Plan to attend our free one-hour webinar, “What Every Chief Marketing Officer Needs To Know About Content Strategy“, Wednesday, August 25, 2010 10:30am PDT. Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler and Mark Fidelman, Vice President of Sales, MindTouch will discuss content, content strategy, and how a lack of a cohesive content strategy can negatively impact corporate marketing efforts. The duo will also explore the findings of a recent survey of 300 technical communicators, and discuss how companies that understand the concept of “social proof” (and how it impacts buying decisions) are architecting content to maximize social proof impact.

PBworks has now launched its
PBworks Customer Relationship Edition, which extends CRM solutions such as
Salesforce.com by offering shared online workspaces for collaborating with
customers and prospects throughout the entire customer lifecycle.  I recently spoke with Chris Yeh, VP Marketing at
PBworks about this new offering that
they refer to as CRC or Customer Relationship Collaboration. This new term indicate
support for collaboration with customers rather the management of them through
CRM.

I already assumed
That we’re in the felony room
But I ain’t a judge, you don’t have to be nice to me
But please tell that
To your friend in the cowboy hat
You know he keeps on sayin’ ev’rythin’ twice to me
- SHE’S YOUR LOVER NOW

We’ve got some more BlueWashing going on. IBM announced today that they’re acquired analytics and marketing vendor Unica for $480 million. It seems like a lot of cash to me, but then again IBM have got plenty and what do I know. I do know it follows quite shortly after they bought pure analytics vendor CoreMetrics.

The “Farewell to Coremetrics and Web Analytics as you knew it” post from the Unica blog (two months ago) is quite interesting in retrospect:

Now, IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics follows suit as IBM folds Coremetrics into Websphere with the likely intention of making it part of the Websphere eCommerce technology stack.

With no major standalone contenders remaining in the market (WebTrends had signaled their interest in getting acquired) prospective web analytics buyers must evaluate the core competencies of the parent company in order to determine the best match for their current and future needs.

IBM does NOT appear to be making a play for a broader analytics offering

The wise seem to be saying that IBM isn’t actually going to bother marketing either Unica or CoreMetrics, but rather just add them into the already vast IBM Suite. Which effectively mean they’re being withdrawn from the Analytics battlefield. If that is the case, then the three players that will be slugging it out will be Adobe Omniture, Google Analytics and WebTrends. And although WebTrends are alledgely not trying to put themselves up for sale, I suspect they might be gobbled up quite soon. Maybe AAPL will feel left out of an Adobe vs Google slugfest, and buy WebTrends just to join the fracas. Maybe we should count Nedstat too, but I don’t see much of them. Or have they already been bought?

I’m the kind of guy that likes to believe the IBM <-> HAL thing (although Arthur denies it), and I’ve got this vision of poor IBM acquired vendors trying to wriggle free of the corporation. For no good reason, let’s end on this:

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

Adobe has gotten into the content management business, with its announcement earlier today of its intent to acquire Day software for $240 million. Day –with its WCM, DAM, and collaboration offerings — has had a good deal of buzz over the last year or so. Why? Mostly due to a renewed marketing push, demo-friendly products, and occasional uncertainty around competitors due to acquisitions (Interwoven, Vignette) . Day was one of the few remaining independent WCM vendors with enterprise credentials and was ripe for the picking, particularly given the strength of its WCM product. Adobe, of course, brings its document, creative authoring, and rich Internet application development tools to the table.

With the Day deal and last year’s Omniture acquisition, Adobe continues to assemble components of the online customer engagement ecosystem that we wrote about earlier this year. What’s interesting is which vendors are approaching this ecosystem — from the standpoint of ECM (IBM, Oracle/Stellent, Open Text/Vignette), marketing software (Alterian/MediaSurface), enterprise search (Autonomy/Interwoven), and now creativity software/interactive Web applications (Adobe).

So, what does this deal mean for content and collaboration pros?

Read more

At a time when consumers have increasingly high expectations for website content, site owners need to pull out all the stops when creating an engaging experience for their visitors. This may include social networking features, multimedia, interactive features like polls and contests, and of course, fresh content that changes frequently. And these features need to be easy to add to a site (and change often) without constant intervention from the IT department.

The trouble is that all-in-one solutions for online customer engagement are thin on the ground. For the most part, the various functions that a site owner needs to deploy for customer engagement – such as analytics, social networking, and content management – are found in separate solutions, creating software management headaches for site owners.

Why is customer engagement so critical for today’s site owners? In a still-recovering economic climate, websites can’t afford to lose customers who show up on the home page, only to lose interest and leave when they’re not drawn in by compelling content. Engaged customers will download information and submit their contact information, which fills the lead-generation pipeline. They’ll buy products, they’ll stay longer, and they’ll come back again and again.

You need to adapt your digital strategies to meet the high expectations of the consumers, and the requirements of your business, to make as many customer interactions succeed. Ideally, customer engagement systems contain the following functions if they are to achieve the goals of retaining customers and improving sales:

Tools to streamline marketing campaigns:  Marketing and sales departments shouldn’t need to enlist technical people every time they need to launch a new campaign, or shift gears on a current campaign. Nontechnical users should be able to easily create campaigns and monitor their progress.

read more

SharePoint is a complex product with a complex pricing model. In an attempt to try to clear things up, I talked to Microsoft’s Subsidiary Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint, Åren Ekelund about how much SharePoint 2010 will cost in a web content management scenario.

Products such as Windows, Office and SharePoint are typically bundled, the different products have different license models and prices depend on your organisation’s license agreement with Microsoft. Customers can always contact a Licensing Specialist to figure out how much they actually pay for their Microsoft solutions. For web managers however, it can still be a challenge to figure out how big a part WCM is of the total bill. This is also the case for the recently released SharePoint 2010.

As with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), many believe they have the licenses already as a part of their existing license agreement. If your organisation has a so-called Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft, Client Access Licenses (CALs) to SharePoint are indeed included. This means that internal users have access to SharePoint.

However, when it comes to web content management, you will have to buy additional licenses for the external facing servers. These vary widely in price depending on many factors, but here a few realistic indications:

• Standard Internet Server: The price for a SharePoint 2010 Standard Internet server lies around EUR 5.500 – 9.500.
• Enterprise Internet Server: The prise for a SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Internet server lies around EUR 20.000 – 32.000. The major extra features in the enterprise version include Access services, FAST search enhancements (note these also require a FAST server license), business intelligence, InfoPath Services & web analytics. You can see a detailed comparison of the editions here.

These prices are one-time expenses which you need to pay up-front for each server. If you choose to get an optional – but recommended by Microsoft – Software Assurance (SA), you will have to pay around 25% annually of the initial license price. Most significantly an SA will allow you to upgrade to new versions as they come out.

Note that many organisations will need several servers if they have significant web requirements (e.g. 2 front-end servers and a search server). UK SharePoint expert Ari Bakker has made some useful pricing examples for SharePoint 2010, which illustrate how much it will cost in both internal end external scenarios. As an example, Bakker writes that a large website on SharePoint with FAST search would cost EUR 82.000 (for 2 Enterprise servers and a FAST search server).

The best advice from Microsoft is to talk to your existing license partner in order to figure out how much your SharePoint projects will cost. Microsoft themselves will also be happy to answer any questions on pricing. As Åren said:

“SharePoint 2010 pricing can be hard to explain, but actual price quotes are easy to get via Microsoft or a licensing partner. We are always happy to help”

My advice is to contact Microsoft early on in any large project, before you decide on one system or license model over another. Many have burnt their fingers on SharePoint having thought that they didn’t need additional licenses. As a comparison, licenses for other .NET based systems such as Ektron, EPiServer and Sitecore start around EUR 30.000 – 40.000 for enterprise projects (see our CMS shortlist from 2009). So even if you have an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft including SharePoint CALs, SharePoint might not be the cheapest option, if your WCM requirements are significant.

Thanks to Søren Laurits Nielsen, Kristoffer Munch, Niels Højdahl (@hoejdahl), Shawn Shell (@shawnshell) & Åren Ekelund for constructive input.

In a departure from my normal waffle, I wanted to share a book I’ve just read “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, that I’ve come to very late – it was first published ten years ago and that anyone who’s hung around with marketers for as long as I have really ought to have read it by now!

I like this kind of book (I read a lot of Seth Godin - yeah, yeah, who doesn’t?) where authors bring to life their serious marketing theory and techniques through stories – but this one surprised me.

Here’s what the author says on his website, as a reading guide:

1. The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. At what point does it become obvious that something has reached a boiling point and is about to tip?

2. The possibility of sudden change is at the center of the idea of the Tipping Point — big changes occurring as a result of small events. If we agree that we are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time, is it reassuring to think that we can predict radical change by pinning their tipping points? Can we really ensure that the unexpected becomes the expected?

Now that’s what I expected to learn.

What I didn’t expect to learn was about the Tipping Point being applied to Revere’s ride at the dawn of American Independence, fighting violent crime in New York, TV for kids, research into why people smoke, the reasons why groups of 150 are good and the relationship to the evolution of our brains…. and, and, and…  a whole host of absolutely fascinating stories.

Clearly Gladwell knows his stuff, these stories brought the points  to life, making it a super read and elevating this book from a simple marketing book, to something I’d recommend to anyone.

Interested? Here are (affiliate) links to it on the Amazon US and Amazon UK websites – or read more on the authors website.

Like most source communities, Drupal has been struggling with their marketing, at least in terms of reaching beyond developers. During a recent exercise to come up with a new slogan, Dries Buytert, the creator of Drupal suggested:

come for the software, stay for the community

This seemed to resonate well with the energetic and developer-friendly Drupal community. To me though, it raised a few questions:

1. Is this really how you should select Drupal, or for that matter any other content management system?
2. Is the Drupal community really that good?

During the past years I’ve been arguing that you should not only look at the software when you select a new CMS. You should look features and also consider aspects such as documentation, roadmap, partners, support and yes, community. Real Story Group, the vendor-neutral analyst firm formerly known as CMS Watch, calls this “intangibles” and has increasingly emphasised this in their product evaluations over the years.

Moreover, I recently argued that developers and not software features, were the real key to success. This lead to a session at our Philadelphia conference earlier this month, where we asked whether the community is really more important than the CMS. In my view, the community is very important and something you should consider before you select any product.

So, does the new Drupal slogan indicate that the software is the best part of the project? Perhaps. But do look beyond the software before you select any CMS. As an example, Drupal has fewer experienced implementation partners than most comparable content management systems.

I would say that Drupal has a very dedicated and large community, mostly populated by developers. The community is especially strong within the media industry. The Drupal developers don’t just meet online; they meet regularly face-to-face, including at the bi-annual DrupalCon conferences, where an impressive 3,000+ registered for the San Francisco edition held this past April.

The interesting thing with Drupal, is that the term community has a few different meanings. Drupal is really engineered with community-driven content in mind, e.g. as known from many news sites, where readers can comment on articles and web managers can build their own little villages.

With community playing a significant role in all-things-Drupal, I’ll suggest a perhaps more fitting slogan:

come for the community, stay for the community

In other words, don’t select Drupal just because you have requirements for community-driven content and Drupal is a good fit: Select Drupal only if you have also talked to the community and have a plan for how to engage with it.

The Gilbane San Francisco conference hits this week, offering two days of innovation and inspiration for content management and marketing pros. Here at the CMS Myth we’re thrilled again to be a Gilbane media sponsor.

But we’re even more excited for our ISITE Design colleague Melissa Casburn, our director of user experience and a UX visionary, who’s been asked to co-lead an important session Thursday afternoon titled “How to Mold the Customer Experience.” Melissa has helped clients as diverse as Zipcar, HP and MTV with user experience transformations.

Her talk (Thursday, 2-3:20 p.m., Session E7) is a must-see for anyone who values delivering more personalized and relevant web experiences for online visitors – a goal more achievable than ever with the smart use of CMS and analytics.  Melissa’s co-presenter is Randy Woods, co-founder of agency non-linear creations.

Before Melissa jetted off to San Fran this morning, we caught her just long enough to conduct an insta-interview previewing her session:

What will people learn in the session – any actionable takeaways?  Definitely. We’re going to focus on six techniques for shaping and improving your UX by merging your knowledge of users with analytics and your CMS.

What are the six? We’ll talk about developing personas; mapping personas to business outcomes; defining visitor types; personas on the page; optimizing the user experience; and integrating with analytics. Optimizing the user experience and leveraging analytics data is a missed opportunity for a lot of companies. There’s a lot of room for wins in this area. We’ll explain why optimization is a process, not just a project.

What about the intersection of CMS and UX? I like to think of it this way: If users are the steering wheel, your CMS is the engine – it allows you to apply what you know about your users to the creation and delivery of a more personalized experience.

Check out Melissa Casburn’s profile on the Gilbane website.

Related posts:

1. Gilbane CMS Conference Invades Boston
2. CMS World Evolves at Gilbane San Francisco
3. Gilbane SF: Let the Games Begin

 The New York Times wrote that Business
Schools Respond to Demand for Use of Social Media.  The story began with some major mistakes that large firms
have made in social media marketing. 
Now an increasing number of firms are asking for social media expertise
in their candidates. These firms tend to feel that personal experience with
social media is not enough, that business related experience is necessary. I
would certainly agree here.

The NYT goes on to write, “To
meet this demand for education in social media strategy, several top business
schools are incorporating courses on social networks into their M.B.A.
curriculums. These include Harvard Business School; London Business School;
Insead, the international business school based in Fontainebleau, France; and
the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, known as H.E.C., in Paris.”  These courses have proven to be very
popular.

The Tines writes that, “because of the
relative newness of social media and their rapid evolution, there is no
assigned textbook for the course. Students are expected to follow
industry-specific blogs like Mashable and Groundswell to keep up with
developments.’ I wonder how many assign this blog?

The professors create content by studying
what is happening and bringing in guest speakers.  This might create some awareness but I am not sure how many
real skills are conveyed. When I worked for the City of New York in helping
local community groups get more federal funding we would occasionally have to
hire new people. If they had a Masters in Community Organization we generally
subtracted two years experience from their credits. This was done as we felt
they would need two years to unlearn what they were taught in school by
experiencing the real world.

Some of the social media courses require
actual work with real clients on their social media marketing. This is a good
move and may avoid the need to do what we did in New York.  Professors do admit that business is
driving innovation here and that schools are trying to catch up. I applaud the
humility.  There is hope.  But I would still take someone with two
years real experience in business social media before someone with the school
work for now.