If there are two things modern comms technologies have taught us, it is the power and danger of herd behaviour and that if something can be manipulated, it will be manipulated.

Despite the enormity of the dotcom boom and bust and the even greater enormity of the credit crunch, both of which were driven by technology fueled herd behaviour, we continue to rush headlong into the ‘next big thing’ – until it comes crashing down around our ears again.

Likewise, the massive growth of Google over the last decade has led to the equally massive growth of an industry whose sole purpose is to manipulate Google results.

On social media, the alarm bells are starting to ring for me and I’m getting a sense of ‘unrealness’ that I got working in the midst of the web and telecoms industry at the turn of the century and in watching the ‘financial services’ bubbles growing ever larger in more recent years.

Two experiences in the last week have added to that sense of unrealness. The first is playing about with Klout and the second is looking deeper at emerging areas of ‘sentiment’ monitoring.  Twitter influence and social media sentiment are on my radar in terms of web strategy but, as always, I’m keen to get beyond the assumption and hype often associated with such things and not waste either my time or my employer’s time and money unnecessarily.

So, if automated tools such as Klout are to be believed, I managed to raise my ‘influence’ score by 8 points in less than a week. How? well essentially by using the same triggers that have always been used in these type of environments, since the early newsgroup days .

1. Controversy

2. Audaciousness (nice word – thanks Simon 😉 )

3. Flaming

Maybe it was a little more subtle than the average troll, maybe not, but in essence it was these 3 approaches that gained the ‘@’ and RT responses that Klout is clearly using as a primary measure of influence in its algorithms. Is Twitter a more mature environment impervious to techniques employed for years in other online social environments? – I think not. Do I genuinely feel I’ve gained any influence during the last week – errr no – but Klout thinks so.

If, however, the consensus is that something like Klout is an accurate representation of influence on Twitter then this raises another key question – how representative is Twitter of offline influence and is there a danger of getting fixated with something which in the bigger, wider world currently has very little influence?

Beyond Twitter, I think I’m seeing the rise of a new SEO – Sentiment Engineering & Optimisation – that, like bees to a honeypot, is already attracting the naive evangelists,  ‘snake oil’ salespeople, confusion marketers and cowboy operators.

Anyone who has spent any real time in web analytics and has had responsibility for reporting results knows how easy it is to misinterpret data and how taking numbers on face value can be a dangerous thing, without trying to understand the deeper background to that data.

If it’s easy to misinterpret and misrepresent structured data, I’m thinking it’s even easier to misinterpret and misrepresent ‘unstructured’ information.

There was a tweet from one attendee at the recent Alterian customer day that I felt was fundamental to this ” It’s hard for a computer to comprehend sarcasm and irony.” Like it or loath it, our brave new social media environment is loaded with sarcasm and irony and as this article illustrates, it is a complex form of communication. Has ‘natural language processing’ advanced to a point where it can interpret a comment correctly that actually has the opposite meaning? If it has then I suggest we are much closer to achieving artificial intelligence than perhaps I thought. Add into this, the ‘ugly side’ of social media, very well described by Econsultancy here, and there is a whole potent mix of manipulated, distorted and amplified information that potentially has to be dealt with here.

With its immense programming capability, Google has a continual struggle to prevent its search results being manipulated (I’m guessing a lot more than 200 signals now) and judging by the numbers of individuals and organisations jumping onto the current SEO bandwagon there is still clearly money to made in trying to do it. So, realistically, how close are we to even beginning to monitor and understand the infinitely more complex realm of social media sentiment in a useful and accurate way? And do solutions such as Klout indicate that a whole new Sentiment Engineering & Optimisation (SEO) industry is about to explode? Sadly, I think they do 😦

Sadly, travel and work commitments have clashed with this year’s J Boye conference in Aarhus but I was pleased to see plenty of engaging Twitter and blog coverage from the first day’s presentations and, in particular, the opportunity to contribute via the #fixwcm hashtag on Twitter.

No doubt the Twitter, blog and presentation file coverage of this debate represents a fraction of the overall debate so I risk going over old ground with this post but then, as a deafened person, I’m used to not hearing the full story and having to fill in the blanks sometimes – so nothing new there then 😉

The biggest blank for me in the debate, from following it remotely, was a lack of comment from the CMS buyers and users themselves. Perhaps they were in the audience listening intently as the analysts, commentators and vendors tweeted and blogged around them, or were too busy with their day jobs to enter the debate online.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d add some further commentary from that CMS buyer and user perspective. In particular I’m looking at this from experiences over the last couple of years of working for product manufacturers with a global presence.

Well over 60% of people start their product research online via the manufacturer’s website. There is an expectation that the manufacturer’s site has the latest, most in-depth and up-to-date content about the product in which they are interested and so it is vitally important that manufacturers manage online content effectively and efficiently. The web itself has both facilitated and accelerated a global marketplace and many manufacturers need to operate in multiple countries today to survive and prosper. This makes website globalisation and localisation increasingly important for a broader range of organisations.

So, given that context, the premise of the debate was that Web Content Management is broken and needs fixing. For me, I think it’s important to start with the definition and I am naturally drawn to the CMS Watch introduction and definition of Web Content Management.  It defines WCM as “A system that lets you apply management principles to content.” and goes on to list 10 key areas that constitute a WCM capability – from authoring to multi-channel deployment.

Personally I concur with comments I saw yesterday about WCM going through a painful evolutionary phase rather than being broken and needing fixing. What I’ve been experiencing over the last couple of years is growing frustration with the processes and tools we are using to manage content and I think this stems from these main areas…

1. Microsoft’s ubiquitous desktop computing presence

Long held wisdom suggests that we have naturally accepted Microsoft’s ubiquitous presence in our lives because it is only through such ubiquity that modern computing has revolutionised how we work and live. In many respects though, this ubiquity has defined how we do things, whether it is starting to write content in a Word document or producing endless ‘death by Powerpoint’. These habits and rituals, developed over many years now are hard to break. I find it quite staggering for instance that the collective wisdom of a very established global manufacturer is contained in folder after folder after folder of files on shared drives with seemingly very little actual captured knowledge, context or lifecycle management. Organisations and the people within them tend to stick with what they know and what has become second nature to them, even if at a fundamental level there are much better ways in which they could be doing things. Logic suggests for instance that generating content in a web first ‘Wave-like’ collaborative way would ultimately be far more effective than in disconnected Word documents but habit and ritual of the long-standing, largely disconnected desktop environment will persist for many years.

2. Web application capabilities moving faster in home life than at work

A key aspect of Web 2.0 as defined originally by Tim O’Reilly is the network effect. It’s worked with staggering success in recent years with the applications we’ve adopted outside of the workplace. And that’s the key point here. In many organisations these applications are stopped at the firewall. I’m sitting here in an open plan office of 200 plus people and the only person who can access any ‘web 2.0’ type application is me. So while community driven, virally dispersed applications have become part of daily lives at home many organisations actively block their usage in the workplace. Right now for instance I am dealing with some digital asset management issues within the system we are currently using and I long for the fast, dynamic, intuitive and highly productive interface that Flickr provides.

In my previous role and in my current one, a lot of the web editors I am working with on a daily basis fall into the ‘millenial’ generation. It’s not surprising therefore that I receive regular comments about how they wished the internal web publishing system worked more like Google or Facebook or YouTube or WordPress. However, having spent time in a software product management role, I know just how complicated it will be for the WCM system developers to get such rich interface functionality into their products to meet the expectations raised by the ‘web 2.0’ giants and they constantly have to evaluate the time and effort required for fixing long-standing pain points versus that required to create business winning new features. I sense here that Open Source philosophies and approaches have raised expectations about how users themselves can influence a product’s development path and presented a real challenge to proprietary vendors to improve how they listen to and respond to user needs.

3. Challenges to long-held management principles

Having spent over 20 years in the workplace now I have never felt so strongly that technology is currently defining two very distinct worlds – the corporate one and the social one. A point I made yesterday in a #fixwcm tweet is that “many organisations’ culture is counter-intuitive to social web so proprietary WCM innovation will continue to lag OS/social software”. The mature, proprietary WCM industry has been defined by what organisations are prepared to pay for. The social web holds many risks – some genuine, some perceived – so once again there is only so far the majority of organisations are prepared to shift from their established ways of doing things. It’s frequently commented that the more transparent, collaborative and crowd-sourced mechanisms exhibited by ‘web 2.0’ approaches challenge the ‘top-down’, ‘command and control’ mechanisms used for many years in many organisations. I’ve certainly seen examples where this is true but also examples where fad, fashion and the irrational exuberance the web world is prone to outweighs simple common sense.

To be honest though, I find I’m regularly reminding myself and those around me that for all the discussions about brand engagement in an online world being increasingly defined by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, every online survey I’ve conducted in the last few years has reinforced that in terms of what web users want from manufacturer’s websites – ‘product information’,  ‘where to buy’ and ‘how to use’ remain the core content management requirements that I simply must not lose sight of.  And how this can be managed efficiently, effectively and engagingly in over 20 languages across 50 countries is core to the future growth goals of the organisation.

4. Continued disconnect between business need and technical implementation

The phrase “if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem” springs to mind here. Business people continue to struggle to articulate what it is they want the technology to achieve in their organisations and technical people continue to struggle to understand how business goals could and should influence implementation. I’ve spent time developing user stories and trying to drive developments from business user personas and perspectives in an agile environment – and it’s not easy! There probably aren’t enough people out there in typical organisations ready and willing to take the extra effort required to work both sides of the equation – so disconnects between what the business wants and what the technicians implement will doubtless continue. Generational shifts, with those who grew up with the web now entering the workplace, could make a difference here in raising the overall level of technical literacy and understanding but clearly this needs to be tempered with the wisdom and common sense of business people who have spent many years understanding what makes their organisations’ tick and how to compete in demanding marketplaces. Generational shifts are also influencing the outlook and function of IT departments and this could help further in breaking down what can sometimes be a major disconnect between business need and implementation.

Right now though, the reality remains that with all requirements considered, it is a mature, proprietary WCM and the collective knowledge and skill of the implementors we use that is still the best fit to address our core objectives and, although there are frustrations, the potential time and cost required to change the current ways of doing things far outweigh the system and process improvements likely to be gained by such a change. In terms of ‘fixing’ what we have I think a service,  MOT and tune-up are well overdue but we are a few years away from considering a full engine re-build, or indeed, a change of car.

Looking at information about the new CMS Watch report, it has the potential to become a watershed in the Industry. The re-classification of products into 5 new tiers  makes some significant statements about how the industry has been evolving.

My instant reaction to the re-classification was that it reflected my thoughts and experiences in recent years on a number of areas such as how Open Source and SaaS should no longer be segregated and how the middle tier categories in particular deserved more clarity and emphasis.

I’m sure there are vendors and practitioners the world over taking issue with certain aspects of the re-categorisation. Naturally, when you spend a lot of time developing and using these tools it is understandable that you create different ‘thought worlds’ based on your own field of reference and it’s sometimes difficult to step back from this and take different perspectives.

I thought I’d throw a few observations into the mix based on my own field of reference. That reference is as a one-time product manager for Immediacy (Now Alterian CMC 6.2), an Immediacy customer and implementor, an ecommerce orientated Joomla implementation I have done on a personal project and being a customer and implementor of EPiServer over the last two years.

After careful consideration, the one aspect of the re-classification that I would take issue with is the positioning of Alterian CMC 6.2 alongside Joomla in the Simpler Products category.

Based on experiences of using Joomla quite deeply over the last year and a full understanding of Alterian CMC 6.2 (from background knowledge and studying the latest documentation and release notes on the Immediacy support site) I believe that the Alterian product sits more comfortably and relevantly in the Mid-Range Products category.

In my opinion, the investment and innovation made in 4 key areas of development separate the Alterian product from the Simpler range of products

1. Web Asset Management ( a lighter-weight Document Management capability)
2. Taxonomy and Categorisation
3. SharePoint Connectivity
4. Administration and Deployment Capability

I believe that these capabilities are of a sufficient maturity to provide a clear distinction between the capability of Joomla for example and the Alterian Corporate product and general awareness of the other products listed in the Simpler Products category also underlies my view on this.

The maturity of the former Immediacy Editor application, a broad range of plug-in solutions and the additional capabilities I’ve listed above make it a comparable, and in several areas, more capable solution to a number of products listed in the Mid-Range product categories. I would be very interested to hear, for example,  a justification for why GOSS in particular is categorised as having broader capability than Alterian CMC 6.2?

No doubt the Alterian acquisition has impacted the roadmap of the corporate product more so than other areas but I think that sufficient investment had been made prior to both the Mediasurface and Alterian acquisitions to justify CMC 6.2 being categorised as a Mid-Range product.

If indeed, the consensus is that Alterian CMC 6.2 is categorised correctly then I raise the question from this post’s title – Is there a market for simpler proprietary CMS’s? Will organisations be prepared to pay $10 – $20,000 for a proprietary licence when they can get an Open Source option for free or does the product maturity (documentation, install base, partner experience) and support that solution provides justify that level of investment?

(Note:- For less of a general ramble and some informed and insightful technical commentary on latest EPiServer developments check out Jon On Tech here… )

Squeak, my faithful hearing aid, and I headed for the EPiServer Partner and Customer Day at the Cumberland Hotel yesterday. Squeak is a relatively new companion – the latest breed of digital aid with enhanced sound filtering and directional microphone control. However, on its last major outing with its twin brother Squeal, to a recent Michael McIntyre gig at the Anvil in Basingstoke, both let me down considerably when they had a major disagreement with the sound system, which led to an unbearable level of distortion and, sadly, a ruined evening. There’s nothing worse than sitting in a theatre full of hysterical laughter having not heard the joke – and particularly having to do it for 2 long hours. 

So – I’m pleased to report no such problems with the acoustics and sound system at The Cumberland – which were excellent – and meant that I heard every detail and also enjoyed the various conversations I had with previous and new acquaintances during the networking sessions. The only slightly disconcerting experience was being able to hear conversations several tables away during the lunch break and a realisation that I now possess an almost bionic superpower. That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration and is more than likely just restoring an ability I should have anyway – but it was an interesting surprise all the same.

As with previous EPiServer events I’ve attended over the last couple of years, I sit in the audience listening to the information from two perspectives. The first as a customer, super administrator and web project manager and the second as a former competitor. Having spent some time developing CMS product strategies and helping drive forward CMS software developments I have deep respect and admiration for those who can listen to customers and partners to identify their pain points and product needs and can bring required changes and new developments to market quickly and effectively. Scanning the horizon, liaison with customers, articulating requirements and working with management and development teams to prioritise work and deliver high quality working software is the hardest and most frustrating role I have ever done and, picking up on my last post, could often be described as a ‘thankless task’.

Having used EPiServer CMS5 pretty intensely for almost 2 years now, it works in ways that I’ve long imagined this type of mid-market WCMS solution could and should work.  It’s an affordably packaged offering with the ability to handle multiple websites, microsites and landing pages in one seamless editing and administrative environment. Different ‘task based’ editing options  are available – from full in context WYSIWYG to an intuitive and dynamic editing interface which enables easy access to multiple country treeviews, page language controls and action windows. It also has sufficient and granular administrative control for more complex globalisation needs requiring access and permission control for a broad spectrum of users and capabilities.

It would appear that EPiServer has moved faster than many in a proprietary environment by remaining 100% channel focused and adopting all the best lessons and philosophies of the Open Source community. On balance it seems to have been more effective than many comparable proprietary vendors in opening up its code base and empowering development partners to create meaningful, useful and broadly viable product extensions.

So, watching Rikard Ljungman, EPiServer’s VP of Product Development, present their upcoming Marketing Arena offering and then listening to subsequent presentations giving more insight into EPiServer Community, I found myself recalling various product scope documentation and presentations from a few years’ back and thinking “that’s what I wanted the Marketing Solution to provide and that’s how I thought the Community tools should be integrated”. Obviously it’s easy to say this in retrospect and I had a real ‘kicking myself ‘ moment when I realised that much of the SEO capability EPiServer is launching is similar in many respects to the Accessibility Checking tools that were already well established in the product I was managing and could have been a relatively quick and easy win – if I’d been a lot smarter.

No doubt I’ll be accused of being an EPiServer ‘fan boy’ with these comments but I’ve been managing web projects of all shapes and sizes over quite a few years now with some of the biggest solutions around – to some of the smallest ones and quite a number in the mid-tier space in-between. I’ve been pretty demanding of the EPiServer product and its implementors and impressed with the flexibility and adaptability I’ve experienced in return – so this is simply giving credit where I believe it is due.

I’ve also fallen into the trap of being too enthusiastic and believing too much of the hype that often accompanies new developments – which  I’ve also been guilty of producing myself on occasions – so I’ve had my fingers burnt slightly and learnt a few lessons following the EPiServer events last year. Hopefully EPiServer has also learnt lessons in integrating its development partner’s work into its own branded product set and testing these upcoming new releases more thoroughly this time round 🙂

As with many activities and tools where you spend a fair amount of your working life, ‘familiarity can breed contempt’ and I think the real test for me will be EPiServer and its partner bases’ ability to recognise and address key pain points and bugs quickly. If developing the latest and greatest functionality comes at the expense of improving the core web content management capabilities that make for a reliable, productive and effective user experience, then EPiServer will risk turning off established and loyal customers who are its best advocates and often help to do the marketing job for them.