Archive for May, 2009

Engaging through Content or just Filing it?

Monday, May 11th, 2009

The news of OpenText planning to gobble up Vignette and the recent Interwoven acquisition by Autonomy sees a new chapter for these grandees of content management and I think is further evidence in the shifts that have been occurring in this market around Enterprise Content Management and what organisations really want to do.

I’ve often described ECM as turning your organisation into a filing system, a necessary activity that keeps everything neat, ordered and regulatory compliant. It brings operational efficiencies and it can even help save the planet as you de-dupe and remove all that redundant server room kit.

The functionality and products of an ECM suite are all about that business function of keeping stuff ordered, records management, document management, asset management etc. Over the past 5 years this is the path that both Interwoven and Vignette set themselves strategically on, mainly through acquisition. This was the path to becoming the new SAP or IBM and to becoming the System Integrators friend through alignment with big business change and major IT projects. Documentum, arguably the ECM pioneer was swallowed up by a storage company EMC (which kinda emphasises the point).

In the meantime, specialised Web Content Management vendors had stuck to their knitting, detected the shift toward agile solutions for business users and away from big IT projects. Technically organisations started to go “small IT” to bet their on-line business on Open Source, SaaS, Microsoft and away from the traditional platform of the web (Sun/Oracle).

Many vendors have prospered in a vibrant space that Vignette and Interwoven originally helped shape, driven by new business focused mantras of “ease of use” and “quick time to value” – of engaging the marketer, the communicator or anyone outside IT who has a message to deliver over the web.

These are things that I have always considered as delivering on the promise of content management software – yes you need the IT stuff to work, yes you need governance, but to truly deliver it’s about democratizing the contribution and user adoption. The web site as a business tool.

To put it very simply, you have a divergence of ECM and WCM – but I don’t identify myself with you as a brand because you have a neat and tidy warehouse or you are Sarbanes-Oxley complaint – it’s good to know, but it’s not what I like about you.

The challenge to the marketer is not about simply publishing content, it’s about what our websites are for – the audience – or more specifically the websites role in persuading, encouraging, educating, communicating – engaging the audience to act.

This is a trend that really came through at Internet World this year in London, with vendors and speakers talking engagement (some based solely on a screenshot of Google Analytics).  

So, what interests me about the two acquisitions (so far, it’s still early) is that the OpenText path appears to be doggedly ECM (with a bit of social media), whilst Autonomy is talking the language of engaging with the visitor – making the Interwoven acquisition look far more interesting.

Also published on my personal blog.

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Posted in Web Content Management | 3 Comments »

Uncertain? Forrester says be bold and engage with your audience

Monday, May 11th, 2009

In a period of tightening budgets marketing leaders would seem to be at a crossroads, do they innovate and boldly engage with the audience to help shape their strategy or do they stick what they traditionally know?

Forrester observe that 25% of marketers, faced with the recession are choosing the latter and yet this could be the very time for going with the new and grasping these new audience engagement channels. 

In this article at MediaPost -Online Media Daily, Gavin O’Malley discusses marketing strategies as budgets are tightened, referring to the latest Forrester research by Lisa Bradner, following their survey of 102 marketing leadership professionals. 

“Consumer needs change rapidly in response to economic uncertainty .. Companies that track those shifts and respond to them quickly can find new avenues for growth.”

The Forrester report, as the article observes,  states that to stay current with these quickly changing demands requires embracing social media as a quick, inexpensive route to the hearts and minds of the consumer. 

Compared with expensive focus groups or surveys, social technologies are viewed as cheaper and able to give almost instant consumer feedback, while they embrace consumers as participants in the innovation process.

In contrast consumers are driven differently, feeling more conservative:

During this downturn, for instance, consumers have indicated a shift toward comfort and community, and away from uniqueness and variety.

So, it seems that the consumers might be viewing the world conservatively during uncertain times, but in contrast Forrester conclude that marketers need to be bold in how they stay in touch with those views.

The full report from Forrester can be purchased here.

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Posted in Web Content Management | No Comments »

Online media spending trends

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Alterian are seeing increasing interest in email and direct response communications, but is this a short termist strategy with a long reaching downside?

Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester had a chat with Robert Tas the CEO of Sportgenic with some interesting comments on spending…

Like most publishers, he is finding that advertisers are shifting dollars away from branding and toward direct response vehicles because of the recession. He and I both agreed that this is a very short-sighted strategy. Not only does it set your firm up for a poor recovery after the recession ends, but it also means you are likely paying more per conversion than if you invested in some upstream activity focused on warming up an audience to convert easier when they reach the direct response of point of sale touchpoint.

via The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals.

For my money I would argue that marketers need to adapt, rather than flipflop, branding is key to encourage reluctant consumer spend, but wasted dollars are just not acceptable right now…

 

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Posted in General Marketing | No Comments »

If my social site is a failure, what have I done wrong?

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Nothing happens on you social media site, it’s a failure and it fades away - this is a frequent reality and goes to underline just how difficult it can be to get a social strategy going.  When you set up a blogging site or build a community it requires an a large amount of commitment and effort, with the rewards potentially a long way off in the future.

I spoke with a successful blogger recently and he told me he was posting 3 times a day on his site to get interest, even when no one was reading it.  That’s a full time job, for someone.  So is it your full time job? Should you pay someone to blog for you?  That really does depend on whether you’ve got something to say – but bear in mind, if you write a beautiful 3 page post, well crafted and edited – it will either stagnate and become a bit wiffy in a few days or be scrolled off the screen by a bunch of your colleagues hitting “press this” and adding their comments.

Blogging successfully is not about being a journalist in the traditional sense, it’s far more modern, bite sized and transactional.

I remember the adage that “the people who should blog don’t have the time and the one’s that shouldn’t do!”  Now I know that’s not true of many of the successful blogs I read – but the billions of lines or stagnating text out there remind me that blogging is sometimes no more than electronic vanity publishing.

“Nothing” happens more often than you might realize. While there is no official count of unused applications, stagnating Facebook pages, or inactive communities, the social media landscape is burdened with dead weight. These types of failures tend to slip away quietly with little fanfare. They don’t ignite passion — they don’t really accomplish anything, except perhaps waste time, money, and space.

via 4 signs you’re a social media failure – 1. Nothing happens – iMediaConnection.com.

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Posted in Social Media Marketing | 2 Comments »