Category Archives: Web Content Management

Finding a new mountain to climb

“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.”

My Niece very bravely played hostess to the family over New Year at her place in Crystal Palace – a hilltop suburb of London that gives excellent views of the city skyline.

The NTL/Arqiva transmitter near Croydon - one of a number of amazing structures and facilities I was privileged to visit and, on a few occasions climb, when I worked for the company in the 1990s

I know the area quite well from my time in the broadcast industry in the early 1990s as it is home to two significant structures that have played key roles in broadcasting history – not just in the UK, but worldwide too. On the site of the original Crystal Palace stands the Crystal Palace transmitting station and a few miles down the road stands the Croydon transmitting station. I visited these stations quite a bit during my early days with NTL as they were often a focal point for the demonstration and launch of new digital broadcasting and telecommunication services . It was always fascinating to get an inside view of these amazing structures and the operations centres that sat beneath them and also to talk with the engineers who maintained the analogue services and were key to developing and implementing the new digital ones.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, my experiences working for Lucent’s mobile/3G operations at the beginning of the century echoed those in the broadcast industry as it was during those pioneering days when there were many possibilities with what the technology could achieve but some very big mountains to climb to get there .

So, sitting in my Niece’s front room after the New Year’s celebrations were done and dusted, thoughts turned to what all those activities had led to 20 years on in broadcasting and 10 years on in the mobile web. Continue reading →

(20)11 predictions from the CMS coal face

I was described recently as a “self-proclaimed crusader on behalf of buyers”. Despite the rather condescending tone and context of the comment, I have heard from others that alternative views of web marketing and information management from those who spend each and every day as practitioners is welcome. Those practitioners who do post comment tend to get their voices drowned out of social media by the vendors, analysts and commentators who shout a lot louder and a lot more frequently.  So in the interests of living up to that label, here are some predictions for the coming year from the CMS coal face… Continue reading →

(20)10 lessons learned

The growth and evolution of social media often puts a different emphasis on the approaches to ‘blogging’ but I still like to use this site as a ‘weblog’ in its more traditional sense – as defined well over a decade ago…

A weblog often has the quality of being a kind of “log of our times” from a particular point-of-view. Generally, weblogs are devoted to one or several subjects or themes, usually of topical interest, and, in general, can be thought of as developing commentaries, individual or collective on their particular themes. A weblog may consist of the recorded ideas of an individual (a sort of diary) or be a complex collaboration open to anyone. Most of the latter are moderated discussions.

So, the following post is a mixture of business and personal lessons learned from the last 12 months – if it proves useful to others reading, that is a bonus in this instance as its primary purpose is to log some thoughts to review at a later date… Continue reading →

It's not what you know, it's who you know

This post’s headline are the earliest ‘words of wisdom’ I remember being given. Despite the fact that it often proves true and is, no doubt, a fundamental aspect of human nature, I have always disliked the phrase.

Thinking about it recently, I believe this dislike comes from the ‘overtones’ of corruption that are often associated with it.

There’s an implication that no matter how much effort you put into learning something and doing it well, someone else is going to do better not because they’ve put in similar levels of effort but because they just happen to be mates with someone in a better position than you.

I’ve seen some great examples of this over the years. In my early career, I remember questioning some expenditure on the departmental marketing budget that was going directly to some UK MPs. This was before the ‘cash for questions’ scandal broke back in the 1990s where it transpired that MPs were taking money to ‘ask questions’ in Parliament. In this instance this was to ‘ask questions’ regarding the future of digital TV which it was clearly in my employers interest to promote. The fact that I saw these budget lines and, indeed, related paperwork from the MPs themselves, with my own eyes means I will always be inclined to believe ‘there is no smoke without fire’ when it comes to these type of scandals. Once the US management took over, things became even worse, cluminating in massive debts and legal action for corrupt dealings.

Then there was Lucent, a company I had admired from a distance for a number of years before joining it. Oh boy, what a hotbed of corruption that place was. I was working there when Rich Mcginn was fired and all the dodgy dealings were exposed. It was often heartbreaking to see these loyal lifelong AT&T/Lucent employees cast out in wave after wave of subsequent redundancies – the many years of hard work and talent sullied by the greed and corruption of its senior executives.

In the hosted services industry, I’ve seen, first hand, how ruthlessly organisations like Microsoft can act through personal and partner networks and how it infiltrates the analyst and consultancy ecosystem to spread its own version of the truth. When I see comments on how it is ‘gunning for Google’ I can certainly believe it.

In the software industry, I’ve witnessed similar vendor and analyst dodgy dealings which are far more about money than they they are about unbiased truth. Likewise, I’ve seen how professional services organisations conspire with vendors to extract maximum cash from clients. In crowded and confused markets, like web marketing and information management solutions, it’s been encouraging to see the growth of truly ‘vendor averse’ organisations like The Real Story Group – we need much more of this type of ‘trustworthy’ analysis in other areas.

In recent years, I’ve had the displeasure of encountering the very worst example of wealth driven entitlement and superiority in my life so far, which helped me understand how a combination of dysfunctional personalities and money driven power could create the type of society where horrors like apartheid and ethnic cleansing could exist.

So, based on over 20 years of seeing the good and bad in the business world, I welcome the idea that Wikileaks intends to turn its attentions on business organisations. It would be good to see some real transparency rather than the faux transparency it is currently fashionable to proclaim.

Filtering out the noise

In common with around 9 million people in the UK and presumably similar proportions elsewhere in the world, I have hearing problems. Some of my posts on this blog have expressed experiences with this and the most recent one described the lipreading course I am currently doing.

Every week now, I spend a morning associating with a group of 20 people who all share the same or similar issues. The one thing we are undoubtedly all agreed on is that it is a very noisy world out there. If you don’t hear well, noise is the biggest problem. Unless you are profoundly deaf, the chances are you’ll hear the noise all too well but what you won’t get is any clarity.

The majority of us in the group have hearing aids that help filter out the background noise and this is undoubtedly the best innovation to have happened with the arrival of digital hearing aids during the last decade. This works, to a point, but we are all agreed we would prefer it to be better. If things get unbearably noisy, one of the options for the hearing impaired is to remove, or switch off, their hearing aids completely and rely on their lip reading skills.  There have been times over the last few years where it has been an utter relief just to ‘switch off’.

So, if the real world is getting noisier and noisier, the online world has got even worse.

I share the opinion of those who say that Web 2.0 is just Web 1.0 that works. What are often described as latest innovations and ideas existed in some form online 5, 10, 15, or even more years ago. What we’ve seen more than anything else in the last few years is mass adoption and a more ubiquitous web presence. In other words, it has got a lot more noisier out there. As in the real world, I don’t regard more noise as a good thing but it is the by product of growth, it’s difficult if not impossible to switch it off and we just have to learn to live with it.

Right now, I think the vast majority of organisations are in the same position with the web as a hearing impaired person is in the real world. They are bombarded with so much noise, it’s difficult to get any clarity.

So, what are their choices? Well they can choose to ‘switch off’ completely. However, although it may give temporary relief, in the same way that a hearing impaired person will become increasingly insular and insolated if they don’t join in the conversation, the same will apply to the organisation.

My advice, based on web development experiences going back to the mid 90s, is to focus on using the tools they’ve been using for years and not to get overly distracted by the growing noise.

Continuing the analogy of the hearing impaired person for a minute, the tool that acts like the button on my hearing aid that filters out the background noise is one that the majority of organisations know best – email!

One of the biggest lessons I learnt in web development back in the 90s is the value of getting web email traffic (sales, technical, service, general etc) copied into your inbox. Everything, and I mean, everything I’ve ever needed to know about the expectations of users, the type and depth of content required, the information flows for customer service, the hot buttons for prospects and, indeed, the best tips for furture product development has come via those emails.

In the last few years, when people have been talking about abandoning the tried and tested communication channels and methods in favour of Facebook and Twitter, I have done some direct analysis of what can be gained from Social Media Monitoring versus listening to the feedback gained via email. Firstly, analysing social media properly, even with automated tools, takes a lot of time and effort. What you end up doing is manually filtering out the noise through cross-referencing the context and determining whether sentiment is genuinely positive, negative or neutral or just laden with sarcasm. What you end up with is something that is still fuzzier than the direct and unambiguous feedback you’ve already got in the emails.

Ironically, I’ve also discovered on a number of occasions that negative feedback in social media often stems from poor email handling within the organisation. If questions are not responded to quickly and efficiently, that’s the point at which someone will take to a forum or start Twittering. So, if you focus on getting the basics right, more than often, that noisy old social media environment will take care of itself.