Recently by Leonor Ciarlone

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Take our poll on content sharing trends between customer support, technical documentation, and marketing.

Then, consider coming in to Gilbane Boston this week to discuss the results!

Attention: technical writers! In the spotlight next week: the availability of authoring assistance technologies that bring a living, breathing corporate Style Guide into content creation environments. Creating team-authored product support content with consistency and globalization in mind has come a long way. More on that over on the Globalization blog.

Join me on April 9th to discuss the value of translation-oriented authoring with technology provider across Systems, language services provider Argo Translation, Inc., globalization consultant Richard Sikes, and QuadGraphics, a customer reaping the benefits of authoring assistance technology in a FrameMaker environment.

I received a number of emails after my blog on Iron Mountain's Friendly Advice Machine, including some from non-John Cleese fans who still thought it was a fun experience. I even know of some colleagues who have visited the site multiple times ;-)

Still, I thought it would be interesting to get the real statistics on visits and impact from the company themselves. Iron Mountain's Karen McPhillips, VP Marketing, answered my call for an interview. Here are some interesting excerpts:

• Aimed at IT managers, a marketing research team developed the campaign by creating a literal "buyer persona" resulting from over 100 interviews with existing and target prospects. This was not a "closed door brainstorming" session. The team identified and aggregated a long list of common process and technology IT-based pain points to drive targeted messaging with a healthy dose of humor.
• By end-October, the first month of release, the site received 19,000 hits and exceeded viewing expectations by 20%. Audience segmentation revealed 60% U.S.-based views and 16% Eastern Europe-based views.
• The previous Cleese-based campaign featured the comedian as Dr. Harold Twain Weck, Director of the Institute for Backup Trauma. By the end of its run, the site had received more than one million hits from IT professionals alone.
• The company markets the campaign globally, but it is available only in English. Given the difficulties of true context-driven translations, especially for "Cleese humor," this seems prudent. McPhillips reports no complaints on the decision from the company's major global markets, including France and Germany.

In the Global Information Age, mere information availability no longer suffices. Today's customer expectations demand relevant information that is culturally acceptable, appealing, and most important, understood. Delivering contextual, multilingual information - communications that make sense in the customer's language of choice - is fundamental. Translation is a corporate requirement.

However, any company with a multinational revenue profile knows that fusing quality and translation is a significant challenge. Our take? Quality translation within the global content lifecycle can be elusive, but it is achievable. To learn more, download our latest whitepaper, "Quality In, Quality Out: The Value of Technology in the Global Content Lifecycle" and listen to the recording from the companion webinar hosted by Sajan.

We'll also continue the quality discussion throughout Gilbane Boston's Globalization track, particularly in the session, "Quality at the Source: Creating Global Customer Experience."

Records management provider Iron Mountain is a company that has intrigued me for some time, as I've watched it morph from a regional to a global player in outsourcing services as well as one of the top best-of-breed RM players amidst the ECM suite and platform providers.

The company appears to have always placed great value on user education and sharing best practices as demonstrated via a continuously expanding Knowledge Center, complete with an "Ask the Expert" section. User interfaces and content breadth/depth within this area is impressive, as is the series of quarterly, role-based newsletters on various topics. Incorporating multimedia into this strategy via the Tour Center has clearly been a major investment.

So, when I ran across the latest campaign featuring one of my all time favorites, John Cleese, I figured I would check out the Friendly Advice Machine. I did not however, count on an inability to tear myself away from it.

Frankly, it is one of the best examples of customer experience techniques I have ever seen. (Adweek agrees.) Targeting mid- to senior-level IT and legal professionals, it is creative, usable, informative, and hilariously funny. It uniquely incorporates "next step" offers and calls to action that quite literally spurs your hand towards the mouse to find out "what's behind that icon?" It bolsters the brand management strategy rather than dilutes it.

Update: Yesterday's Stratify acquisition should help in the "bolstering" department as well....

Check it out -- especially the Dreaded Whitepaper offer -- and stay tuned. I'll be interviewing the company next week about the objectives and techniques that make this campaign stand out. In terms of global customer experience, I'll find out if Cleese has attempted to deliver it in Chinese.

The recording from our June 26th webinar, "Utilizing Web CMS as an eMarketing Platform to Deliver Tangible ROI" is now available here.

During the webinar, my co-presenters from Hot Banana Software and I talked about how the Web is a critical component of marketing and sales strategies for organizations large and small. We noted that more and more marketing dollars are moving to online activities, in billions. Not many would argue with that. But we also reminded our audience that "the other side of the coin" in having more money to spend is the parallel rise in corporate expectations for ROI on that spend. Not many can argue with that.

The heat is on. Organizations want eMarketing to drive sales, period. Proving that it can - and quantifying that it does - remains the conundrum for many. As we discussed how to prove marketing ROI, we asked the audience to tell us about their eMarketing goals. Their responses clearly have accountability (read: measurement!) in mind:

We also talked about the fact that eMarketing is a dizzying challenge, given an array of emerging approaches, techniques, and technologies. Selecting the most lucrative methods is as far from a one-dimensional process as you can get. Here's a snapshot of the methods our webinar audience is using today:

It can be interesting for both analysts and technology vendors to understand the rate of technology adoption within the field -- as opposed to within the market forecast. Here's a case in point, where "2.0"-driven techniques such as social media advertising and RSS content distribution lag begin more traditional "e" methods, focused squarely around email and search.

Want to read more on Web CMS and eMarketing? Download here.

This week's topic: Growth in language translations.

5 questions,
30 seconds,
Promise.

Are here.

I was only able to make it into the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston yesterday. You can still get a demo pass for today. But I was thrilled to hear analyst, researchers, case study presenters, and yes, even vendors, drill down into one of my favorite phrases: "people, processes, and technology make it possible" and hope the mantra continues today.

Point being, obviously, that 2.0 not just about technology ;-). Its about culture, filling generation gaps, the evolution of *people* networking, and redefining community from the core of where community starts. Humans.

What I didn't hear, however, is the "L" word -- specifically language, and that bothered me. We just can't be naive enough to think that community, collaboration, and networking on a global scale is solely English-driven. We need to get the "L" word into the conversation.

My globalization practice colleague Kaija Poysti weighs in here.

There's no doubt that Microsoft understands the value and opportunity in the ECM/BPM intersection. It is also clear that the roads MOSS will use to get there are not confined to small neighborhoods, hence the reference to the U.S.' most famous highway.

Microsoft's significant investments in workflow and business intelligence have been widely reported. I'll leave the work of dissecting components such as Windows Workflow Foundation, Excel Services, and MOSS BI web parts to resources such as Ziff Davis' Microsoft Watch and Russ Stalters' BetterECM blogs as well as Microsoft resources from the SharePoint Product Group and Customer Experience Team (although this one does not show much action since the summer's LOBi (line-of-business interoperability) announcement.

Blogging over at BPMEnterprise.com, Stalters also has an excellent 3-part series called BPM and Steak: A Great Combo, the latest of which pinpoints MOSS capabilities designed for BPM practitioners. Microsoft's strategy for full-scale ECM/BPM however, requires somewhat of a "detour" from MOSS and Office 2007 suburbs. The roadmap is evident via multiple, alliance-driven crossroads. Avenues include "Gold Certified" partners such as Bluespring Software, Global 360, Lombardi Software, and Ultimus as well as "Certified" or "Registered" partners such as Savvion and Appian.

Implementing integrations with some of these products does not appear to be fraught with "Exit here" or "In Construction" signposts. (And given all in the "Gold Certified" group are private, one can't help wondering if there's an acquisition strategy in the works. I digress...) Rather many are direct and well-embedded crossroads between MOSS and Office 2007, targeted directly at business users.

Case in point: Bluespring's BPM Suite 4.5, the result of a decidedly Microsoft-centric BPM play that began in 2003. Most interesting to me is the 4.5 focus on "document manipulation," highlighted multiple times during my briefing with the company. Capabilities include rules-driven analysis, extraction, and dynamic assembly of content from Word, Excel and InfoPath -- with PDF thrown in for good measure. Although many ECM players have been doing "ETL for content" for years, this is not common expertise in the BPM market. In a content-centric BPM application such as compliance, this certainly provides some interesting opportunities for aggregated, context-specific reporting.

As I noted in my last ECM-BPM checkpoint, there are multiple road signs (quickly becoming billboards...) that signal technology convergence and deeper integrations between two blurring market segments. Microsoft's Route 66 strategy is surely one of them.