I continue to hear great things about EPiServer from Blend Interactive’s Dean Barker and other folks in the CMS industry. Their accolades for this CMS is one of the reasons I decided to begin focusing on EPiServer here at the site.

Honestly, I don’t know enough about EPiServer which is why some of the EPiServer fanboys have promised getting together with me sometime to talk about this platform.  Until my education is complete, I’m going to resort to cheap writing by using press releases and blogs to get some of my information out to you about EPiServer. For instance, lets see if this product announcement by EPiServer’s marketing gets you interested to hear more about their products:

EPiServer announces the release of EPiServer Relate+2 , a product package for EPiServer CMS 6, which containsEPiServer Community 4 and EPiServer Mail 5. It also includes a sample website which shows how to combine these three products to build a powerful online community. In today’s conversation economy the ability to get involved in websites where users are free to create, organize and share know-how and experiences in the form of words, pictures and videos is becoming more prevalent and Relate+ makes it a seamless experience for community members, community owners and moderators.

Included is support for Open ID where users can use an existing login ID to sign into multiple websites. The same rich text editor found in EPiServer CMS, TinyMCE, is now used for writing blog posts and the MetaWeblog API is also supported, so users can use their favorite blog applications, such as iBlogger for the iPhone or Live Writer for Windows, when creating or editing blog posts. In combination with blog syndication and ping/ pingbacks, Relate+ is a full-fledged blog engine.

Additional information about EPiServer Relate can be found at EPiServer.com.

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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.

Earlier this week I attended Bowen Craggs & Co’s third Web Effectiveness Conference in Paris. 2 intense days focusing on current achievements, challenges, headaches and predictions of the hard working individuals managing some of the largest and most complex Web estates in the world. Two of the dominant topics were:

• The changing role of the corporate website
• The impact of social media in the enterprise and how the attitude is maturing

Stephane Aknin, head of group e-communications at AXA, opened with a quote by Simon Mainwaring, which seemed to sum up a lot of what was discussed over the 2 days:

The online presence of a brand will increasingly become the sum of its social exchanges across the web and not the website that many currently call home.

The changing role of the corporate website and the impact of social media on the web more widely are in many ways linked. It is naturally not a simplistic case of social media taking over the roles and functions of the website; rather, corporations are gradually realizing that the way they have to act, comply and behave online is changing fundamentally because of social media. –At least the web professionals inside the organisations are! Jerome Colombe, head of Web governance at Alcatel-Lucent concluded that The 2.0 (r)evolution has “cracked the Web architecture lines we knew”. The godfather of Web analytics, Jim Sterne, who talked about how to actually measure the impact of social media, bluntly claimed that the impression of your company no longer derives from the corporate website.

After years of social media hype with rushed-through policy making and childish excitement in equal measures, it was great to listen to a discussion that finally appears to be maturing. Sensible questions were being asked and people were openly sharing their hard-learnt lessons. Some of the key points I scribbled down throughout the many presentations that brought up social media related issues were:

• Listen listen listen! It takes time to follow the many conversations that go on, but it is vitally important to dedicate that time.
• Respond to criticism if appropriate – and don’t mull it over for days: do it quickly.
• Have social media guidelines, even if you don’t intend to actively participate on social media platforms; your employees need them.
• Do not attempt to remove critical; even defamatory comments and do not try to shut down “negativity groups / spaces” – you will immediately be branded a “controller” and it will always backfire, as more than one organisation told us. When you find yourself in a social media storm, “facts simply don’t matter”.
• Befriend someone influential in your legal department and get them to take a real interest in social media; one organisation told how they have made one of their senior lawyers responsible for social media; all initiatives and considered scenarios are run past this lawyer. Every organisation should have a social media lawyer who can take a pro- rather than a re-active approach.
• Don’t befriend customers, clients or stakeholders anywhere in the social media space; Maintain a professional distance whenever you represent your organisation.
• Social media monitoring: think of it more as an alert mechanism than an achievement indicator!

I have deliberately not credited all the speakers for their good advice as many of them were talking out of very recent painful and still highly sensitive experiences, but thank you to all contributors nevertheless – and thanks to Bowen Craggs for facilitating and moderating all this valuable no-nonsense knowledge sharing!

For more on the impact of social media on the enterprise and the deafening hype around it, check out Peter Kim’s talk on the subject given at the recent J. Boye conference in Philadelphia.

What is happening in your organisation? Control or conversation?

Computerworld: “The main purpose of implementing a social networking policy is to identify proper usage and behavior for social networking applications. Remember, the overall goal is to protect the rights and privacy of all employees and the integrity and reputation of the company.”

Complete Story

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?

Social media has evolved from distracting fun to hype to significant mainstream adoption over the last 18 months or so. Will the intranet remain unaffected by this? Or are there any emerging signs from intranets in social businesses that could provide some clues to what the future is likely to bring?

Consumer organisations such as BMW, BT, Coca Cola, Red Bull, Virgin and WWF have invited their customers to participate in conversations and taken their usage of social media tools, such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and wikis very far. They have, in effect, become what analysts now call “successful social businesses”.

Social media has undeniably become a dominant phenomenon everywhere; yet most intranet experts continue to discount it as simply a collection of interesting features and emerging technologies with little relevance. Social media is indeed much more. Notably, some progressive social businesses are going out of their way to facilitate culture change through increased employee participation using mature, “enterprise-friendly” technologies. Notable examples of this includes the world’s largest pump manufacturer Grundfos, pharma giant Novo Nordisk and financial network operators SWIFT, who you can meet on 2 June in Copenhagen for our social business event.

This is causing disruptive intranet changes, which are happening in government administration, large enterprise as well as NGO’s. It would appear that social media is destined to have a huge impact on the work of intranet professionals. Here are just a few signs from existing “social businesses” indicating how your intranet will be affected:

• Collaboration has been an integrated part of the intranet for many organisations for years. With collaboration spaces increasingly being opened to external partners, collaboration might be becoming too important to be left with an intranet manager alone. Collaboration continues to be pushed, mainly through the demands of an increasingly dispersed workforce. Moreover, it is one of the few actual strengths of Microsoft SharePoint.
• Content: once considered a centrally controlled and approved information asset. The amount of online content is exploding in social businesses. When the majority of employees embark on creating and commenting on content it easily causes chaos and places new requirements on governance and monitoring.
• Intranet as a term has disappeared altogether in some organisations. Many successful social businesses effectively don’t even have a corporate intranet. In a social business this development goes far beyond a simple name change: It makes little sense to have a dedicated intranet team, when what you have is an increasingly scattered collection of social media that nobody refers to as the “intranet”. Some social businesses still have their “legacy” intranet around, but this is not something that new employees are told to worry about.
• IT departments remain responsible for the intranet in many organisations, but rarely so in social businesses. Social businesses tend to have tiny IT departments that are busy enough keeping the IT infrastructure (e.g. remaining servers, desktop apps) running. While once infamous for their obsession with security and lack of communication skills, in social businesses  the IT departments are softening their firm grip to allow experiments such as cloud computing (e.g. Google Apps) for business critical (traditional intranet) tasks.
• Management have, with few notable exceptions, been very hard to persuade about the importance of intranets. They take a different position in a social business. Their expectations are constantly increasing and they see internal communications and employee applications as a part of a much bigger picture. The intranet silo has gone and been replaced by a networked set of tools.
• Mobile has been hyped up for many years, but now it is happening at an extremely fast rate. When employees can put the office in their pockets, e.g. e-mail and Office, they also expect their killer applications to work when they are on the move. Facebook is very popular, in particular on mobiles, in social businesses.
• Technology, in terms of intranets has so far been plagued by inflexible content management systems or enterprise portals. With a byzantine user experience and long implementation times (think Interwoven, Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle Portal or SAP), social businesses have taken alternative approaches. Blogs and wikis may have lost some of their sexiness, but are being deployed massively, also beyond technology-happy IT users. Social businesses tend to find the right tool for the job and are not afraid to put more than one tool in place.

Can we all agree that big change is ahead for intranets? If so, please share your thoughts on how intranet professionals can tackle this challenge.

“Engaging with the brand” “What the brand seeks to accomplish” “The voice of the brand” “What the brand desires” “Creating a personal relationship with the brand”

This is an utter waste of the potential of what social media can accomplish. Connect people with people. Help them find their voice online. I have no problem using these platforms for commercial purposes and market education, but the ongoing anthropomorphication of the word Brand has got to end.

WESTBOROUGH, Mass.– Virtusa Corporation (NASDAQ: VRTU), a global IT services company that offers a broad spectrum of business consulting and outsourcing services, today introduced its new enterprise content management (ECM) offering, the Media Convergence Solution Accelerator.  Modeled after Virtusa’s success implementing interactive Web platforms for the world’s leading media brands, the new service combines best practices consulting with proven technology components to ensure a consistent, branded user experience that optimizes revenue generation opportunities.

As content channels proliferate, consumers become increasingly migratory yet expect a unified and interactive engagement experience with companies.  Media organizations often struggle to align their brand across channels, both from a content perspective and at the technical level.  Misalignment in a converged world hurts the customer experience, and can diminish advertising revenue and increase support costs. 

“As difficult as it is to manage content and technologies across disparate customer portals, it’s an opportunity for IT to directly impact the customer experience, branding and revenue generation – and these are precisely the kind of business results that Virtusa focuses on,” said Behzad Ilchi, Vice President for Virtusa’s Media and Entertainment segment. “Our Media Convergence Solution Accelerator is a truly proven approach that packages the best practices we’ve developed with some of the biggest media companies and gives customers more than 20 practical tools to replicate that success.” 

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Jon Marks (@mcboof) has set a challenge to vendors on his blog – to prioritize various elements of what makes a great CMS product, to choose between Editors, Performance, Features, Developers and producing Websites. I know, I’m not a vendor any more - but I started writing a comment and once it got longer than his original post, I thought hang on…

Here’s the challenge from Jon’s post:

So, here is the deal. I challenge any CMS vendor to rate these in order of priority:

• Editors – A user interface that is a editor or publisher’s wet dream
• Performance – The fastest, most stable and scalable CMS in the world
• Features – The richest set of features any CMS could dream of offering
• Developers – An open, standard, extensible product that makes developers salivate
• Website – A product that can give you a kick-ass website, really really quickly

I recommend that you can read the rest of his post and the comments, as he invites CMS vendors to both naval gaze and offer up which one of these children is their favourite.

My take – I guess it goes without saying that in every R&D project office, of every vendor and for every open source developer – this argument is or should be happening – it was certainly my experience – but the frustration is that with a finite developer resource you end up with a compromise.

Compromise is a bad word and here and on Jon’s blog – we have the luxury of donning our smoking jackets, filling our pipes and pontificating on what’s right and proper and not have to deal with the grubby commercial realities. The truth of course is that a vendor has to prioritize based on return on that R&D investment.

But, let’s not let that stop us!

So, looking at the comments on Jon’s post as I write this – two experienced CMS practitioners, Philipe Parker and Zahoor Hussain both sat firmly on the fence, with a view that is was down to the project.

I think Philippe and Zahoor are right – client engagements vary and of course some clients need more of one thing than another, but I think what Jon is driving at is to look at this issue through a vendors eyes of building a single product.

But – is this a single product for a single market?

If my CMS is aimed squarely at the Mom and Pop store market, it would be wasted R&D effort to focus on performance or features, in fact if I focused my effort on the ‘kick-ass website’ creator requirement – I may not even need to offer much up to developers.

This hints at an issue in our market – bit like the WordPress debate… broad church.. big undefined market.. etc etc.. It’s also worth noting that Jon refers to a website, so you hear a collective sigh as the CMS crowd mutter – ‘a CMS is not just WCM’…  (a respectful nod to you folks, but I digress..).

Anyway, lets try and play the game – prioritize..

I agree with Adrian Mateljan, who in his comment defines performance to include stability and reliability.

I don’t think that every CMS should be efficient enough to run every News International website on a rusty old 486 under Rupert Murdoch’s desk – but having something that is there when the visitor or content author have the good grace to turn up has to be #1.

The problem with performance, for a CMS buyer is it is such a complex intangible, with a variety of factors at play – and for vendors, once you’ve got the basics right, squeezing out the extra horsepower is a difficult internal investment sell vs the sexy stuff that helps the product in a demo.

Also today, ‘throwing tin at it’ seems to be an economically viable scalability option for some – I was talking to someone involved in a serious government website project – using a large rollout of a LAMP stack open source product – who was scaling horizontally quickly and cheaply, cloning extra machines and replicating databases. And it was really, really working for them.

So, yes having a reliable platform is priority #1. After that, it gets hazy for me.

Starting with Developers – would seem to be a stuck on, no brainer #2 – right?

A WCM project is no longer ‘crank the handle and spit out a brochure’ – it’s build me a web engagement or experience platform, it’s integrate to social media, it’s show people my back office, it’s mobile apps, it’s marketing platforms, analytics, lead generation etc etc..

The problem for the buyer is that it’s a blessing and a curse, a good developer platform offers great opportunity, but can mask some of the missing ‘out of the box’ must haves for editors as well as product features.

The good news is if a pretty boy pre-sales hacker can build something that fits your scenario overnight, imagine what your crew can do with it in production? The bad news is the hangover of supporting and maintaining the bespoke work.

It is of course a trade off – in a previous life I saw a straightforward, but large government project turn to a behemoth as a systems integrator cut out the ‘out of the box’ vendor functionality (to the point that the software was a tiny bit of the solution) for something beautifully bespoke – but in the process turned themselves into a software developer with all of that maintenance and support responsibility shared by just one client. Bad news for the client as the budget ballooned.

I’ve also seen a client case study presented at an industry event, where the vendor and implementation partner (and presumably the client) were buoyant about a project that was based clearly on a developer platform CMS, the slides spoke of the thousands of lines of code and man years it took to implement – but, it’s a successful project.
There’s a balance here somewhere, can you build and support what you need more efficiently than taking the out of the box, possibly compromised feature?

Yes ‘possibly compromised’ – it’s hell for vendors to build broad adoption into a feature (rather than offering an API and saying get on with it) it means making decisions for the hypothetical customer. Those decisions are hard, the edge cases you need to build to, the current customers you need to satisfy, the future proofing, the support.. etc. This sometimes means that it might not fit your requirement exactly.

Take the example of Jon’s requirement “kick ass websites, really, really quickly”:

Vendor A has the sexiest website cookie cutter you have ever seen, hell even YOUR marketers could work it (but the geeks suspect some back end ugliness there somewhere) . Vendor B has the API that would allow you to roll-out your websites, your way (eventually). Which do you choose? Do you, take the big red D pill or is it a cocktail of E, F and W?

I also think there is a great discussion point here about the crew you have on-board, a debate Jon has championed himself. You want to be innovative and engaging – it’s not going to just come out of the vendors box, a well marshalled set of great, creative developers could be your projects rock stars – differentiating your business.

With my background, I have to talk about the E – Editors. As I’ve written previously, nothing is going to starve to death your beautiful website like a lack of content. Or shackle your progress to engagement nirvana if people are still emailing you press releases to post. But, without P or possibly D – where are you going to post to?

As I said at the outset, it is a compromise – I’d suggest that vendors really want to please everyone – but they have a certain skill set, inspiration, experience, set of customers or whetever that gives them strengths and weaknesses – and buyers need to match those with their requirements.

It would be nice if we could marshal this unruly market into buyer shaped niches, where short lists pick themselves. But, in the meantime in a procurement (boring old advice I know) it’s important that buyers get advice, look at reference sites, carry out POC’s, talk to an implementation partner that understand and have done this kind of thing  before.

Your choice, your compromise? What do you think?

As a fresh new broom sweeps through my professional life as I transition from years of vendor representation to that of an analyst – I’ve changed the title of my blog  (and the URL).

I’ll obviously write more on my move – but more importantly – changing the name of my blog?

Why ‘Hovering Over The Back Button’?

So, I’ve just embarked on possibly the most exciting change in my career, since my first job in the commercial world from being a public servant fifteen years ago – and my first post is to explain a change in the name of my blog!

Well, that’s how it is in the post Social Media revolution – I feel that before I can do anything I needed to update the various breadcrumbs of me around the interwebs (LinkedIn, Twitter etc) and this blog before I can move on, clear my throat, so to speak.

So, why drop”Persuasive Content” after building it for close to three years? Well for a couple of reasons, firstly if I look at what I’ve been writing about maybe ‘persuasive’ content is not what comes to mind!

For starters I’ve been uneasy that calling a blog persuasive infers that I assume my content is persuasive, is written in a persuasive way and that I assume you will be persuaded. That’s not really my style, the name really came from wanting to write about Persuasive Content the discipline as defined by Forrester.

I’ve been a fan of the Forrester notion of Persuasive Content and the software and systems architecture that organisations should be putting together to drive that – but I don’t think I have rigidly stuck to that thinking in my writing.

Whilst everything I have written about can be loosely associated with the Forrester ideas, I think I have moved away slightly. It was pointed out to me that ‘persuasion’ is a little close to coercion for some folks, that really ‘engagement’ – the thing I do write and talk about a lot – is a err.. gentler, subtler thing.

Why ‘Hovering Over The Back Button?’ Well this comes from various presentations and articles I have written recently – I always use this phrase.

I’ve always thought that if you are going to talk or write write about web engagement, or I guess anything really, you need to present the audience with the opportunity you will offer them or the value of listening.

For web engagement, especially when you talk to marketers, it is of consent. A rare commodity that indicates the point at which your audience is willing to listen, be educated, communicated, persuaded or even sold to.

A website delivers that. This visitor sought you out, maybe sifted through a billion google search results and as they arrive they are engaged or at the least ready to listen.

The challenge with a website, is that this opportunity to engage this visitor is extremely brief, there is the simplest barrier for them to leave – as they hover over the back button.

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