Author: Mary Laplante (Page 3 of 13)

How CMOs Are Planning for Social Media

October 29, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

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.

Webinar: Corporate Marketing as a Publishing Business

October 6, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

October 29, 11:00 am ET

Attracting, converting, and retaining customers is the mission of every corporate marketing organization. Content is obviously central to executing the mission. The key to success, though, isn’t just delivering content on websites — it’s leveraging content to wring out its maximum value for the business and the customer.

Leading publishers have deep expertise in solving the knottiest problems associated with leveraging content. How can corporate marketers put a publisher’s knowledge and experience to work in their own domain? We discuss the issues and trends with Diane Burley, Industry Specialist at Nstein, in a lively online conversation. Attend Everyone is a Publisher: No Matter What Industry You’re In, and gain insights into solutions that top media companies have put into practice to survive the digital economy. Topics include:

Engaging customers with content, and metrics to gauge performance.
Managing corporate marketing and brand content from multiple sources.
Streamlining web content workflows.
Creating demographic-specific microsites.

Registration is open. Sponsored by NStein.

Coming soon: a Gilbane Beacon on publishing as every organization’s second business.

Reflections on Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit

September 15, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

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.

Conversations with Globalization Solution Providers

September 10, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

The research for Gilbane’s 2009 study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices Into Global Content Value Chains was supported by seven companies with proven track records in content globalization. Their technologies and services are used by market-leading companies to create competitive advantage with multilingual content.

One of the goals of this blog is to provide buyers and adopters with a variety of perspectives on content globalization strategies, practices, and solutions. The Multilingual Product Content study is authored from our own analyst perspective, drawing on the results of research. The user perspective is captured in the profiles included in the report; they describe the global content value chains deployed at Adobe, BMW Motorrad, Cisco Systems, HP, Mercury Marine, and New York City Department of Education.

To bring the solution supplier perspective into the mix, over the next month or so we’ll publish a series of brief interviews with study sponsors Acrolinx, Jonckers, Lasselle-Ramsay, LinguaLinx, STAR Group, Systran, and Vasont Systems. A representative from each company answers three questions:

What role does your company play in the global content value chain?
Why did you elect to sponsor Gilbane’s research?
What was the most compelling or interesting result to come out of the research?

Readers will be able to comment on the interviews and ask questions of the supplier. We’ll post answers that are appropriate for sharing.

Our first interview with Suzanne Mescan from Vasont will be published next week.

Gilbane at Localization World Silicon Valley

September 4, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

Mary Laplante, Senior Analyst, speaks on the topic of Overcoming Language Afterthought Syndrome:

Gilbane’s 2009 research on multilingual content indicates that global companies are making steady progress towards overcoming language afterthought syndrome – a pattern of treating language requirements as secondary considerations within their content strategies and solutions. This presentation delivers insight into how market-leading companies are adopting content globalization strategies, practices, and infrastructures that position language requirements as integral to end-to-end solutions rather than as ancillary post-processes. The session is designed for content and language professionals and managers who need to know how to bring capabilities like automated translation management, terminology management, multilingual multichannel publishing, and global content management into the mainstream. Takeaways include data and case studies that can be used in business cases to move language requirements out of the back room once and for all.

Localization World Silicon Valley, 20-22 October, Santa Clara Convention Center

Multilingual Product Content Research: One Analyst’s Perspective

August 12, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

We’ll soon hit the road to talk about the findings revealed in our new research study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices Into Global Content Value Chains. While working on presentations and abstracts, I found myself needing to be conscious of the distinction between objective and subjective perspectives on the state of content globalization.

As analysts, we try to be rigorously objective when reporting and analyzing research results, using subjective perspective sparingly, with solid justification and disclaimer. We focus on the data we gather and on what it tells us about the state of practice. When we wrapped up the multilingual product content study earlier this summer, Leonor, Karl, and I gave ourselves the luxury of concluding the report with a few paragraphs expressing our own personal opinions on the state of content globalization practices. Before we put on our analyst game face and speak from that objective perspective, we thought it would be useful to share our personal perspectives as context for readers who might attend a Gilbane presentation or webinar this fall.

Here are my thoughts on market readiness, as published in the conclusion of Multilingual Product Content:

Gilbane Group Releases New Study on Multilingual Product Content

July 28, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

For Immediate Release

Pioneering Research Describes Transformation of Technical Communications Practices to Align More Closely With Global Business Objectives

Cambridge, MA, July 28 — Gilbane Group, Inc., the analyst and consulting firm focused on content technologies and their application to high-value business solutions, today announced the publication of its latest research, Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices Into Global Content Value Chains.

The report is backed by in-depth qualitative research on how global businesses are creating, managing, and publishing multilingual product content. The study extends Gilbane’s 2008 research on multilingual business communications with a close look at the strategies, practices, and infrastructures specific to product content.

The research clearly shows a pervasive enterprise requirement for product content initiatives to tangibly improve global customer experience. Respondents from a mix of technical documentation, customer support, localization/translation, and training departments indicate that “global-ready technology architectures” are the second most often cited ROI factor to meet the directive. All respondents view single-sourcing strategies and self-help customer support applications as the two most important initiatives to align product content with global business objectives.

“Successful business cases for product content globalization address top-line issues relevant to corporate business goals while tackling bottom-line process improvements that will deliver cost savings,” commented Leonor Ciarlone, Senior Analyst, Gilbane Group, and program lead for Multilingual Product Content. “Our research shows that while multilingual content technologies are clearly ROI enablers, other factors influence sustainable results. Cross-departmental collaboration and overarching business processes, cited as essential improvements by 70% and 82% of respondents respectively, are critical to transforming traditional practices.”

Multilingual Product Content is the first substantive report on the state of end-to-end product content globalization practices from multiple perspectives. “Gilbane’s latest research continues to show both language and content professionals how the well-managed intersection of their domains is becoming best practice,” said Donna Parrish, Editor, MultiLingual magazine. “With practical insights and real experiences in the profiles, this study will serve as a valuable guide for organizations delivering technical documentation, training, and customer support in international markets.”

The report covers business and operational issues, including the evolving role of service providers as strategic partners; trends in authoring for quality at the source, content management and translation management integration, machine translation, and terminology management; and progress towards developing metrics for measuring the business impact of multilingual content. Profiles of leading practioners in high tech, manufacturing, automotive, and public sector/education are featured in the study.

Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices Into Global Content Value Chains is available as a free download from the Gilbane Group website at https://gilbane.com. The report is also available from study sponsors Acrolinx, Jonckers, Lasselle-Ramsay, LinguaLinx, STAR Group, Systran, and Vasont Systems.

About Gilbane Group

Gilbane Group, Inc., is an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of information technologies since 1987. We have helped organizations of all sizes from a wide variety of industries and governments. We work with the entire community of stakeholders including investors, enterprise buyers of IT, technology suppliers, and other analyst firms. We have organized over 70 educational conferences in North America and Europe. Our next event if Gilbane Boston, 1-3 December 2009, http://gilbaneboston.com. Information about our newsletter, reports, white papers, case studies, and blogs is available at https://gilbane.com. Follow Gilbane Group on Twitter at http://twitter.com/gilbane.

Contact:
Gilbane Group, Inc.
Ralph Marto, +1.617.497.0443 xt 117
ralph@gilbane.com

SDL Scores with SDL XySoft

July 1, 2009 / Mary Laplante / 0 Comments

SDL continues its ambitious build-out of technology solutions for end-to-end content globalization with its acquisition of XyEnterprise, announced on 29 June. From Gilbane’s perspective, it’s a win all the way around, especially for buyers who continue to seek solutions for the more difficult obstacles to multilingual, multichannel publishing.

The vendors win. The acquisition brings immediate scale to both XyEnterprise and SDL Trisoft. Both companies were having to work really hard to reach the next level, and both were at risk of very slow progress through organic growth. The deep expertise and market focus of each company are highly complementary–SDL Trisoft with DITA and high tech, XyEnterprise with S100D in aviation and aerospace and a proven track record in commercial publishing. SDL Trisoft gets solid North American support and professional services organizations, and XyEnterprise gains the ability to better serve customers in Europe.

Buyers and customers win. First, the consolidation of two of the leading suppliers of component content management gives buyers a new comfort level with vendor viability. Second, efficient, affordable multilingual, multichannel publishing remains a very expensive obstacle for many global 2000 companies. In Gilbane’s new research on Multilingual Product Content, we identify the multilingual multiplier–costs that are solely the result of producing formatted content in another language. SDL XySoft will be able to address the multiplier problem with tight integration of the XyEnterprise XPP publishing engine, which has been a true differentiatior for Xy throughout its history. Third, existing and new customers will benefit from the extensive combined experience that SDL XySoft has in complex, standards-based publishing and content management.

The acquisition is also an opportunity to reinforce the core value propostions for XML and component content management. These technologies and practices sit at the nexus of a set of knotty problems: reusing content across applications, repurposing content for different outputs, and translating content for multiple global audiences. A single-vendor, integrated solution that addresses these problems is more evidence that the market is finally making progress towards overcoming the language after-thought syndrome, identified in Gilbane’s new study. Such solutions support the trend towards the:

“. . . steady adoption of content globalization strategies, practices, and infrastructures that position language requirements as integral to end-to-end solutions rather than as ancillary post-processes.” — Multilingual Product Content, Gilbane Group, 2009

This acquisition should be relatively easy for SDL to absorb, as there’s already an established business unit into which Xy’s capabilities fit (in contrast to SDL’s acquisitions of Trisoft and Tridion, which were completely new businesses for SDL). In addition, SDL XySoft has a proven leader in former XyEnterprise president and CEO Kevin Duffy. Duffy takes the role of XySoft CEO, reporting directly to SDL Chairman and CEO Mark Lancaster. Duffy managed to build a small niche software company into a respected player in its market, surviving through good and bad times. He now get his chance to see what’s possible with the resources of a global organization behind him.

See the SDL press release and the XyEnterprise press release for more information. Gilbane’s study on Multilingual Product Content: Transforming Traditional Practices Into Global Content Value Chains will be published on the Gilbane site in mid-July. The report is currently available through study sponsors Acrolinx, Jonckers, Lasselle-Ramsay, LinguaLinx, STAR, Systran, and Vasont.