Jun 27, 2012
I really enjoyed reading Velocity's Big Fat B2B Content Marketing Strategy Checklist. In addition to it's irreverent tone and design, the checklist is great because it forces the reader to think through all that goes into a successful marketing program. Of special interest to marketing operations folks is the "Flog It" section which talks about getting the most leverage out of content: promotion, lead nurturing, atomization (creating sub pieces derived off of the main piece), and measurement.
Most people outside of marketing operations discount the effort that goes in after the content is finalized and ready for publishing. It really is just the beginning. The best results are achieved by nailing the publishing and post-publishing activities.
Jun 26, 2012
The New York Times has an interesting article about eCommerce personalization - E-Tailer Customization: Convenient or Creepy?. The big take-away here is that if you want to experiment personalization, you need to be prepared to adjust because the results may be the opposite of what you want. Before you implement sophisticated display logic, you need to build the capacity to manage it. Otherwise your visitors will probably be worse off than if you did nothing.
Jun 22, 2012
Within all of us there are two minds: the professional and the employee. Actually, there are probably many more but I am just going to talk about those two. On the one side, the professional is focused on his/her craft and building skills. Professionals are passionate about their discipline and look for ways to be creative and innovative. The professional seeks challenge and isn't afraid of failure. The employee side, however, is focused on his/her job as it has been defined: meeting expectations, following the rules, and other forms of job preservation/advancement. The employee side seeks comfort and safety. The employee avoids risk through routine. Innovation is limited to small optimizations of the status quo.
Both sides are important. You get dependability from the employee. You get excellence from the professional. Depending on the field, one aspect may dominate another. For example, in an unskilled field, the employee dominates the professional. The job is easy to learn, there is no career to build, and you are easily replaced. You show up on time, you do as you are told, and you go home. The best you can do is show yourself to be dependable and hope for a promotion to lead others in the tasks that you have learned. In a high skill job, like a doctor, the employee part is minimal. You see a lot of passion about the craft and much less interest in the details of employment. Doctors can easily shift from one practice to another but the focus is the same - solving challenging problems, contributing to the field of medicine, and delivering excellent patient care.
Why am I even talking about this esoteric decomposition of the human psyche? Because it has profound implications on knowledge management and Intranets. The thing is that advanced skill and knowledge are wrapped up in the professional side of the person and that side wants to interact with his/her field (inside and outside the company). It is far more rewarding to share brilliant insight on a large professional network than to a small group of co-workers. The few co-workers that are as passionate as the professional are probably already on that external professional network too.
This is why the knowledge management aspect of intranets (like blogging and micro-blogging and most wikis) tend to fail so often. The dream of using an Intranet as a catalyst to synthesize all of the great ideas trapped in the brains of an organization never is achieved. The professional's brilliance is drawn to a larger stage. The most successful bits of Intranet are the ones that serve the employee: the company directory, forms, and templates. Templates are the things that are most often passed off as knowledge but I would contend that they are more focused on routine and consistency than thinking and knowledge.
This is why I have such low expectations for the "Social Enterprise" solving knowledge management through tools like Yammer that emulate what is happening on the public web. The single reason for Twitter's success is its openness. With an open network like Twitter (or Google+), I can connect with a stranger on the other side of the world through the simple bond of being interested in the same thing. We can learn from each other and build off each others' ideas. Our motivation is our interest — the professionals within each of us. If you narrow down that pool to just the people you work with (a great percentage of whom are involved in totally different professions), the shared interests get fewer and much more mundane: holiday schedules, cafeteria menus, etc. This makes the value of content shared hardly worth the cost and effort of implementing these tools.
If the Social Enterprise is to work, I predict it will be on open networks that can also support private group channels. Personally, the network that I think comes the closest is Google+. Perhaps LinkedIn. I guess Facebook has the functionality but Facebook has become a place for the hyper-personal and that clashes too much with our professional contexts. I would love to hear about companies that are using public networks to connect employees. Perhaps this would be putting your social network links in your corporate directory profile or creating circles and lists for co-workers. Anyone doing anything cool? I ask this question to the professional in you.
Jun 18, 2012
There is a new SmartMoney article about how companies are giving special treatment to customers with high online influence. Is this really new? When haven't businesses gone out of their way to cater to and hire people with influence? Astute local business people have always engaged with their community to know which customers are most likely to be potent references or critics. The only difference is that social influence is more visible now because it is online and easier to quantify.
The last paragraph about how this might not be fair sounds particularly silly when you translate it into the analog world. Yes, of course the owner/chef is going to go out of his way to create a great experience for a local foodie or restaurant critic. It doesn't mean the experience for us introverts needs to be bad. It just means that there is a bigger upside on extra effort spent on the taste-makers.
May 23, 2012
I recently attended CMS Expo and there was a lot of discussion about "engagement" — presentation-side functionality to create more enriching experiences for customers (on the website and beyond). Engagement is a pretty hot topic within the CMS industry these days. By focusing on engagement, companies can get more value from their content and serve their customers better. The upper tier of WCM vendors have fully committed to this trend. Sitecore now describes its offering as a "Customer Engagement Platform." Adobe calls CQ the "foundation of the Adobe Web Experience Management (WEM) solution". Ektron has its "Digital Experience Hub". OpenText puts its WCM products under the "Engagement" section of their portfolio. Autonomy has theirs under "Customer Experience Management."
When hearing about the opportunities and benefits of engagement, you could see the audience (mostly open source CMS developers) thinking about how they would build these features into their platforms. What struck me though is that thinking about engagement as a technology problem, to be solved with code, is doomed to failure. Yes, we can program some logic that displays different content under different conditions and automates some actions. But as long as we think of engagement as "features" that the developers leave behind, the result will be a fortress of software that insulates an organization from its customers and inhibits real engagement. The software will be correct to the specification but fail to achieve its goal of enhancing visitor experience. In fact, it is more likely to assume wrong and frustrate visitors than get lucky and do the right thing. We all know how hard Amazon and Netflix work with their algorithms and they still get it wrong.
Engagement is a two-way conversation. To create an engaging experience, a company needs to deeply understand its audience. A company needs to listen for the slightest hints of delight or disappointment and continually adjust to get more of the former and less of the latter. Like with anything, you can only automate engagement once you get really good at doing it manually. You can only offer good suggestions if you have been observing what people pick on their own and know how happy they were with their choices.
If you start to build in business logic to engage visitors, you better have metrics and in place, constantly monitor them, and have the skills and the time to tune your algorithms. Engagement functionality is not going to work for companies with a set it and forget it attitude. But for companies that are already executing a content strategy (so they have the right content) and actively seeking performance feedback (through analytics and anecdotal information), engagement features will present opportunities to serve their customers even better.
The same is true for the editorial side of content management technologies. If a company is not good at developing and organizing effective content, if it doesn't have the right skills and processes, a CMS is not going to help much. But in the hands of an organization with a good content strategy and strong executional capabilities, a CMS is an invaluable asset. You can't execute a content strategy without one. Some CMS vendors get this and have developed training programs to help build the organizational capabilities necessary to execute a successful content program (both on the editorial side and on the engagement side). The ones that don't risk losing customers who fail to meet their goals and wind up blaming the product.
Engagement is something that all companies should strive for. An unfulfilled visit is a huge missed opportunity. It could be a lost sale. It could lead to an expensive call to a call center. Worst of all, it creates frustration with your brand that, through social media, spreads like kudzu. Companies won't succeed with engagement because they bought software with the word "engagement" on the tin. They will succeed by having the organizational capacity to learn and serve their customers and by working with tools that support their optimized business processes.
May 21, 2012
Last Friday Jeroen Reijn from Hippo submitted the 30th CMS signature for the CM Field Guide project. If this is your first time hearing of CM Field Guide, it is a community project to share clues for telling what CMS a website is running. For more background, here is my CM Field Guide announcement blog post. Here is the list so far:
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Adobe CQ
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Concrete5
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DemandWare
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dotCMS
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DotNetNuke
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Drupal
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Ektron
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Elcom CMS
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EPiServer
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ExpressionEngine
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eZ Publish
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Hannon Hill Cascade Server
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Hippo CMS
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iApps
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Ingeniux
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Joomla!
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Kentico
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Liferay
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Magnolia
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ModX
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Octopress
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OpenText (RedDot)
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Plone
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SharePoint
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SilverStripe
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Sitecore
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Tridion
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Umbraco
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Websphere Commerce
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Wordpress
Other contributors include Adriaan Bloem (@adriaanbloem), Steven Brent (@stevenbrent), Timothy Davis (@timothydavis), Lee Roberson (@lroberson), Robb Winkle (@robbwinkle), Wes Winham (@weswinham) and of course, the guy who started it all, Deane Barker (@gadgetopia). If you know of any secrets for sniffing a CMS, let me know and I will add it and create you an account so you can use the www.cmfieldguide.com website. If you like to code Python and Django, you can code it yourself and submit a pull request on github.
May 16, 2012
Clay Shirky is one my favorite writers on digital publishing. Whenever I run across one of his articles, I read it twice and I usually wind up agreeing with him even if I object at first. But one of the points that I have not come around on is when he says:
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
link to interview
There is definitely some truth here. The publisher's role of gatekeeper to availability has been reduced as the technical barriers to getting content from producers to consumers have eroded. I don't need a printing press or a distribution network to make my content available. I can post a message that the world can see by sending an SMS from a cheap cell phone. But that doesn't mean that anyone is going to absorb the message. It will probably be lost in the stream. My content is only going to be received if it is good, the right people are paying attention, and it hits them at a time and in a format that is useful to consume and share.
Back in the days when publishing was technically hard, we tended to fixate on the mechanical part of publishing. The capital required to acquire printing and distribution capabilities served as a barrier to entry, but it wasn't the only one. Another barrier was having an attentive audience. This meant painstakingly building trust by offering reliable, useful, and/or entertaining information. The elimination of the technical barrier reduced the up front expenditure to get into the publishing game, but you still need to do the legwork to stay in it. We tend to discount the effort that "internet celebrities" invest in building a brand. Many of these people are driven by passion so it may not feel like a job, but it is a lot of work.
I agree that publishing as a big, monopolistic business is dying. You can no longer get fat and happy as a middleman because the playing field is so dynamic and everyone has a chance to displace you if they do a better job. But even as we see big media companies in crisis, publishing is emerging as a discipline within all organizations. I am sure you have heard the phrase "all companies are publishers now." Corporate publishing has transformed from adapting paper sales collateral to the browser to executing a multi-faceted, multi-channel content strategy to inform and engage audiences on and off the website (email newsletters, mobile apps, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Stumbled Upon, LinkedIn...). Companies employ content managers, graphic designers, social media experts, SEO experts, and analytics specialists to understand, serve, and appeal to an audience as publisher traditionally would do. Collectively, this field is called "Marketing Operations" and it represents a lot of work — especially if you are operating in several languages and in many markets. This is what I do at Lionbridge.
Pushing the "publish" button but may seem easy but it is just a small step in a much larger process to build and reach audiences. Prior to the publish button, there is planning around placement, timing, and what kind of formats to target. Perhaps adding a graphic or interactive application would help get the point across. These decisions should be based on the analysis of other content initiatives. There is work to get the content into the CMS (it often originates somewhere else), tag it for SEO and targeting, and instrument it for analytics. There may be a nee to test the content on different devices. There may also be the need to localize the content for different markets. After clicking publish there is work to gain visibility through social networks and email newsletters. Good bloggers know what I'm talking about and have been doing this for a long time. Large corporations are just learning about it. Then there is multivariate testing and analytics, tuning for search engines, and possibly purchasing ad words. Lastly is taking all that you have learned and applying it to the next iteration through the publishing cycle. Do this continually and consistently and your customers will love you and your prospects will notice you. Do it badly and your competitors will periodically check in on your website just to make sure that you are still in business.
So, Clay, publishing isn't just a button. It may be losing its importance as an industry but it is becoming increasingly important as a discipline within marketing organizations for all industries. That "cadre of professionals" still exists, it has just refocused from getting something public to getting something noticed. And it took a new job in the marketing department under the title "marketing operations."
May 14, 2012
Evil genius Deane Barker (@gadgetopia, gadgetopia.com) approached me with this idea at a vulnerable time. My fingers were itching to code. I had recently transitioned out of all programming responsibility for a consulting client. I was managing a few development projects on which I forbade myself from coding. I was also feeling a little disconnected from the content management community. With this backdrop, Deane taps into our strange shared hobby of detecting what content management system is running a website. He shows me some working Django code that he wrote (a little smelly but excellent for a first attempt at Python and Django — I love Deane's fearlessness.); and before I can force myself to say no, I am refactoring.
That's how CM Field Guide got started. And it is shaping up to be a really cool project. While there are other applications that do the job of sniffing out what CMS a site is running on, CM Field Guide is unique in that it is a social coding project. We share the "tells" we know to look for and we invite people to submit theirs either as code or as a description that we can code.
The code that examines a website is called a "signature" and they are really easy to write. It's mostly metadata and a line or two of test logic. The foundation application and libraries do most of the work. We use github's social coding model of forking and pull requests. As of this blog post, we have 26 platform signatures. Steven Brent (@stevenbrent) submitted 2 of them as github pull requests. Adriaan Bloem (@adriaanbloem) and Robb Winkle (@robbwinkle) shared their secrets over email and github issues.
While I am already finding the application useful, the most interesting aspect of the project for me is around knowledge management. The discipline of Knowledge Management likes to say that knowledge is distinguished from information because it is actionable. Turning information into executable code seems to take this to a whole new level. There is also a social aspect, it's fun to share this information with people and build relationships on a common interest.
A closed alpha of the application is running at www.cmfieldguide.com. We haven't done any real user interface work yet (volunteers?) and we haven't optimized the application for any kind of load. At the moment, we are only giving out accounts to friends and colleagues. But you can quickly become a friend with your contribution!
Apr 12, 2012
I just got an email announcement for Amazon's new CloudSearch service. This could be really cool if popular applications and frameworks like Wordpress, Drupal, Rails, and Django build modules/apps/extensions that interface with CloudSearch. It would be nice to have an alternative to Google Custom Search (which has gotten pretty expensive for small sites) or (in the case of Drupal) Acquia Search. I am already using Amazon's Simple Email Service (SES) thanks to Django-SES. It's extremely reliable and reasonably priced.
The speed with which Amazon is rolling out these services is truly amazing. It's like every system they build to run amazon.com (the ecommerce business) is a candidate for a new AWS product. My only concern is Amazon's long term ability to support this increasing portfolio of services. No doubt they will run into Google Wave-like burnouts that will shake the well earned trust of the development community. What will they do if a service turns out to be a bad business? Will they support it at a reduced level or shut it down completely?
Apr 11, 2012
If you were not able implement a host-based strategy for your Global Business URLs, you might be able to implement Google's rel-alternate-hreflang tag. This article, Giving Google better instructions about language and country, provides a good explanation.
The basic gist is that if you are hosting multiple localized sites on the same host and using paths to keep them separate, Google is going to think that your UK site is just a duplicate of your US and just index those pages once. This will send UK traffic to your US site and undermine the value of your localization. Putting this link tag in the HTML head
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.example.com/en-GB/about" />
will tell Google that there is a UK version of your US about page under /en-GB/about.
Reading through the Google documentation, it is probably a good idea to use this tag even if you have your different localized sites under different hosts. It can't certainly hurt.