Last week I was proud to be voted onto the board at CM Pros, to join a pretty new board under the presidency of Scott Liewehr to take this respected community of practice organisation forward. It’s something we’ve been talking about for six months or so and  one look at the industry heavy weights that have been there before gives me an idea of the responsibility ahead for all of us and these are exciting and challenging times for both membership organisations and the discipline of content management.

You may know CM Pros as the LinkedIn group that has almost 13,000 members and a vibrant discussion board – that really gives you an idea of the breadth of this industry and the folks that describe themselves as Content Management Professionals – although how many wearing the LinkedIn badge are actually members?

I make that last point, not to be churlish but it gives you an idea of the challenges ahead for CMPros – how do you make a membership organisation relevant, post this social media revolution?

I am a member of various loosely structured and sometimes transient tribes and communities, powered by social media and a common interest or need to get something done. How do we engage this crowd, beyond a badge on our LinkedIn profiles – to  marshal this incredible resource and improve our industry?

Yes, improve our industry.

Pull up a bar stool between two CMS practitioners and you are moments away from a possibly heated discussion on the definition of CMS, what software tool is and what isn’t a CMS, the business value of a CMS and possibly the relevance of the latest standards.

Depending on who’s history you are reading – the web focused CMS industry has only it’s 15th birthday this year, if we gauge it by product shipped (Vignette Story Server / Interwoven)  then it’s probably only 12 or 13. I say web focused, as of course comparative granddaddy Documentum had been managing documents since 1990 (but I don’t think we called it CMS back then – did we?).

Anyway, I’ll have to come back to this in future posts – who owns the term CMS? Could get myself into trouble here, leave that for another day…

Back to CMPros – you see we have a young vibrant industry working through puberty – but it’s also an enterprise staple, a necessity – intrinsically linked to the success of just about any decent sized business, charity or government organisation.

Fewer of us make stuff anymore, we are knowledge workers or brokers – content is our currency.  Yet, despite that “enterpriseness” and some vendor consolidation – we haven’t reached the definition and commoditization of say ERP systems.

All of this and loads and loads of other discussion points I could throw up means that now is an exciting and important time for a community of practice organisation. It’s a rallying call, the voice of the practitioner must be heard alongside the well funded, loud voices of the vendors and analysts – and CMPros is a a platform to facilitate this.

Not just on how we shape this industry, the vision for tomorrow, or what we call the damn thing – but to help educate and guide the folks that look to CMS Professionals for help.

A former CMPros director Lisa Welchman wrote a great call to action on this: And Still We Rise: The Professionalization of the Web Vocation and I recommend you give it a read.

Whilst, unlike Lisa,  I can’t earnestly call upon such stirring analogies as US civil rights, I hope this post gives you an idea of what I think CM Pros is for, the challenges we see ahead of us and I hope motivate you to join and participate.

No related posts.

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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