We all know about the importance of the customer experience, but because there's no magic formula for what works and what doesn’t, it’s often challenging to know how your company’s efforts stack up against the competition. Until now. Forrester recently announced the results of their 2012 Customer Experience Index.

Today's managers of web content are increasingly taking responsibility for a wider array of consumer’s needs. Prospects are engaged at the top end of the sales funnel, nurtured with content through the buying process and further informed once they become customers.

In this extremely noisy environment, it is essential to take advantage of every visit to your website to create a lasting, positive impression.

I can honestly say I know how the people hunting down Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and more recently the wooly mammoth, feel. For the better part of the last dozen years, I’ve been searching for the mythical beast called the “Web Developer” but is also known by several other names: User Interface Engineer, Front End Developer, Site Developer and I’m sure there are other names I have not heard before. Whatever you call them, I’m pretty sure that we can all agree on one thing call them: scarce.

In my last post, I sketched out at a high level what I see working at organizations trying to move off of older repositories onto SharePoint. 

What I want to do in the next few posts is walk through a process that, while by no means a silver bullet, gives you a better chance of success than the typical approach.

Let’s take a moment to think about how we engage online. Services such as television cable, on-demand Internet streaming media services and online publishers wouldn’t be as successful if they didn’t allow users to engage with their services across platforms, be it an actual TV, laptop or mobile device. Additionally, users are likely to consider paying a little more to receive access for multiple accounts. This is our consumption economy.

For Christmas, I ordered some LEGO Star Wars from an online retailer for my son — absolutely for my seven-year old, not for me in the slightest, you understand. Now, a couple of times a week I get the usual "Recommended for you" email, but plastered with LEGO. This personal snapshot defines recommendations as still a marketing technique practically in diapers, but helps point to where they should be going.

The term Social Business has been badly abused by technology vendors, end user associations and even well-meaning employees seeking to align specific technologies with business improvements. Based on public-facing information, one could think that this term is a form of social networking, the next generation of unified communications, a data-driven middleware solution, or simply the day-to-day interactions that we already pursue with our fellow co-workers.

Despite difficult economic times, the business intelligence (BI) market continues to grow. According to Gartner’s recently published Magic Quadrant for BI, while the market will grow at a compound rate of 8.1% annually until 2015, because the number of different things that enterprises are looking for BI solutions to do is also growing, vendors are struggling.

"Techmeme has redesigned," Gabe Rivera founder of the popular technology news site wrote in January 2012. "Drudge Report is now indisputably the web's ugliest news site."

Sometimes a headline just makes you wonder. What part of it is "real" news? What part of it is true? What part of it might be easily misconstrued?

If you want to succeed in business today, your organization must embrace social technologies — not just for your customers but also for your employees. But where do you start? Start with building the foundation.

For those who already think they have it under control, check out these two articles:

• The Digital Workplace: How Sociable is Your Intranet?
• 5 Signs Your Company Doesn't Get Social Business

We are gearing up for our February 22nd Tweet Jam on Social Business (#SocBizChat). If you are interested in participating or have a question you want answered, drop us a line.

Most Popular

• 5 Signs Your Company Doesn't Get Social Business
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• Knowledge Management in 2012? Probably Dead
• Knowledge Management Meets Social Business: KM is Dead, Long Live KM!
• 5 Critical Steps to SharePoint Information Architecture Planning

Editor's Picks

• Choosing an Enterprise CMS: Ovum Names EMC, IBM, OpenText Market Leaders
• Adobe's Kevin Cochrane Talks ReOrg, Customer Experience in 2012
• The Art of SharePoint Success: Strategy - The Costs & Benefits of SharePoint
• The 3 Stages of Customer Experience
• Social Business 101: Building the Foundation

Around the Web

• Modeling Enterprise Social Business Processes
• RIP: the social media influencer
• Content Marketing Tactics Now Critical to All Businesses [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Collaboration? You Must be Joking!
• Unexpected Actions Can Transform a Customer Experience

Featured Events (all events | post your event)

• Feb 28, 2012 – (Webinar) How to Build Great Mobile Websites
• Mar 06, 2012 — Get Social with Microsoft & Telligent in Dallas
• Mar 12, 2012 — Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit Orlando
• Mar 20, 2012 — Adobe Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City
• Mar 20, 2012 — AIIM Conference San Francisco

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post your job)

• Director of Customer Success Management in Nova Scotia at Radian6
• Software Engineer — Media Solutions in Bucharest at Adobe
• Principal Business Consultant in Paris at Saba
• Web Content Manager in Newport Beach at Orange County Museum of Art
• Senior Business Analyst in London at Microsoft

If it's time for a change, we've got a shopping list of hot jobs in our spiffy little corner of the world. Our bi-weekly featured jobs list is a great collection of opportunities spanning specialties and continents. Here's who's hiring this week (and if you're hiring, post your openings here).

Amazon had a content management snafu yesterday, accidentally revealing an as of yet unannounced workflow service for Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon quickly removed the content, but not before observers took note of the new goodie.

Apple and Google’s use of non-standard CSS features in its mobile browsers is causing quite a bit of outrage around the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At this week’s meeting of the CSS Working Group, the implications of Google and Apple’s mobile browsers were compared with those of Internet Explorer 6. Gasp. Are things really bad enough to hurl the techie explicative? Unfortunately, yes they are.

With the imminent arrival of Social Media Week and speculation on how many will join the ranks of millionaires (or billionaires) in light of Facebook’s IPO, Social has been on a lot of people’s minds.

Our experts brought us back to school this week and offered some practical advice on how to capture the power of social software to create more agile, responsive and collaborative organizations. Some commonly held myths about Drupal were dispelled, we remembered the customer and got some practical, strategic advice on information architecture tools and things to remember when shopping for an Enterprise CMS.

School’s in session!

A recent HP Labs study examines how to predict the popularity of an article prior to publishing it online or promoting via social media. The researchers were able to estimate ranges of popularity with an overall accuracy of 84% by considering only article content features.

The two top-selling tablets (after iPad), the Nook Color and Kindle Fire, just got a blogging boost from WordPress, the first name in web log hosting. The company announced on its blog yesterday an update to its native Android App (v.2.0.5) that includes a new Dashboard UI, developed to optimize the 7-inch screen on these popular new devices running the Android 2.0 open OS platform from Google.

 Looking to get more out of your social media engagement? As more and more companies embrace social media, many are seeking better ways to access more in-depth analytics. Today, Vitrue, known for its social relationship management (SRM) platform, has released major analytics enhancements designed to give marketers better insights on engagement, global perspectives of fan demographics and metrics, time navigation abilities and visibility across the web.

It took a minute, but, at last, most of us have mastered the art of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and maybe even Google+ if you really care. The next step then is to supervise these various platforms and put them to good uses (other than poking people and crafting snarky captions on photos). There are many ways of exploiting networks, and predictions over the coming year suggest that management marks the latest stage in the evolution of social media. If cleverly employed, it looks like we, the great wide public, are the Internet’s contemporary innovators. 

Any confusion about what ARM-processor-powered Windows 8 devices could and couldn't do has been cleared up by Microsoft. This new class of non-Wintel machines will do a limited amount of what your current PC can do, as they are limited to apps from the Windows Store.