Latest Web Engagement News & Articles

As media moguls burned and fiscal crises loomed we kept our eye on the ball, checking out the good, bad and ugly of implementing intranets, the perils of not doing social media (or doing it wrong) and digging up 5 great tools for tracking online visitor behavior.

Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for CRM this week with (surprise!) Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce leading the pack. Speaking of Microsoft, the company announced record revenues for Q4,  as did Apple and IBM didn't fare so bad either.

In the land of open source Joomla! unveiled its latest Web CMS release taking aim at the enterprise, Drupal-focused Acquia landed $16 mil in additional funding and Packt kicked off the 2011 Open Source Awards.

Finally, your weekend reading should include these three Customer Experience Management articles: an overview of the Social Customer from Michael Brito, a review of customer experience challenges with Hank Barnes and the case for making the customer, not the content, king by Martijn van Berkum.

Most Popular

• Adobe, SDL Lead Forrester Wave for Online Customer Experience (CXM)
• Oracle, Microsoft & Salesforce Top Gartner's CRM Quadrant; Visionaries Lacking
• The Good, the Bad, the Ugly of Implementing Intranet Portals
• WEM: The Perils of Not Doing Social Media, or Doing it Wrong
• Publishing for Tablets: What You Need To Know About iOS and Android

Editor's Picks

• Master Your Content Using the Content Management Lifecycle
• 5 Great Tools for Tracking Online Visitor Behavior
• An Overview of the Social Customer
• CEM: The Customer is King, Not Content, and he's Switching Channels
• Designing The Future Office: Challenge and Innovate Current Management Practices

Around the Web

• The Future Of Mobile Is User Context
• Key Social Business Trends to Watch
• Is Being Transparent With Customers Overrated? 
• Managing The King: What Content Strategists Need To Know About Terminology Management
• When Businesses Don't Connect the Dots

Featured Events (all events | post an event)

• Aug 08, 2011 — CRM Evolution New York
• Aug 23, 2011 — UX Week 2011 - San Francisco
• Sep 12, 2011 — Semphonic X Change 2011 Web Analytics Conference
• Sep 13, 2011 – Enterprise Tomorrow Conference - San Francisco 2011
• Sep 26, 2011 – Telligent's The Big Social 2011

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post a job)

• UI Engineer at Meetup
• Business Development Manager (Media) at Twitter
• Account Executive, Web Content Management at Clickability
• Content Manager, Marketing at Kontagent
• VP of Business Development at ValueClick

Our contributing experts came from all corners of the Web Engagement Management world week, but there was a particular focus on really getting to know today's customer and their expectations. Read on for tips on handling modern challenges, as well as a few bits on web-channel stragegies and multi-channel commerce. 

When businesses shy away from social media, it’s usually because they are wary of negative press or not being able to control their image as closely as they prefer. And there’s good reason to be concerned. A new survey released by Symantec shows that social media “incidents”, where sensitive information is leaked, have cost the typical company US$ 4 million over past 12 months.

For those that do engage with social media, Symantec wanted to know how they protect themselves from negative consequences of using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other online forums.

Choosing a web visitor behavior tracking tool can be a bit overwhelming these days. The field is filled, many tools are confusing, and trying to get a bang for your buck can be tricky. As an assist, we trawled for 5 kick-butt solutions to set you on the path towards better customer experience management.

Get a good grip on your content management process by following the content management lifecycle.

Living in the age of social media must be a lot like when rock 'n’ roll emerged. What is this noise? Only young people like this stuff! Although we more than five years into our social media experiment, you’d be surprised to learn that there are many who still discount social media’s impact.

Enterprise content management provider OpenText (news, site) has announced an alliance with digital marketing agency VML, which will allow customers to work with one team to implement their customer experience management (CEM) solution.

Our Mobile Experience Tweet Jam kicks off today, July 20th at 1pm Eastern time.

Watch the CMSWire Tweet Jam as it unfolds:

Cross-channel marketing sounds simple enough; engage with your customers across different channels. Personalize your message; adapt it to your customers’ intentions, behavior and thoughts. Although in theory this sounds simple, in practice it’s nothing more than a revolution.

The challenge is that to truly do cross-channel marketing, the focus should be on the customer, not on your product or content. The customer should be the center point of attention, and organizations, processes and technology need to radically adapt to realize this.

Rich media is becoming an integral component of everything we do. It's used in sales presentations, conference presentations, websites, web conferences, training and more. That these assets are used everywhere is great, but it also causes issues related to searching, aggregation and just plain trying to find the information we need that may be located within it. Altus365 has the platform to help.

Attention all marketers, market researchers, analysts, and the like! If you're in the mood to learn and schmooze in San Francisco's autumnal sunshine, this year's Sentiment Analysis Symposium — taking place in early November — features in-depth discussions on sentiment analysis of enterprise, online, and social content. Organized by industry analyst Seth Grimes, the roster includes visionary speakers from Amazon.com, Tata Consulting and TripAdvisor. 

Like Twitter (t.co) and the webpage formerly known as Overstock.com (o.co), Google has turned to Columbia for a shortened address. The new G.co will direct web surfers to official Google products and services like Gmail, Documents and Photos. 

We are all social customers. Since the beginning of modern day society, we have always shared our thoughts, opinions, likes, dislikes and criticisms about the brands that we love and the brands we hate. The difference today is that our voices and the conversations that we have with others travel well beyond the living room. They are now being amplified on the social web like never before.

The social customer interacts with business and brands differently based on their emotions and how they are feeling on a given day. One day they might be a collaborative customer, and the next day they might be with a competitor. Much of this depends on a brands reaction, or not. All social customers are different but here are a few ways to make some sense out of who they are and how they act.

As companies grow and mobile workforces expand, opportunities for training and professional development can be challenging to coordinate and provide, not to mention tedious. Thanks to Knoodle, learning activities can be both accessible and social.

So, that new engagement metric you’ve come up with suddenly pulls the TV show you are marketing from #50 to #3, based on using a more comprehensive, multi-platform audience rating system. A sign of true success … or delusion?

MindTouch ( news, site) has breathed new life into the F1 button. True contextually aware help looks like it has arrived. Add a little marketing and sales automation in there and you may have the answer to reducing costs, increasing sales and truly understanding what your customers need.

In Gartner's Magic Quadrant for CRM Contact Centers, several companies showed what it takes to be considered a clear leader in the space, while innovation and emerging trends took a nosedive. 

As the public sector begins to come to grips with the transformation of services to online delivery, it is more important than ever that councils and local authority departments select the right supplier to support their Web Channel Strategy.

The world of multichannel commerce is a very fascinating one at the moment. Just like an old steam locomotive, the multichannel train has taken some time to gain speed, but now that it’s moving, there’s no stopping it.

It may even have gone over the top of the mountain to careen down, just a bit too fast, slightly out of control… an exciting ride no doubt, but are we doing enough to keep it on track?

With a growing number of companies and organizations striving to deliver superior customer experiences, “outside-in” is becoming a popular mantra. On the surface it seems obvious: organizations ought to put themselves in their customers’ shoes in order to understand how to best serve them. This appears especially straight-forward considering today’s advanced technology that allows organizations to track consumer preferences and communicate with them any time at any place. Yet if it’s really so easy, why do consumers continue to have frustrating interactions with companies that leave them feeling ambivalent at best or completely fed up at worst?