing here, with CMS – sure WordPress is barely a CMS – implementing it for a decent sized site could catapult you back into the dark ages of web content management, like I imagine that jumping from your Prius into a Nano would be. You’ll also get very expensively stuck if you try and adapt your Nano to do the job of a Land Rover or the McLaren MP4-25.

- But it’s teaching us lessons on what the people want and we should respond and welcome it into the club..

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!!

I am also obviously going to talk about Web Content Management, which I think is interesting as this turns the discussion from the theoretical and well ordered filing system that your organisation should become, to being about achieving something. WCM is about publishing to the web, not about having well ordered drawers of stuff.

I’ve been in this WCM industry awhile, so lets put aside the crystal ball a minute and ask if we have yet delivered on the CMS promise of 10 years ago? (That’s we as in our industry, rather than we as in our company). Of the democratisation of contributing content, of connecting our Knowledge and Information Workers (as Forrester refers to them), the people that know stuff – with the people that want to know stuff?

And I don’t mean those projects where we have hundreds of content authors or an Intranet, I mean connecting the real people (not hundreds of marketers) in an organisation with your audience through the web.

Connecting people? That sounds like a job for social media. With Social Media we are now breaking down communication and marketing barriers in 140 character chunks. Are our websites, or the messaging and brand values they are used to project now being blown apart and deposited in crumbs around the web? We are now potentially all becoming the messengers, representatives, dare I say marketers for our organisations and any other brands, products, destinations, services we interact with and comment upon. But, for all that, websites are still the destination – the majority of tweets are linking people with web content.

Peng T. Ong (founder of Interwoven) in a the forward of the 2001 book “Web Content Management: A Collaborative Approach” – he talks about the motivation behind founding Interwoven – of enabling users and ‘web masters’ (it was 2001) who are “enmeshed in trying to launch websites” amidst the “chaos of building websites” – pains that organisations still feel today.

We are also seeing the “enterprization” of social media, corporate twitter governance, of paid bloggers and of a greater profile for blogging on corporate sites. We are all becoming accustomed to consuming opinion and news when researching products and services and I think we are become less tolerant of and less attentive to the polished sales and marketing message – people want to meet and understand the people behind the brand, we want to hear their opinion and see them. This appears to be to be convergence, as the ownership of the message is moving from marketing to ‘the people’ as at the same time the consumer becomes more accustomed to and expectant of a less formal, blogger, opinion based style of content.

This gets me back to my point, publishing web content is about the people – tools will need to be adopted by engineers, consultants, product managers and customer service reps – not just sales and marketing – the people our audience want to get a feel of.

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.

Wow.. I was astonished by the original Clay article. In 2009 folks are still advocating self building a CMS? Not for some specialist task, but just for managing web content! I then started hacking together a comment for Ron’s blog and it started turning into this, full blown post. 

OK, so previous generations CMS products were pretty close to being IT development frameworks and if this were still the case – I could have some sympathy for Clay’s point of view. If your CMS vendor (or open source project) of choice is handing you a bag of bolts and suggesting you get on with it, then as a developer I would agree that development frameworks have moved on and could be a better bag of bolts.

In those days we’d propose that an organisation build a contribition user interface (or Content Management Application as we used to call them) and a website (or a Content Delivery Application) based on a bunch of API’s – which was what the customer purchased. In those days we recognised that the CMA was 70% of the effort.

A hand rolled ‘CMA’ was nothing like the business user focused tools of today. Today a CMS, and you can pick one from a wide selection of commercial and open source developers, is a sophisticated business user’s tool. We are way past the “here’s a fancy database and a bunch of API’s – now go build” formative years of this market. 

If we imagine that development frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, put you at that same starting point we were at in the late 90′s (which is a very poor assumption) – does anyone still want to direct 70% of their development on the management application – before you even start delighting your site visitors?  

Clay is of the opinion (and seems this is his view on all developed software) that:

“..it has too many opinions. Those opinions were though of by somebody other than you and the needs of your organization. The more developed a content management system (or any piece of software, really) the more “opinions” it has.

That’s quite a position to take. 

I’d prefer to take that statement and replace ‘opinions’ with ‘experience’. Opinions come for free, experience is hard earned. I can be less sure about all open source projects, but the good ones and all recognised commercial products have years and years of experience equity (and R&D dollars) being applied to each release.  

The bright people on a software project agonize over design, architectural decisions, best ways to make it scalable – they do this through personal experience, innovative ideas, customer feedback – a host of experience based scenarios.  

There is such a broad range of products in this CMS market – you are going to need to have something pretty special to compete or to render obsolete that ocean of existing IP.  

The CMS market is being described increasingly as commodotized and certainly the basics are; WYSIWYG editorial, create pages, change navigation, add images, add meta-data etc etc.. are all there. Why would I want to build all that stuff again? 

Do I want to spend 70% of my budget competing with all of that? Will it stretch to the cost of learning all those lessons as I overcome my inexperience? Will my project delight my content contributors as much as my visitors? 

And that last point is important, back to todays CMS being a business user tool – I have said in this blog before a CMS projects success hinges on that contributor adoption – for fresh content – the life blood of your website.

I would also guess that a user interface that suits Clay, a developer, is not necessarily going to be right for the marketing team that will have to feed this thing.      

Plus of course if, or maybe when, things get sticky, you’ve got a community, support or a warranty to fall back on and a bunch of people who know how your stuff works. 

Clay singles out Drupal and implies a frustration in working with it – my suggestion would be to get involved with that community – apply his development cajonas to becoming the change he wishes to see. (Apologies Gandhi).  The world of CMS is a broad church and if the Drupal community won’t embrace his ideas, there are plenty of others.

Of note of course, is that Clay published these ideas using a blogging tool… a focused kind of CMS.    

I’ve already gone on too long – this is the classic ‘build vs buy’ argument, covered in detail elsewhere – and exposes the gulf between writing code and developing software.

This all started last year with a really interesting discussion with Andrew Ewing of HP, at the time he was evangalising records management and we had an incredibly interesting conversation (you always do with Andrew) – one small part was about e-mail attachments. Specifically the huge duplication in most e-mail repositories and the savings his software was bringing to large organisation just doing that alone. 

These huge repositories of duplicated content affect the agility of an organisation – Outlook servers that take eons to backup and seemingly even longer to reboot – it strikes me that all this redundant data is like cholesterol in the arteries of large enterprises.  

I would be willing to bet that any content management practitioner worthy of the badge, has their own version of the ‘single version of the truth’ story. In my case the anecdote of how much Nestle saved when they realised they had thousands of images, separately stored, of someone pouring milk – which I think I picked up at Vignette, has stood me in good stead over the years!

The core of the proposition has traditionally been about governance, of using the right approved content item or image and of being able to squeeze the maximum amount of value out of the production of expensive copy and images. 

The green computing agenda and the cost saving energy strategies that large organisations are now adopting gives this basic competence of a CMS fresh wings. That storing something once is an efficient thing to do. 

I have always got my thrills from specialising in Web Content Management and audience engagement through the web. I am not an Enterprise Content Management (the art of turning your organisation into an efficient filing system) expert, but clearly there are further efficiencies that Document and Records management tools can bring – when you start filing everything in your corporate life once and re-using.    

In addition, rolling out content management projects, in the form of Intranets is an essential part of a strategy of encouraging people to store things once and to create a culture of self service knowledge repositories and sharing links to the one item – rather than giving everyone a copy of a huge presentation or document via e-mail. 

In the WCM world we also need to look at, or more specifically I guess – prospective customers should be challenging their vendors on – the efficiency of how we deliver the content. One of our US financial customers required 24 web servers to power its old solution, before implementing our CMS solution on just six. 

So, back to the article. I was interviewed by a very smart journalist, Carolina K. Reid (sorry no link as she doesn’t appear to be anywhere!), had a very interesting chat resulting in this article – also reprinted for CIO today.   

It’s clear that when confronted with a big problem of load or of storage, the right IT answer is no longer to throw ‘tin’ at it – however cheap ‘tin’ – more servers, more disks – might be these days. The ongoing costs are getting more focus as is the energy consumed in maintaining them in their cooled cocoon and a good content management strategy should figure somewhere in you plans to minimize that.