Latest Web Engagement News & Articles

Webtrends (news, site) announced an alliance with the mighty Microsoft today, outlining itself as a preferred analytics solution for SharePoint 2010. 

What are you favorite brands? What is it about those brands that make you love them? For as long as I could remember, I have always loved the brand Nike. For me, it was a combination of the quality of the sneakers they produced, and the marketing messaging the company used throughout the years. The sneakers in of themselves were excellent — they felt good to wear. But a lot of sneakers felt “good to wear,” so what was different about Nike? It was the brand messaging; the brand “made me feel good.” I felt like I was a part of something big, and Nike understood how I felt and what I needed. Customer engagement management is all about that last part, the “understood how I felt and what I needed.”

If you need more proof that customer experience is a game-changer for many industries, a new report called “Bringing Dexterity to Subscriber Complexity: Managing the Challenge of Change and Choice in Communications and Media Markets” shows that 83% of communications operators need to get a better handle on network resources and support challenges presented by a more diverse and demanding customer base and the increase of new devices and service offerings.

I have seen many organizations that treat the Web, social media and mobile as three distinct entities. They develop social media strategies separately from web strategies, and as mobile becomes ubiquitous, mobile strategies are adding yet another layer. This separation is the wrong approach because customers expect a consistent online (and offline) experience. Moving forward, websites will become more social and everything will become mobile. Web, social and mobile need to be approached holistically. When I think about WEM (Web Engagement Management), I think about the need for a holistic digital paradigm.

I don't think I really have to tell you that the phrase "if you build it, they will come" is a lot of crap when it comes to building a successful online community. So let's look at some things you should do if you want to be successful.

The Web reflects the return to dominance of the written word.

Microsoft has become the dominant vendor for creating and managing documents via its dual SharePoint and Office products — but with tools like the iPad shifting how we work Joe Shepley asks: Are SharePoint's days numbered?

Google-wise, yes there's been the Google+ buzz, but the company also previewed a new interface for Google Apps and announced its profiles are all going public. But its competitors aren't sitting idle — Facebook integrated Skype for video chat.

In other news, WordPress 3.2 arrived dropping support for IE6, Sitecore added print media to its customer engagement platform, the IKS consortium explored semantic intelligence for content management and Microsoft paid a client $250K to switch to Office 365.

A key social business article this week came from Dion Hinchcliffe. Have a read of 7 lessons learned about social business. We also looked at 3 ways to get buy in for your content strategy and examined how to gain competitive advantage with adaptive case management.

Most Popular

• 7 Lessons Learned on Social Business
• 5 Great Skype Alternatives
• Toppling a Giant: SharePoint 2010, the iPad & Social Business Software
• IKS Means Semantic Intelligence for Content Management, But Will it Survive?
• Google Analytics Now Tracks Social Engagement

Editor's Picks

• 3 Reasons Why Organizations Need to Increase Transparency
• Microsoft Releases Office, SharePoint SP1, Offers Chrome Support
• Sitecore Adds Print Media to Customer Engagement Platform via Acquisition
• Facebook's Answer to Google+: More Chat
• Choosing the Right Social Technology Vendors

Around the Web

• Social Networks: Many Friends Isn't Always More Valuable
• The impact of social media on IT
• Folders, A Nutritious Part of Your Content Management Diet
• Goodbye e-commerce, hello 'customer interaction'
• Ten ways to create a knowledge ecology

Featured Events (all events | post an event)

• Jul 20, 2011 — (Webinar) Best Practices for Mobile Enabling Your Website
• 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 — The Big Social 2011

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post a job)

• Blogger Evangelist at Shutterstock
• Business Unit Manager — SurveyMonkey
• Sr. Product Manager - Mobile at WhaleShark Media
• Webmaster at Jive Software
• SocialFlow Product Engineer at SocialFlow

Netvibes (news, site) has added social analytics to its social media monitoring solution. But these are ordinary analytics, says Netvibes, they are "adaptive".

Adding to its string of e-commerce acquisitions this year, eBay (news, site) has purchased Zong, a mobile payments vendor, for US$ 240 million. 

Successful community engagement takes more than just a worthy cause. It helps to have a useful, collaborative platform from which to organize events, facilitate fundraising and track supporters’ behavior effectively. Launched in April, NationBuilder aims to be a new community toolkit that connects community organizers with supporters so that non-profits, political campaigns and other community organizations can spend more time engaging, building and making a difference.

Needing to effectively sell your content strategy to the high-level executives within your company? These three simple ways will help you to achieve just that.

Engaging your audience through social media might be easy, but tracking the performance and returns from these is not necessarily a piece of cake. Clearspring's latest updates to its AddThis (news, site) platform makes it easier to track the performance of sharing. A new partnership with the BlueKai data exchange also expands users' network for better campaign monitoring and tracking.

Curated content just got more connected. Just as Google+ launches, Flipboard also rolled out a few new features, designed to enhance the way readers browse, search and share content.

Back in March Hippo CMS 7.5 (news, site) was released. That version was focused on localization and contextualization. This week, the open source WCM provider releases Hippo CMS 7.6, but this time, the focus is on supporting developers as they build their websites and applications.

Today Twitter (news, site) announced the acquisition of an analytics platform called BackType. The plan is to develop tools for Twitter’s publisher partners that will help gauge the impact of social media. 

As expected, online gaming vendor Zynga (news, site) has filed for its IPO, meaning we get another round of "It's another bubble!" "Is not!" "Is too!" articles from the financial press.

Sitecore (news, site) knows that a complete customer experience is still a combination of digital and print media. To ensure its print capabilities are solid, it acquired technology partner Pectora.

Here is how some recent corporate news looks through the lens of "purpose" — which I believe is a determining factor of a company's success.  

In part four of this series (see part 1, part 2 and part 3) I look at the process of eliminating duplicate items from the list of top website tasks.

Turns out the Google+ reveal wasn't the only thing up the Internet giant's social sleeve this week. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools now provide tools for tracking the impact of tweets, likes, +1s and more on your website’s traffic.