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There are tectonic shifts underway among competing web, mobile, and social platforms, that will have profound effects on digital strategies. There are too many moving parts and shifting alliances for anyone to predict outcomes with any certainty. But Apple, Google, Facebook, and others are making moves that need to be considered in the context of platform competition, whether it is Apple ad-blocking, and News, Google AMP, and Polymer, Facebook Instant Articles, and Notify, or Twitter Moments. Some thoughts…
Mobile is not a neutral platform
For sure. Benedict Evan’s lead-up discussion on desktop vs mobile platform doesn’t sit quite right, but it isn’t necessary to the argument or the other insights which are on target. It is certainly true that mobile operating systems are becoming less neutral and more intrusive and there will be serious consequences as this trend continues.
… this summer we saw moves from Apple and Google to create their own real-estate around the home screen. … but the broader point is that this is Apple’s screen or Google’s screen, and another content provider gets there only if Apple or Google want (and if they implement the indexing APIs that Apple and Google require). This will get bigger… Next, Apple and Google are exploring new ways to unbundle the content within apps into new usage models. Hence Apple’s 3D Touch unbundles app content into the home screen … Can there be apps where this is the main UI? (And of course this isn’t on Android, so the fantasy of a cross-platform app gets even further away.) Read More
Notes from the Platform’s Edge
“Platforms for everyone, publications for no one”. John Herrman on the fascinating dance between publishers and platforms and social “platforms” like Facebook and Twitter who want to compete / survive via notification control. Referrals to websites from Facebook are trending down for many and the top ten membership is changing, and…
Facebook is … experimenting with a new editorial space… an app called Notify, which lets people aggregate… notifications? It was previously reported by Business Insider to be “a standalone mobile news publication.” … An Apple Watch future or a Siri future or a notifications-based future would threaten the most obvious ways Facebook and Twitter make money—by cramming ads into feeds—so it makes sense, probably, to at least try to get ahead of it, by becoming a sort of news notification clearinghouse—better or more vital than the notifications sent to users by, say, an Apple or Google News app…All along, platforms and publications have been interacting in two ways: on one end, by mingling audience and attention; on the other, by the advertising business model of one replacing the advertising business model of the other. Read More
Apple wants mobile devices to be filled with apps. Google supports a world where people browse the web for most things. Now websites are increasingly caught in the middle of those competing visions.
The full title of the article is “Publishers Straddle the Apple-Google, App-Web Divide”, but it is not just about publishers—everyone has to to figure out how to navigate among this divide and all of the exhaust from it. Ad-blocking, app-blocking, AMP-advantaging, non-neutral mobile platforms, and (healthy) web standards (e.g., web components) development competition, are all driven by the competing business models. Read More
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages AMP Project
Google’s latest strategic salvo in the app-web battle is to provide another way to speed up web pages with an open source project based on the web components standard. The idea is to neutralize any speed advantages of Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, or other apps. Of course this also serves to influence the direction of the web components standard development in the same way as Polymer. This is all good, but there are some concerns about how open AMP is in its current form. There is already a (beta) WordPress plugin which I have installed on gilbane.com but haven’t tested yet. Danny Sullivan’s post from the announcement contains a description and useful links. Read More
And now back to our regularly scheduled programing…
Integrating marketing technologies? That’s the easy part
It would be difficult to find someone more qualified than Scott Brinker to talk about integrating marketing technology. He knows firsthand how hard it is, which is why you should listen to what he has to say about what’s even more difficult.
Is the “integration” challenge of marketing technology really our top obstacle?… There are two studies that I’ve come across in the past couple of weeks that have caused me to wonder if integration has become a bit of a red herring for marketers who are wrestling with the much more hairy, vicious, pointy-toothed beast of digital transformation… Integration is getting easier. Marketing, however, is not. Read more
The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year. You can also subscribe via our feed.
The Gilbane Conference on Content, Technology, and Customer Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.
First of all, choosing a new CMS, or any other enterprise software, should only ever come after a critical and comprehensive analysis of business requirements, strategic objectives, current technology infrastructure, existing and expected operational processes, and a determination of service provider involvement. And once you’re ready to start looking at the options you need to pay attention to the employee, partner, and customer experience from the start if you want to ensure adoption and success. The whole process is less obvious and sure to involve way more effort than you anticipate.
Below are a selection of four conference sessions and two workshops at the upcoming Gilbane Conference that will be especially relevant to anyone considering a new CMS product, platform, or environment.
P2. Aligning Technology with Strategy – Harvard Business Review
The Harvard Business Review Group launched a redesigned site in November 2014, a big step forward for the company in terms of both strategy and technology. The team adopted new technologies for the both the front end and back end that were not only designed to push our capabilities forward, but chosen in close collaboration with business stakeholders with a deep understanding of where our business is heading. HBR’s goals are similar to any other magazine/publishing/media company, to grow the business by creating and retaining subscribers and simultaneously meet the changing needs of digital advertising as print revenues potentially decline. As the primary place where more and more people and clients engage with us, HBR.org has become the center of our strategy. The old site served us well for years but our new technology choices now allow us to form the direct relationships not only with our audience, but more importantly with each subscriber. Topics we’ll cover in our talk will include: advantages of modern UI frameworks and why we built our own, migrating from traditional relational databases to a big data/nosql database.
The presentation will consist of at least three parts: setting the stage for change, evaluating options for new technologies to meet the need, choices made with a retrospective on lessons learned.
Wednesday, December, 2: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m. Moderator:Kevin Newman, Director of Technology, Harvard Business Publishing Panelists: Fred Lalande, Technical Production Manager, Harvard Business Publishing Daigo Fujiwara, Web Developer, Harvard Business Publishing Matt Wagner, Web Developer, Harvard Business Publishing
T4. Benchmark Your WCM Environment
Join Real Story Group for a fast-paced, hands-on session where you will assess your existing WCM environment in a series of structured Q&A exercises. Then find out how your situation stacks up against your peers’.
Thursday, December, 3: 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Speakers: Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group Jarrod Gingras, Senior Analyst and Managing Director, Real Story Group
T5. When and How to Move to a New CMS / Digital Platform
Replacing a content management system has always been a daunting task, but is now more difficult than it ever. As CMS’s have matured they have taken on more functionality, much of which overlaps with other systems thus forcing choices about which system should be responsible for which function. The marketing technology landscape and the variety of technology stacks it suggests are possible is scary indeed — even though your own existing environment provides some constraints. The speakers in this session are consultants who have been through this with many clients and have some great advice to share.
Thursday, December, 3: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m. Moderator:Barb Mosher Zinck, Content & Product Marketer, MarTech Analyst, Publisher, BMZ Content Strategies / Digital Tech Diary Speakers: Rob Martinez, Director of Professional Services, NorthPoint Digital
When to Abandon your Existing Technology and Start Afresh William Thayer, Principal Consultant Technologist, Avalon Consulting, LLC.
Strategies for Migrating to a new Web Content Management System
T6. CMS Alternatives – Bespoke to WordPress
When you need a content management system you have lots of options. In this session our speakers advocate for two alternatives that have been controversial choices for “enterprise-class” requirements. At one end of the spectrum, WordPress, the most popular “content management” system, is often thought of as too lightweight a solution. At the other end of the spectrum, building your own custom system means it can do whatever you want, but the cost of development and maintenance required is considered too high a cost. Both speakers are Gilbane conference veterans and know our audience so will be well prepared for any challenging questions!
Thursday, December, 3: 11:40 p.m. – 12:40 p.m. Moderator:Barb Mosher Zinck, Content & Product Marketer, MarTech Analyst, Publisher, BMZ Content Strategies / Digital Tech Diary Speakers: John Eckman, CEO, 10up
Building a Better Author Experience: WordPress as a CMS platform John Petersen, Programmer, Sutro Software
Throw Away Your CMS
Also see these pre-conference workshops for deep dives:
Whether you prefer to focus your customer experience strategy on the “all” of “omnichannel” or the “more-than-one” of “multichannel”, you have a lot digital, physical, organizational, and operational decisions to deal with. Whatever your terminology preference, below are four relevant sessions with ten presentations at the upcoming Gilbane Conference that will provide you with plenty to think about.
C2. Making Omni-channel Work
“Omni-channel” is a succinct way to refer to the core problem of marketing transformation since it is typically used to include digital and non-digital channels as well as all their related support systems. Used in this way the term represents an ideal that may not often be attainable, but that is no reason it should not be a target to strive for. What does this mean in the real world? In this session our three presenters will look at: what is being done at an organization on the path to omni-channel, some common early mistakes organizations make when planning for omni-channel, and some ideas and strategies for dealing with the growing impact of connected devices.
Wednesday, December, 2: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m. Moderator:Melissa Webster, Program VP, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC Speakers: Kevin Novak, CEO and Founder, 2040 Digital Moving to Customer Centricity in the Omni-Channel Jake DiMare, Digital Strategist, Agency Oasis Successfully planning for Digital Transformation Loni Stark, Senior Director of Strategy and Product Marketing, Digital Marketing Business, Adobe Connected Experiences: From websites to wearables to wherever
C3. Holistic Customer Experiences Require Fundamental Change
As we say in this year’s conference description, “A modern customer experience must be holistic and seamless. Holistic in that customer communications be consistent within the company and across all touch points and channels, and seamless so that transitions between customer interactions are smooth and frictionless. This is a continuous process that requires an unprecedented amount of collaboration and integration between internal and external facing organizations and systems.” In this session two industry analysts look deeper into the fundamental changes required in the supply chain and internal business systems.
Wednesday, December, 2: 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Moderator:Jeff Cram, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder, Connective DX Speakers: Matt Mullen, Senior Analyst, Social Business, 451 Research Beyond Engagement and Experience; The Converged Enterprise and the Dynamic Supply Chain Connie Moore, Senior Vice President Research, Digital Clarity Group The New Customer Experience Imperative: Moving From Digital Transformation to Business Transformation
T7. Modern Multichannel Strategies
Implementing COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere) is not easy, but for years organizations have built systems to accomplish or approximate multichannel publishing. Is this still the best approach? Or is there a newer model needed to support the more interactive web and mobile experiences? This session includes lessons-learned from COPE implementations as well as a proposal for an enhanced model of COPE for a modern customer experience.
Thursday, December, 3: 11:40 a.m. – 12:40 p.m. Moderator:Jake DiMare, Digital Strategist, Agency Oasis Speakers: Chris Schagen, CMO, Contentful GmbH Multi-channel content modeling: Learnings from 3 COPE projects Andrew Blackmore, Solution Principal, National Customer Engagement, Slalom Consulting CDSE – An Evolution of COPE for Maturing Brands
T8. How to Plan for Complex Multichannel Projects
Multichannel projects that aren’t complex are already rare, and the complexity is increasing. When planning for such projects it is helpful to look at successful results for repeatable patterns. This is not easy to do if you only have experience with one or two similar projects. All three presentations in this session provide some level of pattern analysis on relevant projects that will allow you to consider a much broader range of scenarios in your own complex project planning.
Thursday, December, 3: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. Moderator:Barb Mosher Zinck, Content & Product Marketer, MarTech Analyst, Publisher, BMZ Content Strategies / Digital Tech Diary Speakers: Martin Coady, Managing Director, Technology, VML Reusability – the Myth and the Reality In Koo Kim, Senior Vice President, NorthPoint Digital Patterns of Successful Digital Projects Jeff Hansen, Content Solutions Lead, SingleStone Designing a Flexible Content Architecture to Enhance both Customer Experience and Author Experience
[Note: This was posted first on May 6, 2014, so is obviously a bit dated. I’m re-posting here because I want to test the new Medium API, and to encourage me to write more about tablets given Microsoft’s new Surface Book.]
The future of tablets isn’t what analysts thought a year ago, or even last fall
There is a lot of discussion, mainly from an investor point of view about why: saturation, price points, supplier market share, etc., that are relevant for both business and consumer markets. Recently the focus has been on iPads because of Apple’s earnings call but the trend is not limited to Apple.
Why aren’t tablets taking more share away from PCs?
Given the phenomenal growth of tablets the last few years, their computing power, and the large overlap of general use cases shared with PCs (email, browsing) it did seem that tablets were on track replace PCs in large numbers. But the use case overlap was not large enough to support the forecasts. Tablets are tweeners, fighting for space between the superior communications of smartphones and greater productivity of PCs. Being in the middle is not normally a desirable spot for a product, but tablets excel at information and entertainment consumption and this middle is a pretty big and happy place to be.
What do we use PCs for? For years we have been using PCs for some combination of productivity, information / entertainment consumption, and communication. PCs were largely designed and most useful for productivity, whether business or personal, and that’s why we bought them. As PCs evolved and became capable and appealing for information/entertainment consumption and communication we bought more of them. And at some point whatever motivated us to buy a PC, our actual use of them flipped – we now spend a higher percentage of time using our PCs for information / entertainment consumption and communication than we do for productivity. And of course this is the domain of tablets and why they have taken as much of the PC market as they have.
But tablets are simply not as good as PCs for a large number of productivity applications. Until they are this will act as a governor on tablet growth and allow for a shrinking but still large market for PCs.
So far, Apple’s bet has been to keep the iPad simple, rigidly so perhaps, rather than creating a neither-nor product: No longer charmingly simple, but not powerful enough for real productivity tasks. But if the iPad wants to cannibalize more of the PC market, it will have to remove a few walls.
I would say Gassée’s post is from the point of view of a user who would like to replace his PC with an iPad but can’t, that this is a larger cohort than enterprise users or even power users, and that this is the best way to think about the productivity penalty portion of slowing iPad sales.
What would make a significant dent in the iPad’s productivity penalty? Microsoft Office support alone is necessary but not sufficient. A better solution for text entry than accessory keyboards, smooth and rapid app switching, and easy file access would each make a big difference. See below for links to other thoughts.
There is also a maddening and ironic side effect of using iPads for industry applications where they are productivity enhancers. For example, I used to be able to choose between an iPad (mostly research and entertainment) and a laptop (mostly work) for most trips, but a couple of my current projects include working with apps that only run on the iPad. I can’t be productive without having both an iPad and a laptop. Even in the office I often need both within reach. Unfortunately this situation is likely to get worse as more iOS, (and Android!) productivity apps appear.
Watch out for smartphones
Benedict Evans suggested another avenue for inquiry in a tweet:
.@asymco@gassee posit: slow iPad sales are worse news for the PC market: implies phones can take the greater share of PC use cases
I don’t know Benedict, but I picture him smiling devilishly as he composed that tweet. As well he should have.
The more types of computing devices there are the more complicated figuring out use case fit is going to be.
The future of tablets
The future of tablets seems promising in the near term since neither PCs nor smartphones can match their information and entertainment consumption experience and tablets will get better at aiding productivity. The better they get the more market share they’ll take. And of course we haven’t seen all the new industry apps where the tablet form factor and interface is a net productivity advantage.
On the other hand, the right kind of user interface – perhaps a high resolution holographic interface not dependent on form factors for projection – would free us from our quaint categories of PCs, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, glasses, and be truly disruptive. Once computing power and user interfaces become independent of physical size all bets are off.
Wednesday, December 2, 8:30 am – Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston
Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Founder, Bluebill Advisors, Gilbane Conference
Donna Tuths, Global Managing Director, Accenture Interactive, Accenture Digital Global Marketers and Digital Transformation: What They are Doing and What They are Thinking
Scott Brinker, Founder, chiefmartec.com & Co-founder & CTO, ion interactive Building an Infrastructure for Marketing Digital Transformation
Jon Marks, CTO and co-founder, Kaldor Are Apps All They’re Cracked Up to Be? (Or Should We Just Embrace Mobile Web Instead?)
Scott Calderwood, Director, Digital Web Strategy, SAS Institute Key Ingredients for Today’s Modern Web Experience
Michele J. Givens, Publisher and General Manager, Editorial Projects in Education, Inc. Strategies for Improving Digital Outreach & Increasing Audience Engagement
The complete schedule, program and other details can be found at gilbaneconference.com.
Stay up-to-date between now and the conference with the Gilbane Advisor.
Mobile browser traffic is 2X bigger than app traffic, and growing faster
Mobile browser traffic is actually twice that of mobile app traffic, according to a just-released Morgan Stanley report… This appears to fly in the face of recent, strong, and repeated evidence that the app is winning, capturing 80-90 percent of our time on mobile.
Using comScore data, Morgan Stanley says the web is winning… comScore says the app is winning… Both are right… The problem is terminology and the exact focus of each study. Morgan Stanley’s study is focused on unique visitors… while comScore’s report is focused on actual user time spent.
There is still a lot of confusion around this. It’s not as simple as mobile web vs app. Marketers need mobile strategies that cover both: a mobile web strategy for top of the funnel reach and growth, and an app strategy for increasing engagement with those further along in the “customer journey”. For details Read More
Adaptive Content, Context, and Controversy
Trying to decide between responsive design, adaptive design, or separate web and mobile sites? It is a big decision and the attendent debate is both necessary and well worth the effort educationally. Technical, marketing, and business stakeholders should all be involved and all would benefit from Karen McGrane’s accessible and useful perspective on the options. Read More
Marketing technologists, growth hackers, and regression to the mean
This predicted phenomenon — of marketing technologists being a temporary specialization that largely regresses back to the mean of what defines a “marketer” — seems analogous to the pattern we’ve seen with digital marketing and, possibly, what we’re seeing with growth hacking too.
For a while, digital marketers were specialists that raced ahead of baseline marketers with their unique knowledge and domain expertise. But today — even though we’re not there completely — we see the reunification of digital marketing into the standard definition of marketing. Digital marketing is just an implicit part of marketing now. … Although, important to note, it took 20 years. Read More
This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of
For all Wikipedia’s utility it is too often frustratingly incomplete and blatantly biased. This is not a knock on its hard-working editors or its laudable mission. Wikipedia it is a positive force in advancing education and its faults are mainly a result of its idealistic scope. Hopefully it will continue to grow and improve. There at least one example of a very successful model that should at least be applicable to other special domains…
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguity to zombies—but because of the site itself… Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. It’s something the encyclopedia… has managed to do for two decades … Unfortunately, all of the other current ways of designing an encyclopedia very badly fail to meet at least one of these requirements. Read More
The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet
If you’ve been following the topic you won’t be shocked, but will likely find some additional details in this report. If you are not familiar with what has been going on the report will open your eyes wide – where they should be if you are spending money on advertising. The infection by vertical domain is interesting too. Read More
Gilbane Conference 2015
Join us in Boston, December 1-3. Content, technology and customer experience. gilbaneconference.com
The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year. You can also subscribe via our feed.
The Gilbane Conference on Content, Technology, and Customer Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.
