October 2009 Archives

Updated November 24

While preparing for today's webcast on digital marketing and lessons learned from the publishing indusry, we discovered the August 2009 CMO survey conducted by professor Christine Moorman at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, with support from the American Marketing Association. Moorman's results include insights into expectations about the role of social media in digital marketing.

The 511 top marketing executives of US companies interviewed in late July expect to increase spending on social media efforts by more than 300% over the next five years, moving budget allocations from 3.5% to 13.7%.

Top investments are pegged for social networking (65%), video and photosharing (52%), and blogging (50%).

The five most frequently projected uses for social media applications are brand building, customer acquisition, new product introductions, customer retention, and market research.

Read the CMO survey press release for details on the research and links to full results. Register for today's webinar on digital marketing and lessons learned from publishers. 

Update: The webinar recording is available here.

Having gotten my feet [soaking] wet with briefings from Web Content Management vendors, I've come to a realization: the Customer-Vendor feedback loop is one of the strongest keys to long-term success for all parties. A blinding flash of the obvious? I don't think so.  Let me explain...

I have seen, and written, a lot of RFPs seeking "the perfect" WCM product. The natural tendency in these "quests for the holy grail" is for the tool-seeker to list as many WCM features as one might possibly use [...maybe...at some point in the future... if only...] and for the vendors to respond, in turn, by listing all of their capabilities and feature sets. As one might imagine, this scenario typically results in responses which provide the decision-maker minimal product differentiation information.  Why? Because like it or not, most WCM products offer similar feature sets, and if they don't offer a particular feature today, one can be sure it's "on the roadmap".  [I'll spend more time in a future post describing how one can craft an RFP to elicit valuable responses which actually help one decide which product(s) align most closely with needs of the author.] But today's capabilities are tomorrow's old news, so how can one be sure they're selecting a vendor whose product will meet tomorrow's needs? Take a look at the vendor's track record and approach to collaborating with customers to expand and hone its offering.

As I delve into some of the top-rated [by users] WCM vendors, I see a consistent "customer-is-key" theme being played out in the form of both formal and informal feedback channels.  These "conversations" with customers can be either synchronous or asynchronous, direct or indirect, two-way or multi-way...or all of the above.  The point is that successful vendors [pro]actively engage their customers, and then respond in a meaningful manner to enhance their offering in a way that ensures that the product's "roadmap" is *always* aligned with the needs of both current and future customers.

In a recent briefing with a vendor [who I feel has a great approach to managing this feedback loop], the last slide in their presentation listed four of their key differentiators...but all of them were technology-related and failed to mention my aforementioned favorite. Why not?  Is it because they aren't proud of this factor? Absolutely not...they are very proud of it and have worked hard to create such a valuable dialog with their customers. My sense is they left it out because this subject is not yet a key criteria in the minds of decision-makers.  

We are failing to ask the right questions.  Why wouldn't customer service and engagement be the key in such a huge purchase decision? It should.  Innovation is essential, but I believe it is critical that we, the customers, ensure we have a place at the table to refine the direction of such innovation. After all, innovation without purpose or utility is useless.

 

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Talk about a trip down memory lane...  Another excellent blog post yesterday by my friend and fellow Babson College alum, Sameer Patel, snapped me back a few years and gave me that spine tingling sense of deja vu.

Sameer wrote about how the market for Enterprise 2.0 software may evolve much the same way the enterprise portal software market did nearly a decade ago. I remember the consolidation of the portal market very well, having actively shaped and tracked it daily as an analyst and consultant. I would be thrilled if the E2.0 software market followed a similar, but somewhat different direction that the portal market took. Allow me to explain.

When the portal market consolidated in 2002-2003, some cash-starved vendors simply went out of business. However, many others were acquired for their technology, which was then integrated into other enterprise software offerings. Portal code became the UI layer of many enterprise software applications and was also used as a data and information aggregation and personalization method in those applications.

I believe that much of the functionality we see in Enterprise 2.0 software today will eventually be integrated into other enterprise applications. In fact, I would not be surprised to see that beginning to happen in 2010, as the effects of the recession continue to gnaw at the business climate, making it more difficult for many vendors of stand-alone E2.0 software tools and applications to survive, much less grow.

I hope that the difference between the historical integration of portal technology and the coming integration of E2.0 functionality is one of method. Portal functionality was embedded directly into the code of existing enterprise applications. Enterprise 2.0 functionality should be integrated into other applications as services. Service-based functionality offers the advantage of writing once and using many times.  For example, creating service-based enterprise micro-messaging functionality (e.g. Yammer, Socialcast, Socialtext Signals, etc.) would allow it to be integrated into multiple, existing enterprise applications, rather than being confined to an Enterprise 2.0 software application or suite.

The primary goals of writing and deploying social software functionality as services are: 1) to allow enterprise software users to interact with one another without leaving the context in which they are already working, and 2) to preserve the organization's investment in existing enterprise applications. The first is important from a user productivity and satisfaction standpoint, the second because of its financial benefit.

When the Enterprise 2.0 software market does consolidate, the remaining vendors will be there because they were able to create and sell:

• a platform that could be extended by developers creating custom solutions for large organizations,
• a suite that provided a robust, fixed set of functionality that met the common needs of many customers, or
• a single piece or multiple types of service-based functionality that could be integrated into either other enterprise application vendors' offerings or deploying organizations' existing applications and new mashups

What do you think? Will history repeat itself or will the list of Enterprise 2.0 software vendors that survived the impending, inevitable market consolidation consist primarily of those that embraced the service-based functionality model?

We hope to see many of you at our opening keynote panel at Gilbane Boston (December 2, 8:30 - 10:00am at the Westin Copley), but whether you are there physically or not, you can participate by asking questions in advance. K1. Opening Keynote Panel – A Conversation About Content, Collaboration & Customers includes:

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, CEO Gilbane Group
Panelists:
Susan Parker, Director, Mass.gov, Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Michael Edson, Director, Web and New Media Strategy, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution
Luuk de Jager, Senior Director, B2C Organizational Empowerment, Central Marketing Office Online, Philips Consumer Lifestyle

See the complete description of the panel at: http://gilbaneboston.com/conference_program.html#K1

Four ways to ask questions:

1. email questions to questions@gilbaneboston.com - be sure to identify which session the question is for
2. include questions as a comment on this blog post
3. Tweet your questions using the conference and session hash tags (see below)
4. DM your question to http://twitter.com/gilbaneboston

A note on hash tags:

#gilbaneboston is the event hash tag. For individual sessions we'll use the session codes listed with the session descriptions, for example #k1 for K1. Opening Keynote Panel – A Conversation About Content, Collaboration & Customers. For sessions with multiple codes, simply use the first, so for W9/E13/I7. Open Source CMS Powwow use #w9. For Pre-conference workshops use the workshop codes. For example for worksop A: How to Select a Web Content Management System use #a.

Ask away!

Box.net announced today that it has integrated its cloud-based document storage and sharing solution with Salesforce.com. Current Box.net customers that want to integrate with Salesforce CRM can contact Box.net directly to activate the service. Salesforce.com customers may now download Box.net from the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Box.net services will now be available in the Lead, Account, Contact, and Opportunity tabs of Salesforce CRM. In addition, the Box.net native interface and full range of services will be accessible via a dedicted tab on the Salesforce CRM interface. Users can upload new files to Box.net, edit existing files, digitally sign electronic documents, and e-mail or e-fax files. Large enterprise users will be given unlimited Box.net storage. The Box.net video embedded below briefly demonstrates the new Salesforce CRM integration.

 

 

While Box.net started as a consumer focused business, today's announcement marks the first tangible manifestation of its emerging enterprise strategy. Box.net intends to be a cloud-based  document repository that can be accessed through a broad range of enterprise applications.

The content-as-a-service model envisioned by Box.net will gain traction in the coming months. I believe that a centralized content repository, located on-premise or in the cloud, is a key piece of any enterprise's infrastructure. Moreover, content services -- functionality that enables users to create, store, edit, and share content -- should be accessible from any enterprise application, including composite applications such as portals or mashups created for specific roles (e.g. sales and/or marketing employees, channel partners, customers). Users should not be required to interact with content only through dedicated tools such as office productivity suites and Content Management Systems (CMS).

Other content authoring and CMS software vendors are beginning to consider, understand, and (in some cases) embrace this deployment model. Box.net is one of the first proprietary software vendors to instantiate it. Adoption statistics of their new Salesforce CRM integration should eventually provide a good reading as to whether or not enterprise customers are also ready to embrace the content-as-a-service model.

Microsoft has a lot to lose if they are unable to coax customers to continue to use and invest in Office.  Google is trying to woo people away by providing a complete online experience with Google Docs, Email, and Wave.  Microsoft is taking a different tact.  They are easing Office users into a Web 2.0-like experience by creating a hybrid environment, in which people can continue to use the rich Office tools they know and love, and mix this with a browser experience.  I use the term Web 2.0 here to mean that users can contribute important content to the site. 

SharePoint leverages Office to allow users to create, modify, and display "deep[1]" content, while leveraging the browser to navigate, view, discover, and modify "shallow[1]" content.  SharePoint is not limited to this narrow hybrid feature set, but in this post I  examine and illustrate how Microsoft is focusing its attention on the Office users.  The feature set that I concentrate on in this post is referred to as the "Collaboration" portion of SharePoint.  This is depicted in Microsoft's canonical six segmented wheel shown in Figure 1.  This is the most mature part of SharePoint and works quite well, as long as the client machine requirements outlined below are met.

 

 Figure 1: The canonical SharePoint Marketing Tool - Today's post focuses on the Collaboration Segment

Preliminaries:   Client Machine Requirements

SharePoint out-of-the-box works well if all client machines adhere to the following constraints:

1. The client machines must be running Windows OS (XP, Vista, or WIndows 7)
   NOTE: The experience for users who are using MAC OS, Linux, iPhones, and Google phones is poor. [2]
2. The only truly supported browser is Internet Explorer (7 and 8.) [2]
   NOTE: Firefox, Safari, and Opera can be used, but the experience is poor.
3. The client machines need to have Office installed, and  as implied by bullet 1 above, the MAC version of Office doesn't work well with SharePoint 2007.
4. All the clients should have the same version of Office.  Office 2007 is optimal, but Office 2003 can be used.  A mixed version of Office can cause issues.
5. A number of tweaks need to be made to the security settings of the browser so that the client machine works seamlessly with SharePoint. 

I refer to this as a "Microsoft Friendly Client Environment."

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[1] The terms "deep" and "shallow" are my creation, and not a standard.  By "deep" content I am referring to the complex content such as a Word documents (contracts, manuscripts) or Excel documents (complex mathematical models, actuarial models, etc...)

[2] Microsoft has addressed this by stating that SharePoint 2010 would support some of these environments.  I am somewhat skeptical. 

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Jive Software's announcement last week of the Jive SharePoint Connector was met with a "so what" reaction by many people. They criticized Jive for not waiting to make the announcement until the SharePoint Connector is actually available later this quarter (even though pre-announcing product is now a fairly common practice in the industry.) Many also viewed this as a late effort by Jive to match existing SharePoint content connectivity found in competitor's offerings, most notably those of NewsGator, Telligent, Tomoye, Atlassian, Socialtext, and Connectbeam.

Those critics missed the historical context of Jive's announcement and, therefore, failed to understand its ramifications. Jive's SharePoint integration announcement is very important because it:

• underscores the dominance of SharePoint in the marketplace, in terms of deployments as a central content store, forcing all competitors to acknowledge that fact and play nice (provide integration)
• reinforces the commonly-held opinion that SharePoint's current social and collaboration tools are too difficult and expensive to deploy, causing organizations to layer third-party solution on top of existing SharePoint deployments
• is the first of several planned connections from Jive Social Business Software (SBS) to third-party content management systems, meaning that SBS users will eventually be able to find and interact with enterprise content without regard for where it is stored
• signals Jive's desire to become the de facto user interface for all knowledge workers in organizations using SBS

The last point is the most important. Jive's ambition is bigger than just out-selling other social software vendors. The company intends to compete with other enterprise software vendors, particularly with platform players (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP), to be the primary productivity system choice of large organizations. Jive wants to position SBS as the knowledge workers' desktop, and their ability to integrate bi-directionally with third-party enterprise applications will be key to attaining that goal.

Jive's corporate strategy was revealed in March, when they decreed a new category of enterprise software -- Social Business Software. Last week's announcement of an ECM connector strategy reaffirms that Jive will not be satisfied by merely increasing its Social Media or Enterprise 2.0 software market share. Instead, Jive will seek to dominate its own category that bleeds customers from other enterprise software market spaces.

Our July 2009 Multilingual Prodcut Content Report has been featured in the latest post by ZDNet's The DocuMentor blog:

ZDNet introduces Doc (The DocuMentor), sponsored by RICOH. Through his blog, Doc will educate you about Document Management. So who is Doc? Doc is something of an enigma. He was born to a Russian ballerina and a German electrical engineer who some believe was running covert operations for shadowy corporate interests. Doc grew up in various locations in the United States, although no one seems to know precisely where, least of all Doc. His early schooling was unremarkable except for the time he was caught trying to replace all the mimeograph machines with high-tech color copiers that had mysteriously disappeared from a shipment to Albania. At MIT, he made a name for himself by transforming a large printer into a robot that hunts and eats Roombas...

 

See what this quirky mystery man thinks about our report :

 

So Microsoft was asleep at the wheel and didn't use good procedures to backup and restore Sidekick data[1][2]. It was just a matter of time until we saw a breakdown in cloud computing.  Is this the end to cloud computing?  Not at all!  I think it is just the beginning.  Are we going to see other failures? Absolutely!  These failures are good, because they help sensitize potential consumers of cloud computing on what can go wrong and  what contractual obligations service providers must adhere to.

There is so much impetus for having centralized computing, that I think all the risk and downside will be outweighed by the positives.  On the positive side, security, operational excellence, and lower costs will eventually become mainstream in centralized services.   Consumers and corporations will become tired of the inconvenience and high cost of maintaining their own computing facilities in the last mile.

Willie Sutton, a notorious bank robber,  is often misquoted as saying that he robbed banks "because that's where the money is."[3]   Yet all of us still keep our money with banks of one sort or another. Even though online fraud statistics are sharply increasing [4][5], the trend to use online and mobile banking as well as credit/debit transactions is on a steep ascent. Many banking experts suggest that this trend is due to convenience.

Whether a corporation is maintaining their own application servers and desktops, or consumers are caring and feeding for their MAC's and PC's the cost of doing this, measured in time and money is steadily growing. The expertise that is required is ever increasing.   Furthermore, the likelihood of having a security breach when individuals care for their own security is high.

The pundits of cloud computing say that the likelihood of breakdowns in highly concentrated environments such as Cloud computing servers is high.  The three main factors they point to are:

1. Security Breaches
2. Lack of Redundancy
3. Vulnerability to Network Outages

I believe that in spite of these, seemingly large obstacles, we will see a huge increase in the number of cloud services and the number of people using these services in the next 5 years.  When we keep data on our local hard drives, the security risks are huge.  We are already pretty much dysfunctional when the network goes down, and I have had plenty of occasions where my system administrator had to reinstall a server or I had to reinstall my desktop applications.  After all, we all trust the phone company to give us a dial tone.

The savings that can be attained are huge:   A Cloud Computing provider can realize large savings by using specialized resources that are amortized across millions of users. 

There is little doubt in my mind that cloud computing will become ubiquitous.  The jury is still out as to what companies will become the service providers.  However, I don't think Microsoft will be one of them, because their culture just doesn't allow for solid commitments to the end user. 

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[1] The Beauty in Redundancy, http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-beauty-in-redundancy/?scp=2&sq=sidekick&st=cse 

[2] Microsoft Project Pink - The reason for sidekick data loss, http://dkgadget.com/microsoft-project-pink-the-reason-for-sidekick-data-loss/

[3] Willie Sutton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Sutton.

[4] Online Banking Fraud Soars in Britain,  http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2009/gb2009108_505426.htm?campaign_id=rss_eu

[5] RSA Online Fraud Report, September 2009,  http://www.rsa.com/solutions/consumer_authentication/intelreport/10428_Online_Fraud_report_0909.pdf

I had the privilege of attending IMS Boston 2009 down at Gillette 10/7/09-10/8/09, and wanted to share my reflections as well as the general lessons and ideas. First off let me extend my gratitude to Chris Brogan and Justin Levy for putting together an excellent fast paced lineup. With over 20 hours of information from some of the best in the business, it was tough trying to pick the best to share, so forgive me if I made an egregious oversight by missing anything.

 

Overall Message
The overall message that got through the many sessions over the two days was the fact that many industries are being revolutionized (or “dying”), and some may very well not survive unless they adapt to the new environment. Social media is rooted deep in each of our lives whether or not we choose to participate in it, some companies still are not taking it seriously. Furthermore, as a business, regardless of your industry, you MUST care, listen, and engage with your customers. The shift we are seeing is that our "Joe Plumbers" are getting just as much (if not more) of a voice than the so-called professionals.  Another message that was hammered into us again and again is that silos suck, in the modern world everything is connected and needs to feel organic.  The modern consumer can be a powerful marketing tool, a brand advocate, but if you keep your content honeycombed you're making it hard for them to help you. All the faces of your brand need to be unique for the environment there are to be implemented in, but they should all tie to each other and be able to exchange content. Finally, we're are seeing a blend of many disciplines, as Brogan said, "customer service IS marketing." But you could take that a step farther, adding PR and sales to the melting pot in that these disciplines need to function as a single organic entity.  The modern consumer wants to be influenced on purchases by their friends and peers, and as a brand you must find a way to enter this circle. Relationships are the new marketing currency, the more you stockpile the stronger your company will be for it.

5 Favorite Presentations:

 

The list of the top 20 publishers in the world shows a profoundly changing landscape in book publishing. The chart below is provided by Rüdiger Wischenbart from Publishing Perspectives in Germany. He has contributed some good insights into the transformation of the publishing industry. I offer my analysis on the state of the industry and its future.

Some publishers are fairing much better economically, while others are steadily sliding downward in revenue and in their global standing. The changing dynamics between the professional information, education and trade sectors has affected this year’s ranking.  The good news is that publishers that have reinvented themselves (responded to market demand by listening to the customer) have done much better than most.

You may have heard that I'm the new guy in town, and I'm happy to say this is my first blog post as a member of the Gilbane Group.  I am thrilled to be a part such a well-respected organization, and I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work on all things WCM! 

A little about me: I've been a practitioner and a consultant in the WCM space for over ten years, but I've worked for an analyst firm for all of two days.  The good news? I know, first hand, the pains users experience when it comes to web content management.  I empathize with the marketer who knows there must be a way to put all this content to work in her next pull-through campaign, and I sympathize with the Intranet Manager who has been directed to deploy more Web 2.0 tools into the enterprise, even in the absence of a business case. [I'm not a Web 2.0-basher, by the way.] I consider myself a passionate user advocate, and if I'm true to myself (and to you) I'll continue to bring that perspective to all of my work here at Gilbane.

To continue my let-me-tell-you-about-me schtick, here are a few random thoughts that come to mind which will hopefully provide further insight into my philosophy as it relates to WCM:

• Usability has become a commodity; It's time for vendors to stop bragging about it and for users to stop accepting anything less.
• Technology for the sake of technology leads to dissatisfaction every time.
• "What problem am I trying to solve?" -- If you can't answer this, stop what you're doing.
• Technology won't change human nature...but it will amplify it!
• You don't have to do what everyone else is doing...there's a good chance they'll fail anyway.
• "Grassroots" applications require more planning, not less.
• User research is never a bad idea... but don't just ask them, watch them.

And finally,

• If we spent as much time crafting strategies as writing RFPs and selecting tools, we'd achieve a much higher ROI. 

So that's it for now. I look forward to writing more on these pages and hope you'll chime in with your thoughts and reactions.

 

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Bill Trippe was called upon to offer his invaluable insight on the eBook Market in

E Ink’s buyer sweetens the deal: Prime View adds stock to offer after investor complaints

Read Neal's Quote:

X Marks the Spot, for Errors: Early results indicate that filing financial statements in XBRL is far from simple.

We are very pleased to announce that as of today, Scott Liewehr has joined the Gilbane Group as Senior Consultant, Web Content Management.

His Full Bio will be posted shortly, but here are some few key stats:

*Board member of CM Pros

*Scott has strong experience in helping enterprises plan for successful CMS deployments

*Can be found on LinkedIn and Twitter

*Is "a die-hard Bears Fan"