One of my newspaper clients recently added the Facebook “Like” button to their site and saw large increases in traffic. I was thinking of doing the same thing for Content Here but then I started to wonder “would I Like Content Here?” Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE writing this blog and [...]

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Next in my occasional series where I refer to a different to letter to the one in a TLA (after discussing the R in ECM) – I wondering if it’s time we took the W out of CMS and thought about management and delivery as separate disciplines. I am not the first to think like this, obviously, but it’s something I wanted to explore in this blog.

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?

There was some talk during the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last week that Social Networking was having a negative impact on our relationships.  This idea was put forward by Alcatel-Lucent’s Kathleen Culver during her session (#e2onf-25), but not everyone bought into the concept.

I for one agree with the observation. What I feel we are seeing is the flattening of our overall relationship depth.  To explain this, let me talk about the positive impact upon relationships first.

My Social Network Gains

My use of social networks is divided up into two groups, professional and social.  I know that this is not necessarily the norm.  That said, I have seen the tools that I use overall fall into two categories, regardless of focus:

1. Network Mapping: This is LinkedIn (professional) and Facebook (personal).  If I know someone well enough, I link to them.  Essentially, the tie has to already exist. Obviously there is more that can be done with these tools, but we’ll hold off on that.
2. Idea Sharing: This is Twitter and my blog, both professional in nature. I share ideas, both short and long, and over time the audience has grown.  This growth has been through connecting and sharing other ideas.  The connections are to mostly “new” ties.

LinkedIn, by itself, has not significantly grown my network.  It has just helped me keep track of my professional network.  LinkedIn’s capabilities have grown over the years, but my usage has not to a large degree.

As for Twitter/blogging, as of right now, I have about 900 people following me on Twitter and I am following about 200.  I’d guess that there are at least 10-20 people that I have met that I could readily reach out to and have a drink with if I was passing through their town.  A small handful of them might be upset if I didn’t reach out if I was passing through their neck of the woods

This is purely counting people that I wouldn’t otherwise know, not those that I’ve met through real life that I’ve connected to online after meeting in real life.

Overall, a net gain.  Let’s look at Facebook…

Weakening my Strong Ties

On Facebook, I have about 150 friends.  Most of them I knew before I joined Facebook, and a vast majority I met in real life first.  They include family members, my best man, and my closest friends from high school.

The people that I listed are people that I kept in touch with before Facebook.  There are many that I have resumed contact with since joining.  Typically we exchange a few messages and maybe meet-up once.  After establishing a ne “baseline”, we track each other through Facebook, exchange comments, and move on with our lives.

Let’s look at the close friends.  We would regularly call each other, go out of our way to catch-up over drinks, and generally interact as much as our lives and the distance would allow.

Now, we mostly track each other through Facebook.  We feel we know what is going on in each other’s lives.  The urge/need to reach out over the phone isn’t as pressing.  This seems good because I spend so much more time online, so it helps save time.  Aside from maybe commenting on their statuses more than average, I interact with them online as much as most others on Facebook.

My strong relationships seem to be becoming weaker.  My interactions with my close friends are, on average, more superficial than they where before Facebook.

My friendships seem to be moving towards the mean.

Is this Good?

Let’s quickly sum-up:

• Lots of new ties professionally.
• Average strength of new ties, and of previously existing weak ties, is stronger
• Average strength of old, strong ties, is weaker

The answer really depends on your goals.  In my professional life, Social Networking is making things better as I meet more people and gain new opportunities.  The entire Enterprise 2.0 conference is a direct result of my use of Social Networking tools.  My social activities were also entirely the result of my Social Networking. On the whole good things.

That said, there is nothing like talking to good friends all night about anything and everything.  My professional life exists to support my personal life, so the weakening of my personal ties is actually a concern.

Then there is Dunbar’s Number.  Simply put, this is the number of stable social relationships that a person can maintain.  The number is 150.  So, with more professional relationships, personal ones will invariably be pushed aside.  As bad as it sounds, this is probably a wash given that it is relationship 151 that will be dropped.  If that particular relationship was more important to me, it wouldn’t be the one that gets neglected.

Let’s be fair, there is nothing stopping me from calling people like I used to do.  on the other hand, there is nothing stopping them from calling either. It happens much less on both sides, so it isn’t just me.

Will I give up Facebook? No, it still serves a purpose that was not being met before. I am going to make a more concerted effort to connect the old fashion way with my close friends.

So excuse me while I go call my best man.

Social media is all the hype and for some reason a presence on Facebook seems like a definitive must for most companies. Judging from their Facebook presence many significant vendors seem to be better at talking than walking. Join marketing communication vendor Alterian and their 36 fans without any activity at all or become global CMS vendor FatWire’s 11th fan.

Facebook for business purposes has been heavily debated among experts and vendors alike since around 2007. Last year I asked when organisations would begin to take Facebook seriously and highlighted global pharmaceutical Merck and their less than 500 fans. As you’ll see below, vendors are not much better, even though they claim thought-leadership in social media.

As with most other new initiatives the usual best practice recommendation is that you should only get involved in Facebook, if you can dedicate enough time to manage it properly. Just like with my recent posting on mobile CMS vendors, this might be just another example of vendors not “eating their own dog food”. Still, I wonder why many vendors are not following any sorts of best practices?

Let’s take a look at a few vendors. Judge for yourself whether the vendor is doing a good job.

Alterian
36 fans is not very impressive for a vendor which prides itself on a strong social media offering. Note the complete lack of activity.

Autonomy
Claiming to be the leader in meaning-based computing and enterprise search, Autonomy has gathered only 49 fans. Note the complete lack of activity on the Wall.

Day Software
Unlike most who take Facebook seriously, Day has kept their old Facebook group and not migrated it to a page. Interesting how the wall has been visited by what looks like a spammer.

FatWire
14 fans is not many for one of the leading Web CMS vendors. To keep some momentum, FatWire posts press mentioning to their fans. A good use case for Facebook?

Percussion Software
Similar to direct competitor FatWire, Percussion has no real interaction on Facebook, but simply posts press releases to their group of 46 fans. Perhaps this is the future of press releases?

What can we learn?
It seems like Facebook is an arena in which both vendors and customers still have a lot to learn. Just like the famous Web Pages That Suck site teaches us something about worst practices by looking at bad web design, we can learn from looking at the worst vendors on Facebook.

Clearly to make the most of Facebook you need interaction. Interaction requires critical mass and more thought that just blindly posting press releases.

It was recently reported in New Media Age, picked up by the Hubspot blog that Coca-Cola were moving their campaign sites from “traditional” websites to social media platforms and they are not alone, Pepsi recently created a stir as they announced a move from big budget Super Bowl ads to investing in their social media community. So what does this mean for “traditional” web content management?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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At our last meeting in the International Intranet Group, intranet expert Jane McConnell suggested that groups and pages on Facebook should be considered an extended part of your intranet from a conceptual viewpoint even though they are on an external platform. Jane said: If the groups are using the company logo, employees may think they are the official voice of the organisation. Jane’s comment made me think:

1. Organisations, in the private as well as public sectors, need to take Facebook much more seriously
2. Individuals, job seekers as well as those in secure life-time jobs, need to think about Facebook as more than their private and personal social network

Allow me to explain. Thus far, the main discussion has been around privacy, photos and whether you should invite your manager as a friend. Today, a more relevant discussion would be: Why are you not using the incredible potential of the 2nd most popular website in the world? According to web research company Alexa, Google is the only site with more traffic.

Many companies are already using Facebook for a variety of purposes. The below screenshot shows a Facebook page, used by drug maker Merck to alert fans about job opportunities.

Merck Careers on Facebook – 494 fans as of October 18, 2009. Not too bad for one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies

In the current climate it does seem easier to attract talent, but Facebook can also be used for much more. In our community of practice, some have adopted it for connecting with citizens or customers in a more direct way than traditional means by asking for feedback, building loyalty, offering discounts and much more.

On an individual level, you may enjoy how Facebook can keep you up-to-date on your “friends” and former girlfriends. It is your decision how to make the best of Facebook, but why not also use your network to ask questions, get feedback on your work challenges and engage the “wisdom of the crowd”?

To me, Facebook is not about revealing confidential insights or being less selective about my small circle of friends. Facebook is an important network with a potential far beyond the intranet and perhaps even bigger than our website. Why not take it seriously?

As always, I would be very interested in hearing your examples or any best practices.

NB: Feel free to connect with my personal profile on Facebook or our relatively new company pages. We’re still beginning to take Facebook more seriously ourselves.