Web Experience Management News & Articles

Web Content Management Systems (Web CMS) have been around for a while -- yet there still appears to be quite a large number of organizations that are either not using one at all or are not using one properly when implementing their digital marketing strategy for multi-branded websites.

How can you deliver optimal online customer experiences across channels? What tools and processes must be in place? How do you connect web analytics and customer data? What is big data and what skills do you need to make smart use of it?

CMSWire explored these questions and many more in our May 2 webinar, "Using Analytics and Customer Data to Build Great Customer Experiences."

The event featured Dan Keldsen, partner at Human 1.0 and Kevin Cochrane, VP Product Marketing for Web Experience Management at Adobe. For those of you who could not attend the live event, this redux gives you a summary of who said what and why it’s important -- and includes the full video of the webinar at the end of the article.

Open source customer engagement software maker Rivet Logic hit the road May 8 when they arrived in San Francisco with Alfresco, one of the largest open source CMS makers, for the inaugural Crafter Rivet Roadshow.

For several years, usability guru Jakob Nielson has had “bad Search” as his number one “Top 10 mistakes in web design.” The reasons for this are obvious. If users who come to your site cannot quickly find the information or solution they are looking for they will leave and go to a competitor.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) platforms are playing a critical role in marketing departments. Since more companies have turned to the Web as the primary marketing channel to accelerate revenue and build brands, managing a growing mountain of digital assets has become a challenge.

IBM is getting ready to release some updates to its Web Experience Management (WEM) platform. While we can't give you details of what's to come, we can give you some perspective on IBM's approach to WEM and the customer experience.

Enterprise Web Experience Management (WEM) is all the rage these days -- everyone wants to do more will less, in a more relevant, intelligent fashion and for multiple devices.

Answering the call, RivetLogic, an open source consulting firm, has developed an advanced WEM layer on top of the Alfresco open source content platform.

Dubbed Crafter Rivet -- itself an open source offering (details here) -- the product was developed by RivetLogic and key customers to address the WEM needs of both Alfresco customers and the broader market.

Crafter Rivet provides both an authoring and publishing application -- Crafter Studio -- and a high-performance content delivery system -- Crafter Engine.

Crafter Studio comprises a set of a user-friendly features for marketers and other experience managers that includes dashboards, WYSIWYG authoring, in-context preview, workflow, analytics, and multi-channel publishing.

On the delivery side, Crafter Engine consumes content published from Crafter Studio and provides developers with the foundation for quickly building flexible Web and mobile applications using a range of delivery tier technologies.

Crafter Rivet provides a flexible WEM layer built on the Alfresco platform.

Rivet Logic is leading the charge to bring Alfresco WEM solutions into to the market by providing a solid Web Experience Management solution built upon and offered as open source software.

You can learn more about how Crafter Rivet works and engage in a live dialog with the RivetLogic team this Thursday -- join in for a 1 hour webcast on April 12th running at 10am Pacific time / 1pm Eastern time. Click here to reserve your seat.

The mobile web is exploding -- it's true. And the good news is that intelligently addressing the needs of your mobile visitors doesn't have to be intimidating or resource intensive.

Yes, building mobile experiences is not a simple as publishing your website for a smaller screen. But, you also do not need to create completely separate code bases and content.

What if you could design and deploy all your content across all devices appropriately using a single environment and a single set of templates? The key, according to the Telerik team, is to develop your mobile strategy based on "responsive design".

Using responsive design you can:

• Create and manage your content in a single location and have it reflected appropriately across channels and devices.
• Manage a single URL regardless of device used to access your site.
• Automatic adjust the size of screens without doing device detection or redirecting the user to other locations.
• Manage web properties without additional server logic.

Responsive design concepts, product solutions and means of building mobile experiences will be address in an upcoming one hour interactive webinar on April 11 at 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 16:00 GMT.

Is mobile on your mind? If so, you can reserve your seat here.

Top Tasks Management involves continuously improving the top tasks of your customers.

Today is day one of the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, bringing together around 4000 online marketers, technologists and ecosystem players. Kicking off the day today Adobe announced the latest release of their Web Experience Management platform, and this afternoon we had a chance to chat with VP of Enterprise Technology, David Nuescheler, about the CQ 5.5 release, the Adobe product roadmap, how DAM is changing digital marketing team relationships, Adobe's new Web Experience Management (WEM) in the cloud and what challenges are shaping the industry in 2012. Here are some video extracts from our chat.

Like people, computers often lose a few things in translation, some of the minutiae more significant than others. The growth and interconnectivity of our global community in many ways parallels the spawning of an equally giant network of online communications systems, all attempting to speak with each other and share information, yet without common ground. It seems the web needs a translator, and for the team behind OASIS’s recently announced WEMI (Web Experience Interoperability Initiative) committee, the call to action comes none too soon.

Links cause most problems when they overlap and audience based links are particularly problematic.

Being true to its settlement agreement with the FTC in March of last year, Google pre-announced yesterday a comprehensive update that consolidates some 60 privacy policy documents, plus a refresh of its terms of service agreement. Both are to begin March 1, but are available now for review online.

This policy shift is generating buzz online over concerns of privacy, search anonymity and control over just what information gets shared.

Last week I sat in on a TweetJam hosted by CMSWire on the theme of Customer Experience Management. What stuck with me was the topic of customer experience consistency across multiple channels both offline and online.

Someone commented on the fact that the Starbucks brand is not just represented by their graphic image but it is also the smell of coffee when you walk into the store that helps to represent their brand.

We live in a multi-channel world that offers customers varied touch points across Web sites, microsites, print, email, mobile and social networks. Every channel adds to the customers’ total brand experience --whether they are reading through product reviews, walking through the mall, reading an email on their phone, passing a billboard on their way to work, or checking into a store on Foursquare on their iPhone.

The key to success is to ensure that you have the ability to measure, react and engage across these various touch points in a way that is consistent. Consistency builds trust and trust is what will lead you to a loyal customer.

At OpenText we have worked with several customers that struggle with brand consistency both as a result of introducing new channels as well as inheriting additional websites through acquisitions. People’s United Bank is an interesting case study. They wanted to present a unified perception of their brand even as they moved from 3 websites to 11.

They also needed the people who authored the content to be able to push it out in real time across a variety of channels. When all was said and done, they found that they increased channel performance by 70% -- a great statistic. Check out this detailed interview with the People's United Bank project team.

Mobile use of websites is on track to overtake conventional desktop access by the end of 2013, according to Gartner Research.

Cisco's data shows rapid growth of mobile data usage, and predicts even steeper growth over 2012 and 2013. More than one billion Android and iOS apps were downloaded in the final weeks of 2011, according to Flurry.

None of this should come as a surprise -- as you fondly glance at the shiny thing in your right hand.

Source: Cisco

No longer is managing Web content enough. The entire user experience must be managed and optimized across all online channels. And because mobile is a platform shift, it requires not only a change of content strategy, but also a change of certain technology infrastructure as well.

Open source experts, Rivet Logic, are giving a one-hour, live webinar that delves into how you can use open source software to develop exceptional online experiences that address both desktop and mobile web clients.

The event runs Thursday January 19th at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern time. During the discussion you will learn how to blend open source software to seamlessly deliver engaging online experiences across channels. 

You can learn more and reserve your seat here.