WEM Perspectives: You Say WEM, I Say Online Marketing Optimization

By Phil Kemelor (@philkemelor) May 24, 2010

Is Web Engagement Management (WEM) a new on the ground reality, or just the latest turn of phrase to help build the sales pipeline? I think we’ve been here before — but more importantly, how is your organization making its digital business decisions?

The phrase Web Engagement Management is new to me. I admit that when I first heard the phrase and read some of the Web CMS software vendor literature around this concept my first reaction was: “This is just another turn of phrase to sell more software to web content managers.” I felt much the same way watching Online Marketing Optimization become the buzz term du jour for web analytics vendors pitching to online marketers.

And I further admit that after reading the many articles about this subject over the last few weeks on CMSWire, I remain a bit skeptical about how this concept really changes the “on the ground” environment for managing digital channels.

Mind you, I don’t have any inherent issues with the goals of WEM as laid out in Brice’s kick off article (See: What is Web Engagement Management?), but this vision has pretty much always been the vision for the digital world. The tools and technology may have evolved — but not the vision, nor the inherent issues that challenge the realization of this vision.

Recurring Issues in Web Channel Management

Unstable web channel organization structure and a lack of governance within the web channel strike me as two of the biggest roadblocks. Questions like “Where does the web channel organization live?” are still common. Reorganizations within the web channel are more common, and then you can add to this the fact that digital groups are still looked at as outsiders to the mainstream operations of many organizations — especially those that are still driven by offline revenue.

I work with some organizations where the website is divided by lines of business, so that owners of one part of the site may prefer to sell ad space on their pages to outside vendors rather than provide links to the part of the site owned by another line of business — simply because it won’t reflect well on their division’s quarterly revenue numbers. I work with other organizations where marketing, content and IT have little or no relationship, operating in silos where there is no recognition or understanding of each others’ goals. Based on the conversations I have with folks throughout the digital world, I think these are fairly common scenarios.

Making this even more challenging is the participation of software vendors who want to sell their wares. Web CMS vendors focus on website managers and content managers; analytics vendors focus on marketers and web analysts; no one focuses on IT because the vendors know that’s a harder sell.

Looking at WEM Offerings in the Market

Fatwire is in the WCM space and their WEM suite consists of:

Content management
Web analytics
Multi-variate testing
Segmentation capability
Personalization
Targeted marketing
Integration with CRM

Omniture is in the analytics space and their marketing optimization suite consists of:

Content management
Web analytics
Multi-variate testing
Segmentation capability
Personalization
Targeted marketing
Integration with CRM

OK, so I’ll bet that Fatwire’s has a stronger content management offering than Omniture, and that Omniture has a stronger analytics offering than Fatwire, but I’m not here to quibble about features and functions.