Recently by Mary Laplante

Looking to make the most of your experience at Gilbane Boston 2011? Want to be current on the latest content trends and technologies? Download our recent papers, some of which you may have missed.

Smart Approaches to Managing Mobile Learning Content. Just published! Why a content strategy rather than a project mentality is the only way to take full advantage of the business performance benefits and productivity gains that are possible with mobile learning. Listen to the webinar.

Magazines at a Digital Crossroads: eCommerce and New Models for the Future. Makes the case for a growing need for contemporary eCommerce platforms to support publishers as they experiment, win, iterate, and drive their businesses into the future. Listen to the webinar.

Content, Audience, and Targeted Messaging: The Virtuous Circle of Customer Engagement. Presenting marketing messages and advertisements that are relevant at the right moment to create the tipping point from engagement to conversion.

A Fresh Look at Web Content Management: Mastering the Core Capabilities of Contemporary Platforms. The core aspects of today’s WCM systems for anyone evaluating, or reevaluating, the WCM needs of their organizations. Listen to the webinar.

Addressing Digital Product Development Risks: Best Practics for Creating Strategic Outsourcing Relationships. Digital products fail for all kinds of reasons. Poor development does not have to be one of them.

Understanding Best Practices for Profiling, Personalizing, and Targeting Next-Generation Engagment. Develop a new appreciation for the power and value of contemporary personalization, and gain an understanding of how to realize its benefits within your organization.

Global Digital Engagement: Leveragng Opportunities to Increase Impact and Reduce Complexity. How to remove the mystery and anxiety of delivering high-value interactions that lead to engagement by improving the dynamics of each.

Here's a quick rundown of summer educational events in which we participated with our partners. View these archived webcasts that you might have missed,  or refresh your subject matter expertise as your organization heads into fall business activities.

Publishing Production Outsourcing: Wolters Kluwer's Formula for Success 

Integration Calculus: CMS + TMS = Turbo-Accelerated Creation of Multilingual Product Documentation

Making Quality Part of Your Content DNA

Content, Context, and Conversation: The Three Kings of Consumer Engagement

Fall webcasts include insights from Gilbane's 2010 research on XML and multilingual marketing content, customer success stories, eBook challenges, web engagement, and web content governance. Look for announcements on our home page and blogs, in our weekly NewsShark, and through our social media channels.

We're pleased to announce that Gilbane Group has welcomed three new senior analysts and consultants:  Vince Emery, Karen Golden, and Sue Willard.

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.

O'Reilly's Gov 2.0 events took place last week. We've had some time to think about what the current wave of activity means to buyers and adopters of content technologies.

Both the Expo and Summit programs delivered a deluge of examples of exciting new approaches to connecting consumers of government services with the agencies and organizations that provide them. 

• At the Expo on Sept 8,  25 speakers from organizations like NASA, TSA, US EPA, City of Santa Cruz,  Utah Department of Public Safety, and the US Coast Guard provided five-minute overviews of their 2.0 applications in a sometimes dizzying fast-paced format.
• Sunlight Labs sponsored an Apps for America challenge that featured finalists who combined federal content available on Data.gov and open source software in some intriguing applications, including DataMasher, which enables you to mash up sources such as stats on numbers of high school graduates and guns per household.
• The Summit on Sept 9 and 10 featured more applications plus star-status speakers including Aneesh Chopra, the US's first CTO operating under the Federal Office of Science and Technology Policy; Vinton Cerf, currently VP and evangelist at Google; and Mitch Kapor.

A primary program theme was "government as platform," with speakers suggesting and debating just what that means. There was much thoughtful discussion, if not consensus. Rather than report, interested readers can search Twitter hash tags #gov20e and #gov20s for comments.

From the first speaker on, we were immediately struck by the rapid pace of change in government action and attitude about content and data sharing. Our baseline for comparison is Gilbane's last conference on content applications within government and non-profit agencies in June 2007. In presentations and casual conversations with attendees, it was clear that most organizations were operating as silos. There was little sharing or collaboration within and among organizations. Many attendees expressed frustration that this was so. When we asked what could be done to fix the problem, we distinctly remember one person saying that connecting with other content managers just within her own agency would be a huge improvement.

Fast forward a little over two years to last week's Gov2.0 events. Progress towards internal collaboration, inter-agency data sharing, and two-way interaction between government and citizens is truly remarkable. At least three factors have created a pefect storm of conditions: the current administration's vision and mandate for open government, broad acceptance of social interaction tools at the personal and organizational level, and technology readiness in the form of open source software that makes it possible to experiment at low cost and risk.

Viewing the events through Gilbane's content-centric lens, we offer three takeaways:

• Chopra indicated that the formal Open Government directives to agencies, to be released in several weeks, will include the development of "structured schedules" for making agency data available in machine-readable format. As Tim O'Reilly said while interviewing Chopra, posting "a bunch of PDFs" will not be sufficient for alignment with the directives. As a result, agencies will be accelerating the adoption of XML and the transformation of publishing practices to manage structured content. As a large buyer of content technologies and services, government agencies are market influencers. We will be watching carefully for the impact of Open Government initiatives on the broader landscape for content technologies.
• There was little mention of the role of content management as a business practice or technology infrastructure. This is not surprising, given that Gov2.0 wasn't about content management. And while the programs comprised lots of show-and-tell examples, most were very heavy on show and very light on tell. But it does raise a question about how these applications will be managed, governed, and made sustainable and scalable. Add in the point above -- that structured content will now be poised for wider adoption, creating demand for XML-aware content management solutions. Look for more discussion as agencies begin to acknowledge their content management challenges.
• We didn't hear a single mention of language issues in the sessions we attended. Leaving us to wonder if non-native English speakers who are eligible for government services will be disenfranchised in the move to Open Government.

All in all, thought-provoking, well-executed events. For details, videos of the sessions are available on the Gov2.0 site.

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.

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.

Most buyers of content technologies understand the key differences between acquiring a content solution as a service and licensing software for installation on servers behind their firewall. Less well understood, however, is the impact of those differences on the acquisition process. With SaaS, you're not "buying" technology, as with licensed software; you're entering a services agreement to access a business solution that includes software, applications, and infrastructure. The value proposition is very different, as is the basis for evaluating its fit with the organization's needs.

The current worldwide economic situation is causing many organizations to take a serious look at SaaS offers as a strategy for continuing to move forward with critical business initiatives. Our latest Gilbane Beacon was developed to help companies evaluate SaaS fairly, with the goal of helping our readers find the best solution, regardless of technology delivery model. Communicating SaaS WCM Value: A Guide to Understanding the Business Case for Software-as-a-Service Solutions for Web Content Management explains why SaaS and licensed software are apples and oranges. The paper identifies the issues that matter--and those that don't--when considering SaaS solutions for web content management. Available for download on our site.

The period for nominating a peer or yourself to run for one of the open seats on the Board of Directors of CM Pros closes tomorrow, January 7. Visit the elections page on the CM Pros website for details.

We came across a study entitled "The 2008 Tribalization of Business" while preparing to publish a new Gilbane white paper on web experience management. The "Tribalization" research looks at communities and online marketing: how they deliver value, obstacles to making them work, what contributes to success, and how marketers measure effectiveness. Highlights of the research (co-sponsored by Beeline Labs, Deloitte, and the Society for New Communications Research) are reported on marketingcharts.com.

This datapoint caught our eye:

"The greatest obstacles to making a community work are not related to technology or funding, the study found; rather, getting people [to engage] in the community (51%)."

Community is one of four components of engagement strategy discussed in the new Gilbane white paper (the others are personalization, user-generated content, and collaboration). In the paper, we provide some guidance about making communities work not just at start-up but throughout their lifecycle.

Engage Me! Web Experience Management as the New Business Imperative is the companion white paper to a webinar in which we participated with Linksys and the Colorado Department of Transportion. The webinar and paper are sponsored by FatWire. An archive of the webinar is available for viewing, and the paper is now available for download on the FatWire site. It will be posted on the Gilbane site later this month.

Are you investigating technology for protecting your company's high-value documents and other intellectual property? Is better content security on your company's plate for 2008? Need to know the current state-of-the-art regarding enterprise rights management?

Gilbane Group is conducting a survey of companies that are investigating, adopting, and using rights management solutions for high-value enterprise content (contracts, HR policies, product strategies, regulatory compliance certifications, and so on). The results will be included in our upcoming study on Enterprise Rights Management: Business Imperatives and Implementation Readiness.

We are seeking input from IT, content management, and IT security professionals across multiple industries (excluding consumer media companies, which are outside the scope of this study). Some familiarity with enterprise rights management (ERM) or information rights management (IRM) is necessary (i.e., respondents need to have at least heard of the term).

The survey is online and takes about fifteen minutes to complete. In exchange for participation, qualified respondents will receive the aggregated survey results and the executive summary of the analysis. Respondents who fill out the survey in full and provide a valid email business address are also entered into a random drawing for a free one-hour phone consultation with the Gilbane ERM analyst team. Take the survey now. Contact us if you have any questions about the research or qualifications to take the survey.