I was delighted to recently be asked to comment on a paper by Robert Rose over at Big Blue Moose as he dives into the waters of analysis and research with his first paper – Marketing From The Cloud – How Digital Marketers Are Using Software As A Service. It’s a subject I’ve been thinking about, as I continue to research the Engagement Tier and it’s constituent components.

I should point out that as Mr Rose has entered into the world of white-paper wordsmithery, it seems he has, technically speaking, set himself up as a competitor to my day job -therefore this post is by me, not the Gilbane me and these views are my own.. etc… etc..

So, if you read my tweets you’ll know I am already a fan of his writing, I have an embarrassing blog crush on  Robert’s Adaptive Marketer blog and this paper is true to form – it’s a crisp nine pages, sharply observed and based on research that shows that today’s digital marketer is relying on services outside the server room to engage with their audience – from the mainstream of content management or web analytics, to test and target and lead nurturing.

At the Gilbane Group we have (oh heck, should that be they have if I am blogging as me) observed the trend for our clients to reach for SaaS solutions for some time. Mary Laplante published a cracking paper at the beginning of 2009 that concluded that this was driven by two pressures; tight fiscal control over capital expenditure and a drive to quickly deploy innovative technical solutions.

Whilst clearly financial prudence is a continued pressure as we crawl out of recent recession, SaaS based solutions and other services available outside of the server room are an increasingly essential part of the marketer’s solution palette as they strive for agility to keep pace with the changes in the way we engage with consumers over the social web.

So, why is that? SaaS lowers the barrier to entry for digital marketers, often poorly served by long standing enterprise procurement and information technology implementation processes more suited to the provision of infrastructure, than providing for the subtle, fluid and dynamic needs of customer engagement today.

This low barrier to entry of adopting services provided outside the server room enables marketers to quickly add the pieces needed for web engagement, but critically the lower barriers to exit, removes risk and enables marketers to be innovative. They are able to take a ‘suck it and see’ attitude and experiment with new technologies and engagement channels, knowing that they’ll quickly get a measure of their success, with a near instant return on the value of the tools or alternatively to try something else.

That’s not to say that SaaS solutions should not be procured without due diligence, they are still a significant investment in internal commitment, if not capital costs. The advantage is that during that process of due diligence questions like hardware procurement, technology support, budget for upgrades etc. dissolve and the focus returns to functionality and business value. Procuring the right business solution – uncompromised by whether the techies like the colour of the database.

It’s not a silver bullet, lots of options and discussions I’d like to explore here – but as we build out our persuasive, relevant engagement tiers, hubs or web experiences – SaaS clearly has it’s place.

Image of a cloud courtesy of akakumo and reproduced under creative commons license.

Further reading:

• Marketing From The Cloud – How Digital Marketers Are Using Software As A Service.
• Communicating SaaS WCM Value – A Guide to Understanding the Business Case for Software-as-a-Service Solutions for Web Content Management (PDF)
• Into the Engagement Tier…

Last week was my first Gilbane conference as a Gilbane analyst, having in previous years only served variously as vendor booth bunny, guest speaker or panellist  and it was great to focus on meeting folks, listening to some great sessions and participating as a moderator and speaker.  Two and a half packed days, that stretched long into the evening  felt like a week and my new resolve to keep my blog posts short, could be tested – but I’m going to stick to a couple of key things… honest.

Firstly, almost without exception the sessions talked about strategy – not always saying the word ‘strategy’, but certainly of taking a higher level view of objectives – whether we were talking about Intranets, Social Media, Web Engagement or User Experience – a pause for thought before diving into the tools seems the order of the day.

On ‘diving in’ – this conversation really started during the Industry Analyst Debate – sparked off by this post by Andrew McAfee on whether to or not to pilot new tools. It seemed in the end to end in a draw (or possibly with a fight with McAfee – who wasn’t there) depending on the initiative. Clearly some initiatives and tools are easy, low impact and  naturally infectious and others need a bit of work.

But, this idea of ‘diving in’cropped up in later discussions, for example on user experience when we were discussing the web customer experience (an excellent session by Melissa Casburn @mcasburn and Randy Woods @randywoods) - where the take away was to try stuff, even using a bit of good old fashioned gut feel – but to measure and test the results.

Measure, yes, but be a slave to the data – not so much – a point that came out a few times – but was extremely well expressed by Robert Rose (@Robert_Rose) in the last session of the last day (and to learn more about his thinking, I’d suggest reading this blog post).

I completely agree with his assertion that data is only there for efficiency – who cares how many visitors if they are not relevant to your business? (Or as I say, your website is not a popularity contest – umm… unless it is).

Tools didn’t get ignored, I really enjoyed being free to chat to the vendors (I’ve talked about this before) and one WCM got mentioned in more than one session and seems to be making a name for itself as a ‘marketing aware’ product. The fact that this year the WCM track was called “Customers and Engagement” I think says a lot about an industry that has move from IT, to users and is now focusing on the audience.

This audience focus is increasingly the remit of us as content management professionals and it really shone through in a lot of the sessions – whether you are talking about an Intranet, content technologies, web experience or analytics.

Plenty of folks covered the conference with twitter and blog posts, but I would really recommend Sue Ann Reed’s blog – this girl can type as fast as I can talk (almost!) and was astonishingly live blogging the event and won her attendance through the generosity of Robert Rose.  Also CMSWire did a great job too – here are a collection of Gilbane SF posts.

So, my take aways:

- Take a breath, think about what you are doing before choosing/blaming/changing tools

- Try stuff, but measure the results

- Don’t get too hung up on the numbers

- Find ‘marketing aware’ tools

Does that sound about right to you?