Cloud Computing

CMSWire’s recent article The Seven Hats Content Managers Will Wear in 2012drives home a point that I have been making a lot recently. It’s the point that inspired me to take a full-time job with Lionbridge to scale the Global Marketing Operationsoffering. Engaging audiences with content is hard work and it doesn’t matter that your CMS makes it easy to edit web pages. As the article describes, a modern content manager is a content collector, a context controller, an eavesdropper, a concierge, a right-brain thinker, a number cruncher, and a bodyguard. And that is just to manage a site in one language. For a global site, you might as well add “international (wo)man of mystery” to that list.

One thing you realize after years of content management consulting is that the tools play a relatively small role in a company’s ability to maintain an excellent digital presence. Skills, process, and commitment play a much larger role. If you don’t have those, no technology is going to help you.

Recently I appeared on a CMS-Connected and we talked a lot about web engagement. I mentioned that the market, as a whole, failed to get sufficient value from the content production functionality of upper tier WCM platforms. Most customers didn’t have the process, skills, and commitment to fully leverage workflow and other content management functionality. As a result, many found themselves owning 6 million dollar wysiwyg editors. CMS vendors has responded by shifting the value over to the delivery side with functionality like personalization, multivariate testing, and analytics.

One thing that I wished I said on the show was that, unless customers increase their people commitment (time, skills, and process) to managing their websites, the upper tier CMS vendors won’t achieve value on the delivery side either. So far, I am finding that most customers are under-utilizing these advanced marketing features that were so important in their platform buying decision. If only they had more hats…

If your company runs a website (and what company doesn’t?), I want you to take the web manager out to lunch. You will probably learn that he is overworked and would love to be doing so much more but limitations of time and skills prevent it. You may hear will hear that the CMS didn’t really remove the webmaster bottleneck and all of his time is spent chasing down and posting content. He might confess his embarrassment from how bad the site looks on mobile devices. In short, the web manager has his hands full just getting content on the site and can’t even think about maximizing the reach and effectiveness of the website.

If you hear these signals, your organization probably has a lot of growth to do before it can fully realize the benefits that web engagement functionality promises. You need to acquire some more hats before you go software shopping.

The manufacturing industry has been somewhat slow to accept social media as a marketing tool. This is largely because it can be difficult to see how social media plays into the larger business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategy. That, however, appears to be changing. Acccording to a Forrester report released in March of 2011, 30 percent of global manufacturers intended to increase social media investments in 2012.

As global manufacturers increase their social media spending, the case for small- to mid-sized manufacturers to invest in social media grows stronger. The opportunities are particularly attractive in the contract and job shop manufacturing segments, which have traditionally relied on word-of-mouth marketing to win new business. I’d like to share three ways that manufacturers can start using social media today to improve their brand visibility and win more business.

1. Create a Blog to Tell Your Story

Blogs give manufacturers an opportunity to do more than just promote their brand. Blogs allow manufacturers to communicate with their customers and prospects using a richer form of media with longer-form stories. They’re also a great avenue for sharing company information and providing industry knowledge. Manufacturers can use blogs to announce major company milestones, such as getting ISO 9001 certification, as well as share general industry trends and news. By striking a balance between promoting a brand and sharing useful information, manufacturers can gain a thought leadership position that will help win customers later down the road.

2. Start a YouTube Channel to Enrich Content

YouTube can be a great tool that educates buyers while subtly marketing through video. With the dramatically decreased cost of video production, creating a decent quality video is affordable and relatively easy today. Manufactures should consider creating a YouTube video that provides a demonstration of products and processes, a tour of the factory, or showcases customer testimonials. Of course, the challenge is sticking to a video format that customers find relevant and engaging. As an example, one of my favorite YouTube videos produced by a manufacturer is this Carr Machine and Tool video. The video provides customers a walk-through of how their orders are handled while showing the company’s dedication to service.

3. Use LinkedIn to Help Fill the Sales Funnel

A final tool that I’d like to highlight here is LinkedIn. For manufacturers, getting the most out of LinkedIn requires more than just becoming a member of the social network. Manufacturers can use LinkedIn to prime to sales funnel by using their networks to gain access to sales prospects. Once you get a few hundred contacts, your typical network usually reaches in the millions. This network can be used to get an introduction to a potential sales contact – or at the very least to connect with someone that can help strategize on how to contact the prospect. LinkedIn can also be a great place to demonstrate industry expertise by participating in relevant community discussions. Answering a difficult question in a Q&A forum, for instance, could very well lead to an unexpected contract.

This article is adapted from an original piece by Software Advice, an online resource that reports on manufacturing technology and trends. You can access the original article at: How Manufacturers Can Use Social Media to Win Business.

Social media has fueled a race for humans being chased by clones. Brands are pretending to be human by using social media to personalize their brand message.  Because of the rise of social media by millions of consumers where users go, marketers will follow. But can a brand become human using social media?

A brand is not human but the people behind the brand are human. Corporations are not human but they become containers for humans. Once humans step into corporate and brand roles they forget about human preferences. We the people are the ones being chased by entities and brands pretending to be human.

The key word in the previous statement is “pretending to be human”. Pretending is something we did when we were children. We pretended to be whatever our imagination wanted us to be. Brands, corporations and marketers are playing a pretend game aimed at attracting humans.  They use tricks and gimmicks distributed through social media channels trying to attract and trap humans into spending.  The practice is an extension of the sophomoric mentality of the industrial era marketing machines, media.  The cost of this practice is justified by chasing the many to capture a few.  It no longer works.

Social Media Fuels The Chase

EMarketer reports:  Research from social marketing software firm Awareness Inc. indicates US marketers plan to go where users go. The December 2011 survey found that the leading area for new social media marketing investments in 2012 would be increasing marketer presence across platforms, cited by 70% of respondents.

For some marketers, that will mean a new presence on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. While the vast majority of US marketers already use these sites for marketing, some laggards plan to join them there this year.

Chasing Humans Is Expensive

U.S. advertisers spend nearly $40 billion a year for online advertisements, but 31% of their ads are never seen. That means $12.4 billion will be wasted on U.S. online ads this year. That’s the average across all sites; on some sites, only 7% of the ads were “in-view,” meaning 93% of them went unseen.  And they wonder why.

Corporations, brands and marketers spend billions of dollars trying to obtain: trust, relevance, vision, values and leadership in the eyes of buyers, humans. Trying to become human they’ve adopted several human practices to gain attention. The top five practices include:

1. Story creation in context to human needs
2. They create creeds to identify with human beliefs
3.  They create icons-quick flashes of meaning that sum up who you are and what you’re about.
4. They create rituals. These are the repeated positive or negative interactions with the public.
5. They create specialized words that have special meaning aimed at relating to the targeted audience.

The problem with these practices is that they do not create a connection with the human soul becasue they do not touch the heart of the human network. Trust, relevance, vision, values and leadership are attributes that connect the heart of the human network one to one to millions.

Chasing us where we are with irrelevant expensive ads is not the way to reach the hearts and minds of the human network.  Engaging us through our hearts and minds is done through human interaction not an advertising campaign created by clones.

In the old days, static publishing (or baking, where the CMS generates static HTML files at publish time), was pretty much the standard. Most of the WCM products on the market did static publishing: Interwoven, Tridion, RedDot, Percussion …. Even the frying systems like Vignette and FatWire (FutureTense/OpenMarket back then) relied so heavily on caching that they were practically baking style systems. Computing power was so expensive back then that you didn’t dare to do much processing at request time.

Then frying-style systems became the norm. WCM vendors needed to have an answer to market demand for personalization and other dynamic behavior and the only way to do that was through dynamic (request-time) publishing. But static publishing isn’t dead. There are many baking style systems on the market and lots of customers swear by static publishing. Good strategies have emerged to overcome its limitations. The primary benefits of static publishing are still very real: cost-savings, security, and stability. You can cheaply stand-up web servers that have the easy job of just serving up static HTML files.

And this brings me to my little obsession with static publishing. I am hosting a few sites on Amazon S3. The cost is ridiculously low and the speed is crazy-fast. Publishing them is fun too. For example, I publish my little personal site (www.sethgottlieb.com) using a site generator called Hyde, which is a Python port of a Ruby-based system called Jekyll. The way these generators work is that you enter your content in HTML, Markdown, or some other syntax and then run a script that renders static HTML pages with your presentation templates. Presentation templates can also do useful things like create listing pages. The Hyde sample site has a blog and there is a script to migrate from WordPress. Versioning? Git, of course. In fact, using a source code control system will also allow multiple authors to collaborate too. Site generators also do useful things like minifying your CSS and JS files for maximum performance. Want interactive features like search or commenting? For search you could use Google Custom Search. Commenting can be supported through a service like Disqus. You can configure secure areas with your web servers. For little bits of interactivity, you could embed some client side Javascript or server side PHP in your static HTML files.

I also used static publishing to create an archive of a site that I no longer update. I created a Drupal website for my wife’s birthday a few years ago. I didn’t want to pay for LAMP hosting indefinitely but I didn’t want to lose the site either. My solution was to pull the whole site down using wget and then upload it to S3. The site has lots of pages and I wouldn’t want to manage them as static HTML but since I have no plans to change the site, I don’t have to worry about it.

Everything is in a state of flux. An old French proverb says “the more things change the more they remain the same”. Even when things seem to be in a chaotic state of change what remains the same, at least for some, is the ability to adapt.

A Fast Company article titled This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New And Chaotic Frontier Of Business  states:  Despite recession, currency crises, and tremors of financial instability, the pace of disruption is roaring ahead. The frictionless spread of information and the expansion of personal, corporate, and global networks have plenty of room to run.

And heres the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast–the road map and model that will define the next era–no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.To thrive in this climate requires a whole new approach, which well outline in the pages that follow. Because some people will thrive. They are the members of Generation Flux. This is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one: What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions.

Not everyone will join Generation Flux, but to be successful, businesses and individuals will have to work at it. This is no simple task. The vast bulk of our institutions–educational, corporate, political–are not built for flux. Few traditional career tactics train us for an era where the most important skill is the ability to acquire new skills.

Adapting To Chaos

Prior to the web things were predictable. In the web 1.0 economy things were fairly predictable. The dynamics of web 2.0 and beyond are chaotic and the only thing  predictable is rapid change.  With this increased speed of change has come a decrease in planning for the future. We are so uncertain about what will happen five years from now that both individuals and corporations seldom plan more than a few months in advance.

Chaos creates opportunity. Those who embrace the latest technologies will make fortunes.  In the midst of accelerating change, we sometimes forget that new technologies are not new things that we must do. They are simply new ways of doing what we have always done.  The difference is technology accelerates the rate of change which changes the way we do things. Start learning how to do things differently and you will embrace chaos.

As the old French proverb says “the more things change the more they remain the same”. What remains the same is those that resist change. This time there are more people fueling change than those resisting it.

Our brains get programmed from experience. When we repeat the same experience over and over we convince our memory to expect the same experience.  When we walk into a room, a mall and even when we go online we expect a certain experience because our brains tell us what to expect based on the past experience. Change the experience and you change the memory.

HBR had an article by Art Markman titled Dont Think Different, Think About Different Things  which states Memory provides you with the information it thinks you need when it thinks you need it. When you are walking through the supermarket or asked to think about it, information about food and shopping is easy to recall. When you are at a football game, your knowledge of the rules and types of plays is easy to think about, but the texture of fresh romaine lettuce is not.

When you need to solve a problem in a new way, you have two options. One is pure research and development. The other requires finding knowledge which we already know that offers a novel solution. When you gather a group for an ideation session, you are betting that the group already knows how to solve the problem, they just have to find the answer.  Pulling information from memory to solve problems happens effortlessly. To find innovative ways to solve a problem, you need to ask your memory the right question.

Tapping Into More Memories

Individually we solve problems based on our memories experience. Collectively we can solve more problems because we’re tapping into a larger pool of memories.  The social web is a platform of memories made and being created, one to one to millions second by second.  The collaborative nature of the human network enabled with connectivity to larger human networks ignites problem solving through discovery of innovation like never before. New memories are being created.

When you consider that in the last two years more information has been created than ever before in history you can see the building of a “human memory network” that is vast and accessable in real-time.  When you enable groups, millions, of people to examine a problem and contribute to finding a solution a new dynamic is created…..thinking about different things instead of just thinking differently.

Thinking about different things requires input from those with different memories. Institutional thinking has created institutional memories.  Since everything has shifted to the unusual the usual solutions to old problems no longer work. In other words organizations can no longer rely on old memories they must create new ones.  Memories come from experiences and all things social are changing the memories of everything and everyone at the click of a mouse.

Innovate and you create the next memory.  Old memories can be good but new ones are better.

A lot is being discussed about social business models and what does social business really mean.  IBM is devoting lots of resources to this subject and they frame their views about what a social business means in the following context.

 Becoming a social business requires a long-term, strategic approach to business culture, executive leadership, an effective corporate strategy, and organizational ability                       to recognize and design for transformation.

According to IBM the results from those already on the journey to becoming a social business show:

• 90% of respondents report measurable business benefits from Web 2.0 tools, including better access to knowledge, lower costs of doing business, and higher revenues (McKinsey Global Survey 2010)
• Standout organizations are 57% more likely to allow their people to use social and collaborative tools (IBM CHRO Study 2010)

The Seven Habits of AntiSocial Businesses

The 21st Century customer and employee have distinctive views as to what makes a business antisocial. These views are created based on the habits of a business and the top seven antisocial business habits are:

1.  They use “social technology” as a marketing tool rather than an improvement tool
2. They have no idea that the audience includes their employees and the employees laugh at the false claims they make to the marketplace.  Yet the company has no idea the employees are laughing because they don’t listen.
3. Leadership has no idea what being a social business means and they think just because they are using social media that makes them a social business.
4. They are obsessed with ROI on use of social media rather than use of technology to enable people, processes and performance.
5. They view engagement as tricks, traps and capture techniques while ignoring the customers social experience with the organization as a whole.
6. They practice 20th Century management methods with an emphasis on top down control vs. bottom up enablement.
7. They don’t understand nor will they recognize that the entire marketplace is being transformed. Buyers are now the sources of media and their influence is greater than yours. Their attitudes, actions and media relfect the lack of understanding.

The bottom line: If your organization exhibits several of these traits, now is the time to transform your thinking, your actions and your relations.  If your company exhibit several of these traits, now is the time to start looking for a new job.

Other thoughts on Antisocial Businesses

1. Is Your Business Antisocial? by Brian Solis
2. The Anti-Social Business from IBM
3. Antisocial Business Ideas from Realcognitic
4. The Anitsocial Enterprise from Forbes
5. Move Over Social Media; Here Comes Social Business from Fast Company

The purpose of business is to create a customer.” — Peter Drucker.  Could Drucker be wrong?  Maybe and maybe not but now consultants and know it all pundits are spinning customer creation as the holy grail to all 21st Century sales and marketing efforts. I am sorry, no I am not, but I don’t buy it.

A business doesn’t create a customer they come ready made. Customers are looking for suppliers to meet their needs but in the 20th Century mentality suppliers look for customers to meet their needs.  It doesn’t work that way in the minds of the 21st Century customer and yet many suppliers still think that way.  Look around and you’ll see suppliers consumed with CRM , RM, QM, CM and all the other acronyms  and now social media tricks aimed at capturing, not engaging, the customer.  Now suppliers are talking aboutt another consultant speak mantra of the month—Customer Creation Tools & Techniques

Back to Drucker who said “The purpose of business is to create a customer.” He was right but the open question that  leading 21st Century thinkers would ask is “by what method?”.  Some would say the method involves coordinated online and off line activities and who would disagree, no one. But again “by what methods”?  Customer creation advocates would say you have to be in the same place at the same time as the customer. Make sense but….is there a better way than chasing the customers time and place online or off?

Methods determine outcomes. If suppliers chase customers, engage and capture them whether online or off, the customer sentiment is not likely to consider the suppliers methods as relational.  Customers are more inclined to follow the market sentiment of a brand or product based on the sentiment of other customers. In other words customer creation comes from other customers and the role of the brand is to is to simply serve the customer one at a time and deliver beyond expectations.

Zappos attracted customers by serving one customer at a time beyond their expectations and the brand sentiment traveled by word of mouth one customer to another. Zappos customer creation method was to let the customer create other customers and let the related experiences create “customer media” that speaks for itself.

Doc Searls talks about “The Intention Economy,” which  grows around buyers, not sellers. It leverages the simple fact that buyers are the first source of money, and that they come ready-made. You don’t need advertising to make them. The Intention Economy is about markets, not marketing. You don’t need marketing to make Intention Markets.”  You don’t need marketing to create customers.

People do not exist to be customers.  Our purpose is certainly not to create and keep suppliers. Our primal instincts naturally drive us to relate, co-create and communicate. That being the case then the methods that create customers are activities that enable customers to relate, co-create and communicate. The customers primal instincts are not that complicated and yet markets have made it complicated thus they fail to relate online and off. Instead markets pursue marketing schemes that try and create us.  Sorry, as Doc says “we are ready made waiting for service”.

There is a war brewing within the online travel agency space over Google’s recent move with Google Flights and Google Hotels.

Google began positioning its new flight-finding feature at the top of general search results for airline booking information earlier this month. And its new competitors in the $110 billion online travel industry aren’t happy about the search giant crashing the party, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

Chasing The Market To The Bottom

Travel is hot for 2012 and beyond.  An increasing number of people say they’ll do more leisure traveling in the coming year, and even more say they’ll fly if they can find good deals in 2012. Good deals are going to be hard to find. The airlines attempted to raise prices 22 times in 2011 (and nine of those attempts were successful).

Business travel spend is expected to have grown 6.9% in 2011 compared to 2010, hitting $250.2 billion.  The forecast for 2012 is 4.3% growth in business travel spend for 2012 (or $260.9 billion).

While revenue growth in the travel sector looks promising the user experience continues to decline. Flying today is like traveling by bus with few frills and even fewer fun times.  Consider some of the recent headlines:

1. Airline Technology Leading to Customer Alienation
2. Airlines Score Lowest In Customer Satisfaction
3. 92% of Executive Unhappy With Business Travel Experiences
4. Airline Delays, Cancellations and Complaints Rise

I could go on with an endless list but by now the picture should be obvious. Current market dynamics within air travel services is propelling a race to the bottom and Google knows this.  In other words air travel suppliers have boxed themselves into competing on price and thus air travel services have become a commodity. The meaning of the term commodity is used to describe a service for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.

Google knows that search has the greatest influence over consumer choices for travel services. 93% of people who seek information on travel services use search. Consumers seek ratings and reviews, news articles, word of mouth and blog post which in the end influences their decisions. When there is little differential in a market then price becomes the initial decision factor followed by “social influences”, i.e. quality of the experience.

As a result, the present online travel bazaar is very competitive and the margins are shrinking . The  tight competition led the market to compete on price rather than experience. Google recognizes this and simply stepped in and made the shopping experience better. Google doesn’t care about the price of air service they care about providing the price to consumers seamlessly.

As fortunes are made by leveraging technology to become ever more efficient, there is yet far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the discovery of new experiences and creation of new opportunities. That is exactly why we created Social Flights.  We are changing the direction of the race to the top.

Happy New Year!

2012 is going to be a big year for me. Starting in January, I will be a full time employee of a new business unit of Lionbridge [http://www.lionbridge.com] called Global Marketing Operations (GMO) [http://globalmarketingops.com/]. The best way to describe GMO is that it is a service that helps global companies execute their global content strategy. We take great content that marketers and designers produce and make it available to the intended audiences. This includes:

• preparing and instrumenting content for publication in the customer’s content delivery systems (web content management, email campaign management, advertising, etc.)
• Operating those delivery systems.
• Localizing (translating and adapting) content for local markets.
• Helping customers understand the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

GMO becomes the arms and legs of the marketing organization to close the gap between strategy and results. My new title within Lionbridge will be Global Marketing Operations Solutions Manager. In the near term, I will be optimizing tools and processes to help scale the offering as well as working with GMO clients to help them maximize the value they get from the service.

I have been working in content management for over 15 years. Over that time, I have come to realize that technology is usually not what prevents companies from being successful with content. Yes, better tools increase efficiency. But that doesn’t mean having the right tools will lead to success. In fact, I have been noticing that many compelling CMS features are under-utilized. The capabilities are there; the capable people to use them are not (or they just don’t have the time).

With the emergence of content strategy as a main-stream discipline and the pressure on marketers to show quantitative results, this execution gap will only widen and become more visible. And that’s why this opportunity with Lionbridge GMO is so exciting to me. This is where I can have the most impact in helping companies be more successful with content.

In practical terms, some things are going to change and others will stay the same.

First, the changes….

• I will no longer be accepting consulting projects through Content Here. Lionbridge offers a Global Digital Benchmark and I will lead the internal component of that offering. I will also consult with GMO clients and prospects to evaluate their tools and processes.
• I will write and speak more on the operations, process, and analytics of content management.

But these things will stay the same….

• I will continue to post to this blog [http://www.contenthere.net] and tweet [http://twitter.com/sggottlieb]. Some posts will be re-posted on GMO blog [http://blog.lionbridge.com/marketing/].
• I will continue to track the content management software industry. Lionbridge and its clients need to stay up to date with the latest technology developments that improve efficiency and increase reach.
• I will continue to be vendor neutral. The success of GMO will depend on being able to help customers regardless of their platform. When it comes to choosing a new platform, Lionbridge is aligned with the customer. We want to choose the most suitable technology because we will be using it.
• I will continue to attend content management conferences and engage with the content management community. I have great relationships in this community and I think that my work at Lionbridge will provide insights that we all can learn from. I also look forward to connecting my clients to trusted companies and practitioners that provide tools and services that Lionbridge does not offer.

As you can see, I am pretty excited by this new chapter in my career. With that, I will wrap this up by wishing everyone a very happy, productive, and rewarding new year.