What's Hot in Web Content Management in 2011?

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Apr 22, 2011

There are many different perspectives on what's big in web content management (WCM) this year, and where better to hear them then from the crow's nests of WCM vendors themselves? Following are a number of brief interviews we conducted at the recent Gartner PCC and Forrester Marketing Forum events.

Multi-Channel Engagement

Yes, WCM has evolved to be about much more than publishing content to websites, and most WCM vendors have recognized this evolution and adapted.

The Year of the Mobile User

When asked our question, Sitecore's (news, site) SVP Marketing, Darren Guarnaccia, said that they believe the number one driver to multi-channel engagement will be mobile. Supporting this channel will be tricky, Guarnacia said, because you have to re-think the entire experience, not just resize it. But mobile is just the start. Here is Darren explaining more:

Fatwire's (news, site) Partner Manager, Eric Atkinson, shares a similar view as Sitecore — that engaging experiences are key and that mobile is a top priority this year.

Tracking & Managing the Experience

Bart Heilbron, CEO of GX Software (news, site) talks about tracking your customer in real-time across all your channels. The key here, in his view, is that organizations can use many different technologies to engage with customers (i.e., more than one Web CMS, multiple social networks, multiple devices, twitter, etc.), so they need to be able to track what customers are doing independent of the underlying technology.

GX Software is different from many other Web CMS vendors in that they have broken out their core web engagement and online marketing tools into a separate product called BlueConic (read more about BlueConic here).

Optimizing the Digital Experience

Bobby Caudill, Adobe System's (news, site) Experience Architect, identified three key trends for WCM this year:

The explosion of multi-screen applications
The need to optimize digital experiences
The digital enterprise itself

All this means the need for a Customer Experience Management (CEM) strategy that enables organizations to create, deliver and optimize the customer experience. Stay tuned the next few days as we dig further into Adobe's new Customer Experience Platform, the fruit of the Omniture and Day Software acquisitions.