#futureWCM – some thoughts from China – part 4

Just to add some context to the next post…

For the first few years of this decade I was immersed in an Enterprise Content Management project for a global products company. For the last couple of years of this decade I have also been immersed in web/enterprise content management for global products companies.

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Therefore, as we come to the end of another decade and the first of the 21^st century my thoughts are turning to the progress that’s been made over the last ten years and if I was writing this blog in 2020 (as from its title you may guess I intend to) what would I be saying about the next ten years of progress?

Ten years ago, the company I was working for was spending in the region of $25 million to consolidate its many external and internal websites onto one consistent platform and empower the subject matter experts around the organisation to create and manage content for themselves. There were great ambitions to be able to deliver highly personalised content and use the web as a dynamic multi-channel publishing tool that would create PDF documents on the fly based on the web visitors specified preferences.

The consolidation worked well and came at a crucial time as technology markets started to collapse and the dotcom boom turned to bust. The ambitious and complex personalisation efforts were abandoned completely and as far as I can see today were never resurrected.

Fast forward to the end of the decade, the global projects I have been working on are a fraction of the budget (around $1-2 million) but have been achieving the same types of results in terms of website consolidation and functionality. However, I am experiencing some of the same issues I did 10 years ago that call into question how far we’ve actually come in that time.

When you are responsible for managing websites, global or otherwise, the degree to which you can empower others around the organisation to create and manage content is the top concern because all other aspects of web management and marketing are ultimately dependent on this. Consider for a moment all of the debate and hype currently being generated around ‘social media’. The best way for a product manufacturer to achieve positive sentiment on the social web is to focus on producing products and associated services that deliver on their promise of performance and reliability and will be talked about for those reasons and not any negative aspects. Getting the information management right both inside and outside the organisation is crucial to this.

So, ten years on, is this getting any easier? Well, yes and no. In general the tools have become more non-technically focused and generation shifts mean that the younger employees are more web savvy. However, I still think that the deep dependence on Microsoft’s largely disconnected desktop environment that is so ingrained in many organisations is hindering rather than helping progress in content management. Too often, the web is still seen as an activity that ‘someone else does’, that it is too technically complex for everyday business folks to get involved with and that responsibilities for it come in addition to people’s day jobs. Web Content Management in particular sits in too much of a separate domain which still leads to considerable duplication of content and effort.

Over the next ten years I’d really like to see organisations really focusing on breaking their Microsoft Office dependence and beginning more of their content creation and management processes online rather than having to go through lengthy re-purposing exercises to make that content useful on the web. There is undoubtedly a place for ‘social web’ style publishing processes within organisations once the downsides of such approaches have been fully exposed on the wider web but these will entail major IT and cultural change programmes that will typically take years not months to push through

The CMS providers who successfully address the concerns of the IT department for secure, reliable, robust and supportable solutions with the non-technical ease of use exhibited by the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are poised to win and deep down I’m really hoping this isn’t Microsoft SharePoint, simply because I think SharePoint continues to be a counterproductive information management approach that is designed to safeguard Microsoft’s desktop application monopoly.

In 15 years of content management projects from enterprise to medium to small companies I can’t remember ever initiating or participating in a content related workflow. Now that it’s become commonplace to publish anything and everything to the web through social media tools it seems unlikely that I ever will.

However, thinking ahead, this is an area that could well turn on its head during the next 10 years as we climb the slope of enlightenment. The more I get under the covers of social media, the more I think that organisations need to play a very cautious game here. This may well be contrary to the hyped-up view of greater transparency and openness that’s currently pervasive but then after so many years of hype exposure I’m more inclined to turn against the herd view these days.

A Global Web Managers Wish List…

The cost-effective globalisation capabilities of EPiServer (with a touch more object orientation and shared content support but maintaining the traditional site tree mental model)

The image management and manipulation capabilities of Flickr, expanded to support the video capacity and capability of YouTube

Non-technical creation and management of rich media illustrated by 10CMS

Article creation and management with the simplicity of WordPress and document capabilities of Google Docs

A microsite creation capability with the simplicity of WordPress but within the globalised framework of EPiServer

Module/application development and integration with the breadth of Joomla and simplicity of Facebook

Collaborative site building with the breadth of SharePoint but the simplicity of Google Apps and WCM connectivity of Alterian

Community site building breadth of Drupal with simplicity of Community Server

A content repository that works with the speed and accuracy of Gmail that could auto-categorise and make related content recommendations on the fly

Google Analytics expanded to incorporate social media monitoring – as I want to keep all analytics in context

An internal relationship building and knowledge sharing capability illustrated by Twitter

#futureWCM – some thoughts from China – part 3

Microsoft and Google featured strongly in my last post because in thinking about how web content management may develop over the next decade, the big battle for hearts and minds these organisations are engaged in will continue to shape WCM because they touch so many aspects of the content process. A personal view I’ve held for a number of years now is that Microsoft’s understandable efforts to protect the desktop worldview that it earns the bulk of its revenue from has been doing WCM a disservice and products such as SharePoint continue to distract us from smarter ways of doing things. Conversely, Google appears to be accelerating its pace of development in exciting and innovative ways. Its services are superb for small to medium businesses and I welcome its ongoing efforts to usurp Microsoft’s desktop dominance in larger organisations.

Many WCM and ECM developments of the last 15 years have been skewed towards Microsoft’s desktop PC view of the world and, for the sake of ubiquity, we have complied with this worldview and happily made WCM products that look like Microsoft’s desktop apps (because that’s what most people are familiar with using), connected to them or integrated them while being at its mercy with sometimes flaky support for broader standards such as WebDAV or having to get to grips with it’s particular way of doing things such as extensive use of CAML in SharePoint.

Google has been making steady progress in pushing the humble web browser forward to accomplish ever more sophisticated computing application tasks. Recent developments have highlighted progress in these areas. Google Wave and a new range of Google Apps site templates illustrate the company’s play for Microsoft’s stronghold of business collaboration. Reading Don Dodge’s recent blog post following his departure from Microsoft to Google and looking beyond the slightly acrimonious tone of some of it, the words he chose to describe the development of Google docs hit at the heart of Microsoft’s perceived weaknesses and Google’s strengths.

Personally I welcome these developments and have felt frustrated at the time it’s taking to shift from an information management approach that has clearly had it’s day and to a web first one that makes so much sense in an always on, always connected world.

For a number of years now I’ve been emphasising the importance of context in the content management process and while in a Product Management and Strategy role a few years ago, was focused for a time on visualising just the kind of connected and collaborative process now being illustrated by Google Wave. At the time we were looking at how web based application developers such as Zoho were innovating word processing in a browser based environment, recognising that new thinking should be applied rather than replicating old thinking on a new delivery platform.

#futureWCM – some thoughts from China – part 2

1^st generation web content management was driven by the US and the desire for the dominant global organisations of the 90’s to embrace the commercial opportunities offered by the web

2^nd generation web content management was driven to a large extent by Europe and Scandinavia, who have needed to deal with many more language and cultural challenges across all types and tiers of organisations

3^rd generation web content management is being driven by web users themselves who have discovered the power of open source community development, online content creation and socially driven communications

4^th generation web content management will be driven by the East – simply because the West doesn’t understand the East well enough. An excellent recent TED presentation here by Devdutt Pattanaik emphasises some aspects of this lack of understanding

I’m not making this observation because I am currently writing this blog in China. My experiences in working for European brands with strong Asian presence in recent years has given me an insight into how business is done in the East at a grass routes level, how and where this is influencing information management requirements and how this is likely to impact web content management.

For product manufacturers, particularly those with some heritage, the web can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it has helped them create effective global sales operations. On the other, it erodes margins and polarises markets – with mass market low-cost products at one end and premium products at the other. The middle ground is not a comfortable place to be in today’s wired economy.

Sitting in meetings here in Hong Kong I have been struck by the contrast of presentations by the marketing folks. The European contingent’s slides are often peppered with the phrase ‘no internet’ – referring to efforts to prevent high-end, premium products being subjected to a price-led web war. So the unease in the room was apparent when the Chinese marketing folks presented. In contrast, their presentations were almost entirely about the web and it’s hard to forget that almost every single product being discussed, including competitive ones, is manufactured in China.

The more I listened, the more I got a sense of déjà vu. There was a lot of comment about sites like Taobao and Team Buy . Although terms like social networking were being used liberally, the concepts they were talking about, such as ‘team buying’ sounded awfully familiar to web seminars I attended back in the late 90s where start-ups like letsbuyit.com were regular presenters. During the peak of the dotcom boom, their concept of people coming together to push down the price of an item made regular appearances on TV in the form of their ‘ant’ logo.

Letsbuyit.com was a high profile victim of the dotcom bust but it is making a comeback – this time as a membership orientated price comparison site

Given that the great firewall of China is blocking access to some of the familiar names of the ‘social media’ world, it appears there are no shortage of online ‘conversations’ happening amongst the countries many, many millions of web users. It looks like China is continuing to through it’s own dotcom boom within its firewall, with the types of irrational exuberance that continues to be a feature of the western world’s web usage, fueling a boom in online communications and shopping. Regardless of whether this bubble bursts any time soon, I think these developments are significant to the future of the web and web content management in the coming years.

At present, open-source software is not big in China – mainly because extensive pirating means that proprietary software is mainly free too. I imagine that Microsoft, in particular, is quite happy about this as it has helped indoctrinate the world’s largest population into the belief that the only way to operate a computer, deal with content and communicate online is via its software.

From what I’ve heard over here, China has big ambitions in software. Perhaps the recent resignation of Kai-Fu Lee from Google China (who originally headed Microsoft’s Chinese Research operation) indicates things are gathering pace as one imagines he would have the background knowledge and insight to jump into the Chinese tech venture capital space at the right time. If China is to make an impact beyond its firewall, then it needs to look beyond what Google is doing to usurp Microsoft’s desktop computing dominance. The netbook market development driven to a large extent by Taiwan’s ASUS innovations has often been described as a threat to Microsoft’s dominance because it has demonstrated that there is an alternative. ASUS and it’s fellow Taiwanese manufacturer Acer’s enthusiasm for netbooks is clear and I understand it shook Microsoft that these innovations were more popular in the western world than it believed they would be.

So, with Chinese companies innovating in hardware, it follows that they’ll be innovating in software, in the first instance to deal with the obvious differences in language and culture close to home and secondly to help create a new world order.

#futureWCM – some thoughts from China – part 1…

…Not much specific Chinese WCM input yet but I’m expecting some over the next few days. The following is just a few initial thoughts from the flight over and being wide awake when I need to be asleep 😦

As another decade is coming to a close and we begin heading towards 2020, there is increasing commentary about the future of Web Content Management and what the next year, 5 years and 10 years might bring forth.

Quite often, looking back and learning lessons from history helps in the process of anticipating what the future might hold. While we can be sure there will be unpredictable developments, we can also be sure that history will repeat itself in one form or another. After-all, the ‘noughties’ has been a decade full of ‘history repeating itself’ – from the Dotcom ( read South Seas) bubble, to long drawn out ‘religious’ wars in ancient lands to another great economic disaster. This last decade would seem to haved showed more than many that the more technologically sophisticated we get and the more electronically connected we become, the faster and more frequently we repeat our historical mistakes.

So, a good place to look back, before looking forward, is to the birth of the ‘Web’ part of Web Content Management and the great works of Tim Berners-Lee.

Aside from Sir Berners-Lee’s association with Dorset UK (where the very best of ‘noughties’ WCM came from of course 😉 ) and his more recent time at Southampton University working on the Semantic Web (I’m trying to put my home town on the map for something other than the Titanic 😉 ) I believe the simplistic essence of his original idea hits at the heart of what Web Content Management, to date, has been all about .

The essence of the WWW is ‘content plus pointers’ and you can pretty much distil the majority of our WCM efforts over the last 10-15 years down to that simple description. Content (documents, text, data, images, video) plus pointers (taxonomy, site navigation, search engines, blogs (chronological pointing), wikis (pointing simplified) )

Through his work on the semantic web, Berners-Lee has described the WWW transitioning into the GGG (Giant Global Graph). Spookily enough, when you read more about graph theory, one word stands out – the ‘Matrix’.

However, prophetic film making aside, the simple description of the GGG is ‘content plus pointers plus relationships plus descriptions’

Twitter, for example, distils down nicely into this description. 140 characters can provide surprisingly valuable content – it is the best content ‘pointing’ tool yet devised (because of the following 2 points) – relationships between content and pointers are visible and can be analysed – and the content, it’s context and relevancy, is often described well – by humans rather than metadata.

But, like any first mover in the technology space, Twitter is gaining critical mass but also generating considerable hype. I think that looking beyond this hype and the mechanics that Twitter is illustrating is key to the future of WCM. In part two of this post, I’ll give the reasons for this thought…

Looking beyond Social Media hype…

Since arriving at my current organisation and seemingly the only person in the place with the word ‘web’ in their job title I have become a magnet for a whole bunch of folks, from Marketing and beyond, interested in embarking into the brave new world of Social Media. In fact the CEO himself has said he wants to do more in Web 2.0. When I hear observations that we shouldn’t bother with our current WCM efforts and just use Facebook and Twitter I start to worry. Am I missing something here? Is social media really reaching a level and maturity where we should be concentrating all our information and communication management efforts on it?

Over the last couple of months I’ve learned some interesting things about ‘appliance manufacturing’. The first is that it is a surprisingly cut-throat business, with one manufacturer not hesitating to take another to court over the size and shapes of their knobs (you know what I mean and I kid you not). It’s also not without its fair share of accidents. Each year brings at least a few suitable nominees for the Darwin Awards and I have heard tales of how people have managed to embed all manner of attachments in themselves while trying to clean appliances while they’ve been running and then trying to sue the manufacturer. Some of our customer service people have to use two names because they have received unreasonable and abusive approaches from aggrieved customers. Naturally, email and the web have become prime tools for unhappy customers and ‘social media’ is clearly another potential weapon in the aggrieved’s armory.

So it is in this context that I have been getting ‘hands on’ in social media and trying to understand some of the mechanics from the ground up. If you’ve read much comment on my blog you’ll know that I’ve been exposed to a lot of hype over the last 20 years and, to my shame, been responsible for creating a fair bit too. And let’s not beat about the bush here – there is a hell of a lot of hype around ‘social media’ at the moment – equivalent I think to the ‘one-to-one relationship marketing’ and ‘personalisation’ idealism that helped fuel the original dotcom bubble.

A great example of this is a comment I saw associated with the recent Monitoring Social Media event earlier in the week. “Twitter Doesn’t Create Influence, it Reveals it.” Now, if you read my previous post you’ll see I’ve been conducting an experiment in Twitter influence and trying to understand to what degree it is valid and to what degree it can be manipulated. On last look, I raised my Klout score by 15 points in just over a week. Looking at other influence monitoring tools like TweetLevel I even discovered I had an influence level equivalent to the founder of CMS Watch – an organisation I have admired for years for its incitefulness and ability to get beyond hype in a crowded and complicated industry. A subsequent communication revealed that said founder and I are agreed that Twitter, although providing professional value, is pseudo-reality. My concern is that the more hype is generated around things like Twitter influence, the more the professional usefulness of the tool will be undermined and it will become a haven for the ‘dark side’.

In another communication I received the observation that perhaps these experiments show that “social media expert” is just another word for ‘douchebag’ and interestingly enough a bit of hunting around revealed an excellent resource on all aspects of social media psychology and ‘douchebaggery’. This has led to me questioning that if the ‘dark side’ of social media and Twitter, in particular, is well-known amongst those who are practised in its use, is this sufficient sanction to prevent these mediums descending into the typical expletive ridden slanging matches of a typical YouTube comment stream? Will the age-old adage from the long-standing newsgroup and debate forums of the last decade of “Don’t feed the trolls” work successfully in these newer online communications environments as they reach mass market appeal?

Personally, my recent experiments have revealed to myself that I don’t like being a social media jerk and that fulfilling the guidance offered on some of the sites I’ve read recently is the right way to go. My only hope is that as these environments grow in their popularity and usage that others become similarly enlightened…

Don’t breach trust –

Don’t be a jerk, hater or taker –

Have command over your subject matter –

Listen and respond –

Publish quality content that adds value –

It’s been a rapid learning exercise but I think I can now offer some wiser counsel to those yet to experiment or really understand these newer social media environments and, once again, to those I may have upset in the process, I am sorry. Once again I seem to be fulfilling a repeated purpose in my life “to serve as a warning to others”

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