Category: Content management & strategy (Page 116 of 468)

Hi, I’m Ian Truscott and as you may have seen I’ve recently joined our WCM practice (you can get a bit of introduction to me here) – I am pleased to say this is my first blog post (hopefully of many) for Gilbane.

It’s an exciting time for this segment of the CMS industry and to be joining Gilbane and I am looking forward to sharing my passion for web engagement – hence the unashamedly buzz word laden title.

Depending on the commentator; we are either in a social media age, or we are post the social media revolution – in either case the Internet is no longer an extension of the traditional passive consumption media channels, it is a place where information and brand consumers get involved.

In fact, folks are now arguing that it’s no longer ‘social’ it’s just ‘media’ – the way we create, consume and socialize content has changed forever and for everyone. And of course, there is so much of it – how do you make your message stick?

This has mean’t a shift in focus for our industry, we’ve seen the age of the IT developers platform, been through the focus on ‘easy to use’ for content contributors to now – where being audience centric has become mainstream thinking (and a business imperative).

This has spawned a number of descriptions for this extension of WCM and the tools and practices we need to apply to become audience centric, including Persuasive Content, Web Experience Management, Customer Engagement or Web Engagement.

All of these have something in common; a cycle of listening to the audience, understanding their needs and behaviour, using that to create and optimize content and some form of relevance based delivery.

At it’s simplest, from a tools perspective – it’s the intersection of WCM, web analytics and personalized delivery. But it gets more complex,  with the inclusion of social media, CRM, marketing automation, e-mail, mobile delivery, auto-categorization, search – this list can go on.

Yes, you can throw the kitchen sink at this one – but software and industry best practices are being aligned, for sound business reasons and they are aligning behind the audience, the citizen, the consumer.. you in fact.

I’m going to finish on a couple of quotes from Frank Gilbane – from the foreword to ‘Web Engagement’ by Bill Zoellick (a book I’ve enjoyed for a while):

The most unique characteristic of the web is in the way that it changes the relationship between your business and it’s customers.

You will not be able to take advantage … and know your customers without engaging them in a way that encourages them to share information with you. 

Engaging your customers requires understanding the new tools and data that are available and applying them in a way that nurtures a new level of trust. 

Not just saying that to be nice to the boss (although it can’t do any harm!), or to point out that the book was authored by a Gilbane alumnus – I think the most relevant part of the quote is the date that Frank wrote that foreword – it was February 2000.

Hence my excitement in joining Gilbane, a firm that has a great, long standing pedigree as an authority on web engagement, which is, as I say, my passion and I look forward to the privilegeof contributing to that.

Interested in reading more on Web Engagement? – I suggest reading this White Paper by Mary Laplante or check out our guide for marketers at Gilbane San Francisco – where our speakers will be discussing a lot of the subjects I touch on here.  

I am very happy to announce the addition of Ian Truscott to our team as a Gilbane Group Senior Analyst based in London. We have had customers in Europe for many years and have wanted to expand our business with a local presence, so Ian is an especially welcome addition. Ian’s focus will be on Web Content Management, which remains our largest area of consulting, and has become even more important with the increasing influence and activity of enterprise marketing in web content strategies and purchases.

Ian comes to us from Alterian, where he was VP, WCM Product Strategy. Alterian sells a platform that combines web content management, marketing campaign management and social media monitoring tools.

A little more on Ian from his summary on LinkedIn:
“… fifteen years of enterprise software experience, ten of which working with web content management. This experience has come as a CTO, in product marketing, product development, sales and consulting – from starting my career as a computer operator and UNIX administrator. A strong web content management pedigree, having focused on web technologies for the last ten years, working with some of the major vendors and pioneers in this area. During this time I have taken various products to market, engaging with a broad range of organisations (including McDonalds, Diageo, AstraZeneca, WWE and Glaxo) and large central government departments while living and working in the USA and UK. ”

You can reach Ian at: ian@gilbane.com, or: +44 (0) 203 137 9600. Ian is an active Twitterer at @iantruscott. You can also meet Ian if you will be at our conference in San Francisco in May. You might even find Ian together with our Senior Analyst Scott Liewehr in the hotel pub amid a gaggle of other CMS industry insiders.

Welcome Ian!

(Disclosure: Alterian has been a Gilbane client, and in keeping with our strict vendor neutral policy and our ethics policy regarding clients, Alterian was fully supportive of Ian joining us, and Ian has sold all his shares in the company.)

The term Cloud Content Management has begun to appear with increasing frequency in the last few months. But what does it mean? And how is it different from Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?

Gilbane Group answers these questions in our latest Beacon, which it titled Cloud Content Management: Facilitating Controlled Sharing of Active Content. Here is how we briefly define Cloud Content Management and contrast it to ECM:

“Cloud Content Management is an emerging set of content sharing and management
practices and a supporting category of software built on an open, secure, cloud-based
platform. It is rapidly deployed and easily used to manage content, in any format, that is
actively shared among collaborators working both inside and across firewalls. Cloud
Content Management is complementary to Enterprise Content Management, which is more
focused on controlling access to static, unstructured content in TIFF, PDF, and office
productivity document formats as it is electronically captured, stored, distributed,
archived, and disposed.”

The Gilbane Beacon explores the various facets of this definition and goes into much more detail as to how Cloud Content Management differs from, and complements, ECM. We urge you to download the Beacon (free registration required), read it, then return here to share comments.

When working with enterprise clients, we are inevitably involved in helping our operational champions sell investments in content globalization practices and infrastructures. Sometimes business case support is a formal part of the engagement, and sometimes it just evolves as part of what we do to help companies create competitive advantage with content in multiple languages.

In a recent joint Gilbane/SDL webinar, we made the point that the last pitch to top executives — the one required to seal the deal for funding — is fundamentally different from the others made along the way. If you’ve made it to the executive suite, you’ve done a good job so far. But too often, we’ve seen clients fail to secure investment because they use the same approach to selling that’s enabled them to pass through the previous gates. Some common points of failure when selling globalization technology to executives include:

• Investment focus that is too tactical.
• Poorly expressed pain points.
• Lack of strategic value proposition tied to the top line.
• Vague ROI.
• No vision that ensures sponsorship and ongoing support beyond the initial project.

These points of failure can be addressed by recognizing that the funding conversation with executives is truly different, and by restructuring the approach to presenting the value propositions related to the investment you’re seeking. For the webinar, we developed a value-oriented framework for selling globalization technology within the highest levels of the organization. Its four components, as illustrated above, can guide you through the process of creating and delivering an executive sales pitch biased for success. We used the framework to examine six ways to recast an executive sales pitch. We backed up brief analyses of weak and strong answers with data from Gilbane research and real-world customer experiences.

The recorded webinar is now available on the SDL website.

Congratulations to recently elected officers, and to new CM Pros board members Saravanan Rajan, Brett Zucker and Ian Truscott!

Content Management is often loosely defined but covers a virtual ecosystem of vendors and practitioners. The 2010 CM Pros board extends a call to the community of practitioners to further define product niches and areas of specialist expertise. The goal is to guide the market and the people that look to CM Pros.

Board-appointed officers for the coming year are:

• Scott Liewehr, President (Senior WCM Consultant at Gilbane Group and Principal at onesta)
• Saravanan Rajan, Vice President (Chief Technology Officer for CoSI Consulting)
• Ayse Kok, Secretary (PhD Student, ICT Consultant, and Researcher)
• Brett Zucker, Treasurer (Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer at Bridgeline Software)
• Ian Truscott, Director (Product Strategist, Alterian)

Look for action from this board as they gear up for a full season of activities that will engage the Content Management community. Be sure to join CM Pros at their Spring Summit at The Gilbane Conference (http://gilbanesf.com), May 18 in San Francisco.

About CM Professionals
Founded in 2004, CM Pros provides information, expertise, and support to global content management practitioners and related professionals and the organizations they serve. Through peer-to-peer knowledge exchange, educational events, and advocacy of respected practices, the association fosters a better understanding of this critically important discipline.

Join CM Pros on the Web at www.cmprofessionals.org.