Latest Web Engagement News & Articles

As more organizations build online customer communities, often aided by social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, the lines between community and social media have begun to blur.

Last week, we reported that interactive marketing was forecasted to grow substantially over the next five years. Almost on cue, two launches seek to capitalize on this predicted growth. Ventana, best known for its public relations, has spawned a new entity it's calling Ventana New Media. With it comes the release of the Ventana New Media Engine, designed to optimize content-driven search engine communications so organizations can build an effective brand identity, while generating leads accurately across appropriate platforms.
 

Dreamforce starts today… and it feels like Groundhog Day. Not the groundhog that tells the weather, but groundhog in the way things keep repeating themselves. The repetition this time is in the shape of Microsoft’s offer of rebates of US$ 150-per-seat for customers who subscribe to Dynamics CRM online.

Despite our concerns about personalization, both from a privacy and efficacy perspective, marketers are still easily seduced by its utility. Additionally, try as they might to resist it, consumers have grown accustomed to it. Yet, thanks to the need to engage users across various channels, marketers are under pressure to deliver personalized, location-based messaging. To do so, marketers must overcome a few challenges.

In a world full of strife and disagreements, you can take comfort that at least we’ve found a way for social, mobile and apps to work together. Well, Direct Message Labs have, anyway. And with their latest Reach platform, end-to-end marketers can effectively manage their presence across various platforms and applications all in one place.

Stop talking or writing about your new app, video, Twitter feed or Facebook page. Start making your customers’ lives simpler, faster, cheaper.

I’m writing a long piece on customer collaboration, one of the key components of Social CRM, which elevates to its proper place the idea of building peer-like relationships with customers. Very naturally, the focus of this piece swings toward the technology being developed for collaboration with customers. But as is often the case with anything involving customers, the technology merely scales and extends a human activity. If you’re not ready to engage in that activity, the technology isn’t going to help you.

Salesforce.com (news, site) acquired social media monitoring platform Radian6 this March, but the US$ 326 million deal was lacking a mobile app that would address the growing needs of an increasingly-mobile workforce and enterprise. With this, Salesforce has today announced the launch of an iOS application for Radian6, available on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

As digital advertising grows to an estimated US$ 72 billion market in 2011 measuring, managing and optimizing this spend has become a priority for Adobe. A reorganization announced today puts Brad Rencher, currently in charge of Adobe's Omniture business unit, out front in this domain and overseeing the company's customer experience management (CXM) solutions, largely got via the Day Software acquisition.

Targeting is not an alien concept to marketing professionals. But as businesses get more intimate with social media and CRM applications, does this mean that social media marketing is also increasingly becoming personalized? A recent survey among marketing professionals gives us a few insights into how firms target and personalize their marketing messages.

Touch Marketing offered analysts a bit of a break with the release of a recent Twitter infographic. The colorful graph presents over 35 different statistics, including the number of registered users, what time of day is best for being retweeted, and how many new tweets are posted per week. Behold: 

In the last article in the Publishing for Tablet series, What You Need To Know About iOS and Android, we discussed which tablets and operating systems a publisher should target. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, it is time to tackle the more juicy problems.

Today’s question: How the dickens can I get my content to fit onto tablet screens and enhance my content using the wonders of digital, while retaining a production workflow that doesn’t break the bank? Well, it turns out that not all content is created equal — let’s look at that first.

 Yahoo is an extremely popular website, yet its stock has performed really badly. Why? Because it sells stuff (banner ads) people don’t want to buy.

All hail the newest addition to our giant bag of acronyms: CXM. All hail the man leading the CXM pack at Forrester: Stephen Powers! 

Along with a handful of other analysts, Powers kicked out a report for Forrester titled: Harnessing The Convergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions. It covers the basics of the growing CXM trend and offers tips on how to make it most useful, by clearly defining the role of content. 

Since Oracle announced that it was buying web experience management vendor FatWire (news, site), there has been a lot of speculation as to what the company might do with the product set. Yesterday, Andy MacMillan, VP of Product Management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle, outlined the roadmap for Fatwire and explained how Oracle will make sense of things under the Oracle WebCenter moniker.

Twitter's own image sharing service was initially announced back in June — much to the dismay of third party developers — but was finally rolled-out to all users this week.

Today Norwegian Web Content Management vendor eZ Systems (news, site) added another dash of customer experience management spice to its Web CMS, chalking-up the acquisition of personalization provider YOOCHOOSE GmbH.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (news, site) has been busy making the web a more accessible place. In focus today is a project dubbed the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) — it aims to help software vendors make better web content authoring and management tools, including WYSIWYG editors, word processors and web content management systems.

URL shortening service Bit.ly (news, site) has acquired automated social media broadcaster Twitterfeed (news, site), moving from URL analytics towards channel delivery, thus extending its  intelligence capabilities into the burgeoning social media sphere. Customer experience managers should be pleased.

The mobile application marketplace is booming and competition is tough. Making sense of the action via mobile analytics is critical and analytics vendor Flurry (news, site), has just announced a new release, introducing enhanced demographics, segmentation and time-based analysis.