A few days ago CMS Wire gave me the opporutnity to do a guest post summarizing what happened at Content World, which they published here. I am re posting here as you may find some of the observations inetersting in terms of the trends in web strategies:

Open Text Content World is coming to a close today. Like most user conferences and industry events, I find everyone gets the highest value from connecting with other people. Everyone loves the networking, sharing stories and best practices, bouncing ideas, building friendships and having fun. The breakout sessions and PowerPoint decks are almost secondary.

I would like to share some of my observations from this week resulting from talking to partners, colleagues, customers and friends. These are the topics and trends I identified. 

Focus and Consolidation

Everyone is being tasked to do more with less. Many customers I talked to are considering, in the middle or completing projects to consolidate multiple web properties into one to drive cost savings and have a batter grip on their web strategy.

There is a growing concern that tactical departmental social media deployments can make this problem worse. During a session, I asked the audience how many had made an audit to find how many social media sites existed in their organization, no one raised a hand.

Social Media is Everywhere

I think every single customer I talked to had a strong interest in social media. For most of them, finding a way to leverage social media is becoming a requirement in their organization; and while some companies have had great success others are being cautious about their approach. On one side, there are concerns on compliance, safety, governance and control.

On the other side, applying social media inside the firewall produces very real but also hard to measure or soft results. Everyone seems to agree with the concept we have been promoting since early this year about social media not being a strategy but a tool to support a business strategy. 

Portals are Cool Again

A few months ago, Portal was a term many wanted to avoid: Portals were perceived to be aging technology from the 90’s. Now, I see Portals re-emerging as the operating systems of the enterprise (a term I borrowed from John at Sutro Software)- providing a unified and personalized user interface to multiple applications and information sources.

There was a lot of interest in the vision of the social intranet, which was presented in the general session and a number of breakouts – a vision that is reality at Motorola who shared details of their intranet in one of the event’s favorite sessions.

Convergence

The worlds of Knowledge Management, Portals, Collaboration, Social Media and document management are converging. The lines are blurred. Organizations need modern collaborative processes to get things done and to capture the collective intelligence (and IP) of the organization, they need to make this information safe, meet compliance requirements and provide a simple and integrated user interface for users.

Enterprise 2.0 is Becoming Strategic

The role of many people I talked to was evolving and the value of these solutions to the organization is being recognized. A few years ago collaboration and document management were considered to be IT infrastructure, now with the addition of Enterprise 2.0 elements and other innovations, these solutions are considered key company assets that can transform organizations, impact productivity and directly affect the success of the organization.

Use of Video is Maturing

It was very interesting to hear how the use of video is maturing in large organizations. Video is being used in many ways: as an engaging way to connect with customers and employees, as a training tool, as a universal communications media that does not require translation and as a way to connect more personally with people.

I find that many companies are starting to think about how to more effectively deliver video (one of our customers has 200,000+ people going to their video-enabled intranet home page every morning) and more effective ways to manage video assets from a storage, security and consistency perspective.

If you think about the array of solutions that were talked about in Content World (from WCM and DAM to records management and compliance) it is easy to come to the conclusion that they serve very different use cases and are being implemented in different areas of an organization.

However, when you take it one level higher, everyone at this event was thinking about how to store and manage content (making it safe, compliant, managed and accessible) and how to improve the way people experience and interact with content (make it more personal, relevant, social and pervasive).

Storing and Managing Content

To me, storing and managing content is something companies have to do. The biggest value and potential for impact in an organization, however, is in improving the way people experience and interact with content.

That is what is unique. And hard. And difficult to measure. But also very exciting. This is where social media, widgets, rich media, personalization, mobility, content recommendations and other exciting technologies can help. Inside and outside the firewall.

The Present and the Future

A summary of the event would not be complete without talking about VCM 8. It is a major release. There are too many stories to tell. Which goes back to my first point about how people get the most value of these event by learning from each other

A little bit off topic – one of my favorite cartoons making fun of our coffee dependency

Online marketers, like most other professionals, are expected to do more with less – especially in challenging  economic times. Onlinemarketers are trying to find out how to increase Web site and campaign effectiveness, which can be measured in terms of unique visitors, click-throughs or leads. Marketers in eCommerce companies have a bit more focused goals, focusing on conversions and average order value, often acheved via up-selling and cross-selling.

Key to meeting these objectives is to ensure people visiting your Web site or receive email communications from your company are presented with the most useful information and the most powerful offers for them. In this quest of finding the best message, the best offer, the best banner ad, marketers have tried a number of different tools from personalization to analytics to a/b testing. It is easy to get too exited about these tools, but at the end of the day, it is critical to understand these are only tools to improve relevance.

Relevance is the key to Web site effectiveness. But how to make your messages more relevant? Most studies show Web site visitors have very limited patience: if they can’t find what they need in three clicks, they are gone. This means you have one or two chances to give each individual customer exactly what he or she is looking for: the product they want, the answer to the question they have, the information they need. This post aims to provide an overview of the tools available to increase relevance.

The first step is Analytics. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Analytics can tell you how many people are visiting each page or consume each of the resources that you make available  on your site, what are the most common click-through paths, exit pages and many other useful data points. Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have the people or the time to properly study the analytics data to derive business insight and to act on this insight. maybe because it is hard to show ROI for these activities outside of media and online commerce.

One of my favorite phrases is “Your opinion (as a marketer), while interesting, is irrelevant“. No matter how smart you are, you can only guess what will be most attractive for your customers. therefore, one of the fundamental principles of marketing communications is to test everything. In this age it is inconceivable to run a banner ad without at least testing a few messages. Testing multiple messages takes very little effort and, in my experience, the results often surprise you. When testing 4 or 5 different banner ads, it is not uncommon to find a 5x difference in performance. The same applies to direct mail, email promotions, etc.

But testing banner ads and messages manually is very time consuming, although certainly worthwhile for large campaigns. This is where a/b testing comes in. A/B testing tools automate the process of presenting multiple offers to customers, sometimes based on a specific segment, reporting results in real time and adapting your site to use the message that proved to be most effective in tests.

MVT Testing take this concept further by testing multiple variables: message, color, position, offer, etc. – and all their possible permutations. MVTcan be incredibly powerful to fine-tune offers and promotions in any website. As good as they are, adoption of A/B and MVT tools has been very limited, mostly in eCommerce companies. As with analytics, resourcing is part of the problem.

A/B and MVT have their own challenges: First, it is still for the most part a manual process. Second, you could be testing all the wrong things – the process still requires someone to decide what messages or what elements to test. Last, these tools require some time to run (the more variables in play the longer it takes for MVT to produce statistically-valid results) and they are focused on past behavior.

This is where a new breed of tools come in: Content Recommendations, offered by companies like Vignette, Omniture, Loomia and others. While there are differences between how these products work, the fundamental premise is the same: to observe customer behavior, and to automatically determine what is the most relevant content, product or offer for a particular customer based on what similar customers have found to be useful.

A short story to illustrate: An architect builds an office complex with multiple buildings a parking garage, a cafeteria and other services.  The buildings open to the tenants but there are no concrete pathways between buildings, the architect has left all the open space covered in grass. After a few weeks, the paths that people take to go from one building to the other are clear from the wear in the grass. Over time, the grass is gone in these paths. The architect then paves thee paths with concrete. He did not try to guess which way people would walk. He observed and acted on actual behavior. Recommendation technologies pave the path between website visitors and the content they want.

Now a specific example: An online tax service is trying to make their website more useful. During tax season, many customers would go to their site and look for “Form 1099″. Traditional search tools would use a keyword-based algorithm to find the web pages and documents where the keyword “Form 1099″ occurred more often. Instead, Recommendations technology observes that most visitors who type “form 1099″ in the search box actually end up opening, downloading and printing a file called IRS1099-A.pdf and then spend some time in a page labeled “how to fill your tax return”, so it presents these two resources at the top of the search results, even though the keyword may not even appear i the actual page or file. This scenario is what is being called social search.

Another advantage of Recommendations is that it can adapt in almost real-time to changes. Imagine a celebrity appearing on TV on a Friday afternoon wearing some very chic aluminum sunglasses. Everyone who is watching the TV show wants to buy these sunglasses. The first visitors to your eCommerce site would have to navigate a bit to find the exact product, but after a few visitors buy the item, recommendations technology “paves” the way for other visitors, a process that could take minutes. Your analytics person or campaign marketer could be asleep or on vacation and recommendations technology has learned from customers  and adapted the site to show the now very hot item in the most prominent position.

As with any new technology, there are differences between the offerings from recommendation technology vendors. There are a couple key aspects to consider when evaluating them:

• The observation technology – it can go from the very simple (clicks-based) to te very advanced (some measure over 30 heuristics).
• The algorithm to determine what to recommend – some call it the wisdom of crowds engine
• How similar visitors are grouped – behavioral segmentation and integration with your explicit profile data
• Content database – how it is organized, categorized and updated as items become available or are retired
• Presentation model – how the recommendations are integrated into your overall website experience

This is very exciting technology that is likely to produce big results for most web sites who implement the technology but more importantly for customers in general.

I just read this blog post which starts with a very bold statement “SaaS adoption will move beyond the “Tipping Point” in 2009”.  .  Countless analysts’ reports have prophesized about the explosive growth of applications delivered under a SaaS model for some time now. The reality is that adoption of software via this on-demand model has been quite limited (outside of CRM, thanks to Salesforce.com).

Sometimes it seems like the IT industry is looking for the next big acronym that will revolutionize the way we look at technology. In reality, customers and IT departments are much more cautious than what most vendors and analysts would like them to.

While not exactly the same, there are very few differences between SaaS and the ASP model that was the vogue in the late 90’s. Where is the money? The Forrester slide in the aforementioned blog shows 24% of companies are “interested in SaaS’.  There is a difference between being “interested” and signing a check.

First, I think it is important to understand SaaS is a delivery model that can be broken down into multiple components: hosted offering (off premise), monthly billing based on use, small or non-existent upfront cost and quick deployment. This in contrast with the “traditional” software deployment licensed as a perpetual license, deployed on-premise by the IT department and variable deployment times.

Most SaaS offerings are available to purchase online via a credit card with self provisioning. To enable these self-provisioning and instant-on capabilities, SaaS offerings are usually templetized with limited options. Integration with other systems is not as flexible as with a traditional on-premise solution. I say mostly because there is a wide range of vendors with different models. To support many customers from each server, SaaS vendors usually require multi-tenancy.

In my humble opinion, the SaaS model is not nearly as important as the evolution in the market towards managed services. What is the difference? Managed services are also hosted off-premise by a vendor that also provides software deployment, management and maintenance.  In other words, a managed services vendor takes the pain from IT hosting and managing a discrete piece of infrastructure. If you look at Salesforce.com in terms of implementation costs and resources it probably looks more like a managed service than a true SaaS model.

Let’s look at email as an ideal candidate to move off on-premise IT. Most It departments see e-mail as a business critical service from It but also as a solution that is pretty standard in terms of the ability for It to add value.  Microsoft Exchange Server has a very large and growing market share (70-80%) and is used everywhere from small companies (licensed as part of Microsoft Small Business Server for organizations with 5 users or more) to the largest enterprises.

There are two markets for off-premise Exchange services: Hosted Exchange (SaaS) and Managed Exchange.

Given the advantages of hosted Exchange in terms of cost, availability and security most in the industry (myself included) expected droves of small and medium businesses to go to Hosted Exchange. Microsoft had hundreds of Hosted Exchange partners – from companies like 4smartphone.net  to USA.Net to Microsoft’s own Exchange Online offer. Yet, despite effort from Microsoft and all these partners, adoption had been very limited.

Managed Exchange is a different story. Vendors like HP, EDS and AT&T hosts millions of email inboxes for the world’s largest companies but not in a SaaS model. They manage their Exchange servers on their behalf, with a team of certified Microsoft Exchange IT experts in a datacenter. There is no multi-tenancy, each customer is likely to have a cluster of dedicated Exchange servers. There is no online self-procurement: these are multi-million services deals done in person.

What is my point? Analyzing this data, one can come to a couple conclusions:

• The SaaS model is especially attractive for the SMB space.
• Yet it has failed to gain the traction that the industry expected .
• There are very few success stories outside of CRM. I can’t think of many successful and profitable SaaS vendors. Omniture, Salesforce.com, who else? WordPress?
• The SaaS model still has many challenges ahead:
  • Information security perceptions – would you trust all your information to Google Apps and Google Mail? Many CIOs I have talked to would not.
  • SaaS software deployment model has its own challenges: it  can break things  
  • Reliability (SLAs) – the best example is the 38 minute Salesforce.com outage this January    (do a search on “salesforce outage” results in over 100,000 hits)
• The Managed Services model, on the other hand, is very successful and gaining momentum.
• Many large IT organizations are offloading core low-value IT services like email to managed services vendors.
• In other words, while SaaS is not being adopted as fast as everyone though, Managed Services have reached critical mass and are already a significant business.

Enterprise 2.0 is one of those buzzwords that is looking for a definition. In my mind, it referes to the application of Web 2.0 ideas, processes and technologies to inside the company – to the intranet and the extranet.

I am presenting on June 10th for the Technology Executives Club on this topic. These are my slides for the webcast.

Back in March I blogged about how to use Video.  In the May edition of B2B magazine there is a short interview with Jeremy Allaire who makes a few points that are very consistent with my post:

• The challenges of using YouTube as your primary video strategy: loss of control, experience and limited engagement.
• Leverage YouTube to reach customers, then bring them to your own site where you control the experience.
• Taking advantage of syndication to social networks (i.e. YouTube)
• Adding very clear calls to action to send uses back to your site
• The importance of metrics

i am not suggeting Jeremy read my blog and stole my ideas (I would be honored, he has been an industry visionary for years. I have been tracking him since the early days of Cold Fusion), just pointing out there is validation from an industry expert of these concepts.

Our fantastic Social Media Strategist, Dirk Shaw has a very interesting blog post about earned content. We have been chatting about how companies need to develop a content marketing strategy that includes content aggregation as well as content syndication.

If you are interested in learning more about social media you should follow Dirk at @dirkmshaw and you may find the white paper I wrote on Enterprise Social Media Strategies interesting.

 Last week at Web 2.0 I presented a session titled The Social Media Trilogy: Three Vital Components for Building a Successful Online Strategy.

The room was designed for 250 held well over 350 and some people were turned away. It looks like this is a topc of interest for most organizations, probably because of the immaturity of this model, which is one of the topics in the presentation. I posted my deck on slideshare.

I am writing a white paper that expands on the presentation and provides a bit more detail as well as social media guidelines and other resources. To get both the white paper and a PDF of the slides please register at www.vignette.com/citizen

There is no question about the importance of video as a key component of a marketing strategy.  We live in the age of the video-centric Web.

There are opportunities and dangers in using YouTube as a marketing tool.  First, it is important to understand the profile of the typical YouTube visitor. By looking at the most viewed videos, I think it is safe to assume most people spending time on YouTube are teens looking for entertainment – music videos, comedy or funny videos. This is not to say that is the only demographic using it.

The opportunity is to use YouTube as a distribution mechanism to fish for customers. The danger is in using it as your video platform. Let me explain:

There are a number of problems with embedding your own YouTube videos on your own Web site: Google may insert contextual advertising about your competitors and customers can click on the video to be taken to YouTube.com where they can get lost watching at Coke and Mentos videos, forgetting why they went to your site in the first place. In other words, you don’t control the experience. Any medium to large company probably is going to have to manage dozens or hundreds of videos, and you need a better way to manage those videos, to understand who and how they are viewed and to connect them with other resources on your site in a synergistic way.

You can’t do this with You Tube. You probably need a video platform that provides all these capabilities. You need to own your Video experience, because Video is as important as any content on your site.  This is why we built Vignette Video Services, to help companies who want to take control of their video strategy.  

The opportunity is to use YouTube as a channel to fish for customers. The ideal scenario is the opposite as what I described above: people go from YouTube to your site. Posting your content on YouTube to make it easy for people to find will probably increase your reach and viewership. What you need to accomplish is that at the end of the video customers don’t click on the funny video that Google is promoting but on your site because they need more information or they want to learn more.

At a minimum you should promote your site’s URL at the beginning and end of your video. you may want to create a series of videos and only make the first part of the series available on YouTube, customers would have to go to your site to get the rest of the story.

It is interesting that we live in the age of the video-centric Web, yet most of the industry is still learning how to use it. This tells me Video presents an opportunity to get ahead. It is an opportunity to build a strategy that gives you a competitive advantage.

The question is – what are you doing with Video?

This is a key question every large company has two answer, especially when different groups want to contact customers with messages about training, events, new products, promotions, surveys, etc.

When I was responsible for the Developer audience at Microsoft, I tried to create communication channels that would carry all these messages: the MSDN site, MSDN Flash newsletter, sub-audience specific sites, blogs, etc. But there is always a need for more formal communications that would go via email. The audience owners had to approve any communications going out or any new channels to avoid spamming customers and having a massive number of newsletters. At some point many companies have a discussion about how often they should be sending emails to their customers.

I have seen companies who have a rule about not sending broad emails to the customer base more than once a week. Some companies think it should be every two weeks or every month. Some companies have no rules and every one is free to spam everyone who has ever opted-in. Defining a fixed cadence to contact customers misses the point altogether.

The key for customer communications, either via email, RSS, twitter, fax, etc., is relevance.

Yetserday at the Omniture Summit, Forrester Analyst Emily Riley was sharing how after two years she still enjoys the weekly email newsletter sent by BabyCenter and read it thoroughly because it is relevant – it has information that is useful for her becaus eit has been targeted based on her baby’s age.

But when I get emails from a similar site (to remain unnamed) those emails are spam. My two daughters are 7 and 9, I don’t care about pretty much baby anything, the communcation is not relevant. Now, if the company had a Pre-Teen Parent newsletter, I might be interested. After all, they have my information, my permission (I haven’t opted out, my bad) and the exact age of my two daughters. Whay wouldn’t these companies continue to provide relevant information to parents as they grow? from diapers to cell phones and college.

If I am a developer heads down on a project or trying to understand a technology, I will dig every piece of relevant, useful information you send my way. If the information is useful, I will be grateful for that information even if I get an email every single day, scoring points for your brand. But if you send me information that is not targeted, relevant and useful, then every email is spam even if I only get one every leap year.

Content is King, Relevance is the Crown that makes Content the King.

This is the holy grail for entrepreneurs and employees. How to be successful.

I have thought long about the key to success and I have been asked often about what makes people successful. I have my own credo (maybe for another post) but I found this video to be pretty close to what I believe the keys to succes are. A video well worth spending 4 minutes watching.

Seth Godin blogged about the same topic this week . malcom Gladwell wrote about 10,000 hours of effort being the magic number for being successful. Seth disagrees.

“You win when you become the best in the world, however ‘best’ and ‘world’ are defined by your market. In many mature markets, it takes 10,000 hours of preparation to win because most people give up after 5,000 hours. That’s the only magic thing about 10k… it’s a hard number to reach, so most people bail.

Yo Yo Ma isn’t perfect… he’s just better than everyone else. He pushed through the Dip that others chose not to. I’m guessing that there are endeavors (like being CEO of a Fortune 500 company or partner at a big law firm) where the rewards are so huge that the number is closer to 20,000 hours or more to get through the Dip.

But, ready for this? The Dip is much closer in niche areas, new areas, unexplored areas. You can get through the Dip in an online network or with a new kind of music because being seen as the best in that area is easier (at least for now). You can get through the Dip as a real estate broker in a new, growing town a lot quicker than someone in midtown Manhattan. The competition is thinner and probably less motivated. “