Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework? Part 2

By Julie Hunt (@juliebhunt) Jun 17, 2010

Yesterday we asked the question: Is the corporate website obsolete? With a growing emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for companies, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and initiatives to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites. (You can read Part 1 here)

A Web Presence Management Framework may be the best approach for managing web content and web presence anywhere. Today we consider what such a Management Framework could look like and the future role of WCM/WEM platforms, where WCM/WEM may be the hub or one of the components.

Managing Distributed Web Presence

Some vendors of “traditional” web content management solutions have been transitioning their offerings to WEM platforms where managing and enhancing the web experience or engagement of the customer is the central purpose. The current WEM platforms focus mainly on customer and social capabilities existing in the corporate website, and are in very early stages of supporting integrations with external social sites.

Should WCM / WEM Software be The Hub — or one of the components?

Those supporting the notion that WCM/WEM Platforms should manage web presence and continuation of corporate websites include:

Brice Dunwoodie of CMSWire on What is Web Engagement Management:

It's how you create and manage content, including primary web content, multi-device content, blogs, forums and wikis. Your WCM platform is also the hub of your social media integrations and increasingly the dashboard by which you view your brand's conversational world.

Further expansion on the WEM platform from Barb Mosher, CMSWire: The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management:

Content Optimization: analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing, optimization and SEO.
Multi-channel Management: delivering same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline – new mobile web
Conversational Engagement: corporate website-based communities, UGC, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.
Demand Generation: customer engagement/experience through targeted marketing - increasing the number and quality of relationships, through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.
Sales Automation: two-way CRM integration, social CRM; e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.

As described by CMSWire, WEM platforms would provide capabilities and monitoring of brand and customer conversations on corporate websites, as well as bi-directional communication extensions to external social sites.

On The Other Hand

If the customer experience of a particular brand is taking place on external social sites, then there is now a distributed model for managing a brand’s web presence; the web experience/engagement for the customer is now remote from the corporate website. So there is even more need for tools/solutions to monitor, listen, act, engage…for customer-focused purposes, as well as for corporate business goals (which should lean heavily towards the customer).

A WCM/WEM platform may not be the hub for the overall solution, but instead one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content is still important but may not be tied to a specific website anymore). But content is also integral to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WCM/WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.