CMSWire Interviews

Search engine optimization and digital marketing have become -- and will continue to be -- key parts of any successful business. Vanessa Fox, former Googler and founder of Nine By Blue, is one of the individuals who pioneered these techniques. She spoke with CMSWire about her work and how she sees these fields advancing in the coming years.

Immediately after it was apparent that Apple's App Store was a hit, dreams of dollar signs and rave reviews have danced through the head of many an entrepreneur.

The BBC’s website for the 2010 World Cup was notable for the raw amount of rich information that it contained. Every player on every team in every group had their own web page, and the ease with which you could navigate from one piece of content to the next was remarkable. Within the Semantic Web community, the website was notable for one more reason: it was made possible by the BBC’s embrace of Semantic Web technologies.

The rise of social media has radically altered the state of customer communications. Organizations now have unparalleled insight into customer wants, needs  and -- more importantly -- into their perspectives. But consumers have gained a tremendous amount of influence, with social networks literally giving a global voice to every customer. This means that delivering a positive customer experience -- tailored to individual expectations -- is now a critical part of marketing and customer service.

When you think about Microsoft partners, one of the first that comes to mind is NewsGator. A successful third party integrator to Microsoft SharePoint, NewsGator Social Sites has over 4 million paid seats and is Microsoft's premier partner for social software integration. And while this last little while has seen a number of interesting events happen for NewsGator: Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer, a new version of Social Sites, a new version of SharePoint and a new CEO, it only spells good news for the social software company. Here we offer some of J.B. Holston's (now the former CEO of NewsGator) views on these topics.

Everyone wants to believe that there is a single bullet solution to solve all SharePoint problems. While the answers are never that simple, the starting point is: asking the question "why?"

Ant Clay, Founder and CEO of Soulsailor Consulting Ltd, is one of a new breed of SharePoint business technology consultants. Known to ask clients repeatedly “Why?” until they breakdown and admit “they just don’t know,” we thought we'd turn the tables on him to ask a few questions about SharePoint, governance and the upcoming release of SharePoint 2013.

Content Marketing isn't exactly new, but it's certainly come mainstream with the evolution of the Internet and recognition that the online customer experience should be as much about engaging and building loyal subscribers as it is about selling products and services. The two go hand in hand these days.

To learn a little more about content marketing and how it helps engage customers, we spoke with Robert Rose, Senior Analyst at Digital Clarity Group and co-author of Managing Content Marketing.

All businesses struggle with the question of what works in marketing. To hear how one organization made the decision to switch from traditional marketing tactics to a content marketing focus, we turned to Nicolas Antonio Jimenez of Widen. Nicolas acts as Digital Asset Management provider Widen's Marketing Coordinator and has witnessed firsthand the benefits that came from providing quality content to create an educated audience.

If you look at your company’s efforts to analyze social media data and optimize social media engagement and they seem ill-defined and / or lagging behind what is actually happening in the space, you are not alone. In an exclusive interview with CMSWire, Kushal Saha, Managing Director of the Information Technology Practice at investment bank Cascadia Capital, described how social media’s explosive adoption curve creates an inevitable lag in the capabilities of analytical and optimization technologies and services.

Joe Chernov, VP of content marketing at Eloqua, knows of what he speaks. He is an award-winning content marketer in business-to-business marketing, having created with his collaborator JESS3, content such as The Content Grid and The Blog Tree infographics; The Future of Revenue animated video; and The Social Media Playbook and Social Media ProBook e-books.

Joe recently took some time out to answer questions about his field and where he sees it going.

Take a minute and talk mobile strategy with Marci Maddox, Director Global Product Marketing at OpenText.

Context first. This is what Bob Egner, VP of Product Management and Global Marketing for Web CMS vendor EPiServer is excited about.

In an exclusive CMSWire interview Egner and CMSWire staff dug into the fundamentals of Customer Experience Management, how Web CMS vendors differentiate -- or don't, the cloud and PaaS vs. SaaS, how to go mobile more simply and the big challenges facing vendors in 2012.

Let's have a look:

If you survey records colleagues about Jesse Wilkins, the resounding chorus is “Jesse is committed to advancing the profession.” He has spent the past decade commenting on XML first and then email management. In the next year, he will stake a claim in social media governance on behalf of his new employer, AIIM (aiim.org). It’s a huge gamble.

Sitecore (news, site) announces the evolution of their web engagement platform, officially recognizing that Web Content Management is about more than just the channel -- it's all about the customer. See our video interview with Darren Guarnaccia, Sitecore's VP of Product Marketing as he highlights what's driving the company's current strategy:

When CMSWire sat down to talk with Salesforce.com EVP Alex Dayon we were looking for the secrets of successful enterprise collaboration.

Based on our conversation, the not so secret, secret sauce may be to emulate the most popular collaboration tool in the consumer space: Facebook. In Dayon's words, why would you do anything differently when hundreds of millions of people are using this tool, without a user manual.

The discussion wasn't all about Facebook though. Here's part two of our conversation. And if you missed our first session, catch it here: Chatter vs. Yammer? You Miss the Point.