On May 19, I will be giving a keynote address on the Web Content Management market landscape at the CMS2009 Conference in Nijmegen, Holland (http://www.cmscongres.nl/). In the presentation, I will discuss recent trends in client demands for WCM products as well as strategic directions that vendors will take over the next year. On May 20, I will also lead an interactive two-hour workshop on estimating the total cost of ownership of WCM products over a five-year period (see "Workshop Tony White" in the sidebar of http://www.cmscongres.nl/). And for you English speakers, don't worry about the language. Even though the CMS2009 website is in Dutch, the presentations will be in English.
April 2009 Archives
Every now and then the question of critical mass pops up when discussing the uses of social media in companies and organizations. "How many users should we have before social media is useful?" IMHO there is no absolute answer to the question, as it depends entirely on what you use social media for. A wiki can be very useful for a project team of 4 people to produce project documentation - especially if they happen to reside in different countries. A board of directors consisting of 6 people can save time by having agendas and and meeting minutes stored in a shared workspace and edited by all members.
Social media is inherently social, so instead of defining critical mass one could say that the minimum mass for social media is 2 people. If writing a blog saves you a couple of emails, that is already good. Now, I am not against email per se (although my inbox is a disaster, and I never remember which folder I stored that email containg a really good link). It is just that email was never intended to be either a teamwork or an information management tool, although it is often used as such.
Tomorrow I will be talking about business opportunities in multilingual social media here in Helsinki. It should be an interesting event - more about it tomorrow. As for now, I want to conclude this entry by referring to the fact that lack of time is often mentioned as one of the main obstacles to using social media. This can well be a generational issue. The younger generation uses IM and Facebook and is almost constantly online. I still seem to spend a lot of time in meetings, or writing and preparing materials, or reading and evaluating a lot of stuff. And despite of coming from the land of mobile phones I prefer calling people to sending SMS or Twitter messages. A good friend of mine has done a lot of research on learning, and has pointed out that learning requires long enough quiet time to absorb and understand new topics and ideas. In an environment with constant instant messaging, where do we find that quiet time for learning?
More on this later, but the title of the keynote by Microsoft's Tricia Bush, "The Web Platform of The Future", should suggest Microsoft's presence will be interesting.
Join us at: http://gilbanesf.com
I came across an interesting scene the other day on Larry King. Ashton Kutcher was basking in his success to be the first person to have 1,000,000 followers on Twitter, beating CNN by just minutes. My first thought was "Why Ashton Kutcher?" My second was "Why not?" As an aside, should we now call Ashton King Twit?
Anyway, it got me thinking about Twitter and how I communicate electronically. I have been a rabid user of text messaging for several years. It has become the primary mode of communication with my college age sons (except when we are in the room together), who have all but abandoned email, even IM. Phone based text messaging even allows my wife and I to constantly keep in touch while I travel without requiring both of us to be talking synchronously (another way of saying being tied up at the same time). Asynchronous communication in the form of emails, text messages, tweets, IM, etc. have freed people up from maintaining a real-time state with their conversation partners. Maybe asynchronous messaging has helped me stay married for so long. Also, messaging has become invaluable for work, allowing me to multitask and keep things moving with coworkers asynchronously.
Now I am using Twitter, ramping up, getting to know it better. One thing I really like about Twitter is that it is device and software independent unlike cell phone messaging which I must do from my phone. I can twitter from my computer, phone, or IPod Touch. If you haven't added your phone to your Twitter account, do it now (more info at http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/14014).
By the way, I looked up Twitter and Twit on a couple online dictionaries. The noun Twit means "an insignificant person" or "an excited state". The verb means to "taunt". The verb Twitter means "to talk lightly and rapidly" just like a small bird twitters. I don't think Mr. Kutcher is an insignificant person, or his accomplishment unworthy of attention, but he does tend to talk excitedly and to taunt ("You've been Punked!"). Why not Ashton Kutcher indeed! </>
Atlassian announced today the Atlassian Stimulus Package, a discounted offer on two of it's most popular products, Confluence and JIRA. This offer is intended to benefit three different parties: Atlassian, small workgroups using these products, and children in developing countries.
Here are the details of Atlassian's package, which features the number 5. For the next five days only, teams of up to five users may purchase an annual license to either Confluence or JIRA for $5. Atlassian says that these are fully functional versions of the software, not "light" versions. In addition, the license is renewable annually for the same amount and includes support from Atlassian.
Atlassian stands to gain from this promotion, of course. The company should gain many new subscribers to its products as a result of this offer. Their hope is that the small teams using Atlassian software will influence others within their organization, leading to additional purchases at full price.
Small workgroups of up to five people also benefit from this deal, because they can purchase proven collaboration tools at a huge discount and can continue to use the software at an extremely low annual cost.
The real winner from the Atlassian Stimulus Package is impoverished children around the world. Atlassian will donate 100% of the proceeds from this promotion to Room to Read, a charity that builds libraries for children in developing countries. Atlassian's goal is to donate $25,000 to Room to Read, as a result of selling $5,000 in discounted Confluence and JIRA licenses on each of the next five days. More kids will have books to read -- or learn to read in the first place -- as a result of Atlassian's and Room to Read's joint effort.
Hats off to Atlassian for crafting a marketing promotion that not only sells software, but also benefits less fortunate children around the world!
A quick way to get a feel for the topics in this year's conference program. Compliments of Wordle
... inside a widget window on your computer?
 |   Browse Inside this book |  |
I collected a few more CMS vendors who are on Twitter. I was having some technical difficulties with the table I started here, so I decided to put it in a spreadsheet, which you can download by clicking here. My thanks to folks who commented on the initial entry and added me on Twitter. If you know of more, feel free to comment here. Better yet, updated the spreadsheet and send it to me via email and I will keep it up to date and post it regularly.
UPDATE (4/14): Already added a few more, so download it again if you need to.
UPDATE (10/12): As Oliver notes below, we have moved the list of CMS vendors to Tweeple.org. It's a great way to look at the whole list we have developed, and choose to follow all or some of them with a single click. You can also suggest additional companies there.
The 10th annual Buying and Selling eContent conference took place under sunny skies in Scottsdale, AZ, this week. The event brings together buyers and sellers of business information that drives decision-making within enterprises and supports research within institutions. There’s no doubt that the economic climate is putting pressure on the industry. But although budget cuts are certainly shaping 2009 packaging tactics, the industry faces far bigger challenges that will still exist when the economic pendulum swings back the other way. We spent much of the conference wondering when – and if – participants will make the commitment to innovation, roll up their sleeves, and begin the difficult work of transforming their businesses.
Anthea Stratigos, co-founder and CEO of Outsell, gave a stirring yet practical opening keynote. She used Outsell’s highly-regarded and well-researched annual outlook to explain why the industry isn’t simply experiencing a blip. She strongly reinforced the fact that things will be different on the other side. This isn’t news to industry watchers and participants. The need for fundamental change in the way the information industry works has long been acknowledged. We experienced the same buyer/seller tension at the NFAIS conference in February, where the “them versus us” attitude was right out there in the conference theme: “Barbarians at the Gate? The Global Impact of Digital Natives and Emerging Technologies on the Future of Information Services." Gilbane’s own study on Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends and Best Practices (May 2008) looks at some of the important issues in those markets. The current worldwide economic situation simply brings the need for revamping the industry into even clearer focus. Sellers want the buyers to acknowledge the value of the content they provide and be fairly compensated for it. Buyers want the sellers to provide that value – and more – for a lot less money. And everyone wrings his or her hands over new entrants into the workforce who expect to have access to quality content for little or no money, with tools that are easy to use and freely available.
At the same time, there exists a wealth of technologies that can be brought to bear to address these problems and enable industry transformation. The BSeC program provided good exposure to some of these, including dynamic publishing capabilities, structured content creation, software-as-a-service platforms that enable low-cost experimentation, social computing tools, and cloud computing services. Although there was lots of twittering going on (see #bsec09), the gulf between the buyers and sellers in the audience and the technologies and services being discussed on the speaker platform felt quite wide at times. As analysts trying to fulfill our market education mission, we found ourselves wondering how to narrow that gap.
One answer lies in the willingness to experiment and then report on successes and failures. Marty Kahn from ProQuest described insights emerging from Project Information Literacy, the goals of which are to "understand how early adults conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and 'everyday use' and especially how they resolve issues of credibility, authority, relevance, and currency in the digital age." Kahn showed the current working version of Summons, a Google-style interface for library data. It's meant to aid students who perceive a higher value of information offered by a library, but are stymied as to how to get at those resources with quick, easy discovery. See a video on YouTube. John Girard from Clickability highlighted successful experiements by some of the company's customers in paid-content markets, enabled by Clickability's SaaS WCM solution.
Another answer lies in leveraging experience in other domains. While experiments get started and begin to show early results, the information industry can look outside itself to other content practice areas and seek experience from which it can learn. One such domain is technical documentation. One of the break-out topics for informal discussion was flexible content and how it can play a role in the transformation of the industry. It seemed like an early learning conversation for a number of the participants. The technologies and practices for creating, managing and publishing flexible content have been delivering value to technical documentation organizations throughout the world for some time. The information industry can leverage this deep expertise.
The tools to innovate are readily available. The know-how exists in other industries and content-centric business practices. The necessity to transform the industry is apparent. We’ll be watching to see who steps up to embrace the change and experiment with the business models that can drive a transformed industry.
A team of researchers from International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released a very interesting piece of academic research this week, which presents some findings from a study of "the largest organizational social network ever collected." The researchers collected and mined data related to c. 400,000 IBM employees. The researchers further focused on a subset of that dataset -- 2,600 consultants -- to draw insights on how connectedness impacts the productivity of employees who generate revenues by logging billable hours.
What makes the study so interesting -- in addition to the extraordinarily huge dataset used -- is that it is one of the first attempts I've seen to assign a currency-based value to social network connections. In this case, the social network is based in email; it lives in IBM's internal deployment of Lotus Notes.
The study associates incremental revenue earned by a consultant with both individual and project-level email activity. For example, the study finds that if an IBM consultant uses email to reach out to a manager that is not his direct supervisor, he produces, on average, an additional $588/month in revenue as compared to a consultant that only interfaces with her direct manager.
This is fascinating stuff, and my head is spinning with the possibilities of how this might be applied to inter-enterprise interactions conducted via emergent social software, rather than through well-institutionalized email. I just came across this study today and haven't had time to properly digest it yet, but will do so and comment further. In the meanwhile, I invite you to read it for yourself and leave observations and comments here.
using default
Bill http://twitter.com/billtrippe has set up tweet poll:
What eBook device are you using today? http://twtpoll.com/31yn5r
#twtpoll
Gilbane Boston 2011
Follow us on Twitter