Latest Web Engagement News & Articles

Ahh, the weekend! After several informationally intense days at Gilbane Conference San Francisco, the R&R starts with a leisurely stroll through the week. Grab a cuppa something and check our coverage of the event.

One the most prevalent themes at #gilbanesf was web engagement management. Even at the post-conference inaugural #CMSGeekUpSF, conversations about engaging content, the importance of enjoying web experience and CMS becoming a Conversation Management System kept going.

Next door to #gilbanesf, a geeky crowd was sporting freebie Droids, Evos and G-socks. Yup, that would be Google I/O. How do you know you're at a geeky conf? Sign #13: 87% of attendees are using Macs, and 47% of those have "Powered by Ubuntu" stickers on them, as observed by @pmonks.

Froyo, (attempted) revival of Wave (especially pitched to the enterprise) and Google TV were among the goodies Google tried to impress the folks with. Oh, right. That and the big Google Storage announcement chasing after Amazon’s S3 offering that already has a relatively established history in the RESTful cloud services market. Too late to the game, dear G? Will BigQuery API and Prediction API become the game changers in Amazon vs. Google storage war?

Editor's Picks

• #gilbanesf WCM, WEM and the Digital Marketing Hub. CMS has been redefined as a Conversation Management System.
• Google Unveils Storage for Developers, Heads-up Amazon. The RESTful cloud service is another layer of the Web giant's storage and networking infrastructure, and competes directly with Amazon S3
• WEM: A Look At Multivariate and A/B Split Web Testing. Many web content management systems include options to run tests on your websites.
• IBM Adds Big Data Analytics, Offers Advanced Case Management Services. IBM really is throwing the kitchen sink at business analytics.
• Alfresco Gets Active in the BPM Space. It is no secret that an integrated BPM (business process management) solution is on Alfresco's roadmap.
• SharePoint 2010 Infused with Webtrends Analytics. It's not just content management and social computing vendors who want to a part of SharePoint's ecosystem.
• The Next Wave: Enterprise 2.0, Immersive Workspaces and Virtual Worlds. Is your organization using virtual reality or immersive workspaces?

Most Popular Articles

These articles were what you fancied most this week, according to Uncle G's analytics data.

Our Polls and Your Votes

Check out our recent poll results and commentary from industry experts:

• Poll Results: SharePoint 2010 Implementations Focused on Collaboration
• Poll Results: Web Analytics Need More Love
• Poll Results: Usability is Top DAM Challenge
  

Content Management Jobs

Here's what's been brewing lately in the CMS jobs and careers field. Both seekers and employers, catch the best fish of the season on our content management job board.

Featured Jobs

• Senior Technical Application Specialist at EidosMedia Inc
• Web Application Developer at CoreMedia
• Sales Engineer at CoreMedia
• Online Marketing Software Sales at Meltwater Group
• Software Engineer at Google

Traveling or Virtual, There are Events to Attend

Wondering how to spend your time in the next few weeks or months? Attend a conference, or maybe just a webinar or two. Have a look at our Industry Events Calendar to see what's happening in your area.

Featured Events:

• May 27, 2010 – Advanced Intranet and Portals Forum 2010

• May 31, 2010 – ExpressionEngine CodeIgniter Conference - San Francisco
• Oct 7, 2010 — HartmanEVENT 2010 - Social Media & Mobile Usability

Alterian (news, site) joined the crowd and kicked out their first integrated cluster of tools for social media marketing this week. The suite provides solutions for monitoring social media channels, collecting and analyzing customer data online, and multi-channel marketing.  

Web Engagement Management (WEM) seems to be one of the prevalent themes at this year’s Gilbane Conference San Francisco. The last session of the event was around the convergence of online marketing tools and web content management systems. CMS has been redefined as a Conversation Management System.

Hadley Reynolds of IDC moderated a wide-ranging discussion of strategies to enhance "findability" on corporate websites at this week's Gilbane Conference in in San Francisco. The discussion bypassed the most commonly-discussed topics such as improving ranking in Google or methods to increase click-through rates. Instead, the focus was on how to insure the people companies most want to reach — potential customers — can reach the right information and be converted from visitors to customers, both on the wider web as well as within the corporate website. Here are the key take aways.

Remember the frenzy the Google Marketplace caused? Well, get ready for part two. The Web giant unveiled another online store at the Google I/O Conference yesterday, this time for Chrome applications.  

Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group keynoted the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco today. His thought-provoking talk was focused on the roadmap for the social corporate websites with the goal of making them relevant again.

In the future, he asserts, there will be no corporate sites. There will only be sites assembled on the fly based on your social data.

Once you become immersed in testing your website it’s not hard to get caught in a matrix of never ending variables and what if scenarios. While there are many advanced tools that can help companies evaluate the usability of a website — a few of which we’ve already covered — ultimately there are two predominant types of testing methods that can be used: Multivariate and A/B Split Testing.

Today we examine these two testing concepts.

When it comes to selecting the best-fit Web Content Management (WCM) software, a great deal of confusion continues to haunt vendors and buyers alike. Industry analysts have done little to make this any easier. It's time to move beyond Web CMS.

Thanks to another revision of their privacy policy, Facebook has been in the headlines this week for all the wrong reasons. Whether or not the thousands leaving the platform will increase to a significant number on the 31st of this month (a.k.a Quit Facebook Day) remains to be seen, but MySpace is taking advantage of this tiny window of oppotunity regardless. In a move that aims to attract Facebook's sloppy seconds, the ex-king of social networking has announced the simplification of their own policy.  

Facebook changed its privacy policy again. Please, alert someone, we don't think we can contain all the shock and surprise we're feeling right now.

Okay but seriously, this time users have been affected so deeply that an official Quit Facebook Day has been instituted, and authorities from both the U.S. and Europe are up in lawsuit-filled arms. Is the social network on its way to becoming a victim of its own success, or are we just being too paranoid?

It’s half comic, half E-Book authored by Lisa Welchman of Web Operations Management firm WelchmanPierpoint. If you ever wondered about the impact of the web on organizations, and how to examine and understand the strengths and weaknesses of your own web presence — this quick read is for you.

 As the social media phenomenon continues to guide and enrich web engagement strategies, more and more companies are responding with holistic touch points for their customers. Twitter's rendition, called the Twitter Business Center, allows businesses to interact with their customers even if they're not following them. 

Web Engagement Management (WEM) is a strategy for how an organization brings together its human and technology resources to optimize its digital presence. In the article What is Web Engagement Management (WEM)? we outlined 5 core WEM components. But we just skimmed the surface. Here's more on what we think is at the center of WEM.

There's no two ways about it: Your technical team needs to participate in your marketing plans from the get-go — that is, if you want your Web Engagement Management (WEM) strategy to be successful.

Approximately six months ago we discussed the ways Demandbase, a provider of B2B customer acquisition solutions, works to better engage publishers with target audiences and deliver better, relevant advertisements.

Today they are launching a new platform called Real-Time ID Service that aims to identify business web traffic, in real time. With the new service, marketers can be armed with valuable insight into not just who is visiting or who has visited a website, but rather who is about to visit their website.
 

Thanks to the social networking gold rush of the last couple years, there are now countless ways to create low-friction customer conversations online. However, to make these conversations count — driving sales, increasing customer satisfaction or creating stronger brand awareness — there needs to be an effective way to manage how these conversations come together to add value, otherwise, they’re just noise.

If KickApps (news, site) failed to catch your attention before, perhaps their partnership with Adobe will do the trick. The combination of these social media and creative technologies has yielded the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) App Studio, a cloud-based, drag-and-drop media player solution. 

Consumers use several sources of information before making purchase decisions — they may seek independent opinions, speak to customer service agents, or examine goods physically. And they are constantly accessing information via multiple touchpoints — including mobile devices, social networks and company websites — throughout the research process.

Companies have come to recognize the importance of providing excellent cross-channel services to improve the customer experience. In fact, according to a Forrester report,  80 percent of customer experience decision makers said that improving cross-channel interactions was one of their key priorities in 2010. However, consumers consistently rate satisfaction levels for cross-channel experiences as poor, so it is apparent that businesses often struggle to deliver on this goal.

Lithium, a new-ish player in the Social CRM circle, has just made a significant investment. The acquisition of Scout Labs has left them a whole US$ 20 million dollars lighter in stock and cash. Meanwhile, social media startup founders are seeing dollar signs. 

Is waiting for the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines on a new Federal Government cookie policy like waiting for Godot? One might not be blamed for thinking as much.