Content Management Matters ™

Lisa Welchman's keynote speech on Web 2.0 and Web Operations Management was one of the top five sessions of Web Content 2008 (according to evaluation forms). Her message was simple, yet profound: you can’t do anything cool on the Web if you lack mature Web Operations Management practices.

Day Two of Web Content 2008 started with Jerome Nadel, Chief Experience Officer at Human Factors International, speaking on Making 2.0 Work For You, Inside and Out. Within the first ten minutes, Jerome had already contradicted two points made during yesterday’s sessions.

When you mention Facebook, most people immediately think “social network” (or perhaps “application overload”). Not many people will think “content management system.” Adrian Sutton, CTO at Ephox, spoke at Web Content 2008 today about the marriage of content management and Facebook. While the initial Facebook frenzy has somewhat cooled off these days (Adrian went so far as to call the unending list of invites to join groups and add 1,000 applications “a new form of spam”), there are some things that Facebook has done right, and which content management systems can learn from.

At the Web Content 2008 conference today, John Lovett of Jupiterresearch was a knowledgeable and personable presenter in a tough time slot, and I have to say I was suffering from information overload at the end of the day. Nevertheless, I got some good tidbits.

As a B2B marketer working with smaller companies, I didn’t think his topic, “Adding Dynamite to Dynamic Web Content,” was relevant for me. So, it was good to hear him acknowledge that dynamic content is tougher to implement in business-to-business situations.

He did say that implementing dynamic content, which he defined as “Content changes on a web page in response to different contexts or conditions,” doesn’t have to be a monumental project; you can start small with something as simple as image galleries. So, that was optimistic.

The big issue, of course, for companies implementing dynamic content is generating the content. The vertical that most obviously uses dynamic content is the media: generating content is their business after all. Also, travel, financial services and retail.

One example was Hotels.com who has moved from expert evaluations of hotels to user-generated content, which users find more valuable anyway. And, of course, user-generated content is a great way to overcome the issue of limited resources.

This afternoon at the Web Content 2008 conference, Ken Walters’ PowerPoint for his presentation, Design is Good Content, was refreshingly elegant. Loved the font. He’s obviously a designer and a good one. (although I wanted to edit his and the rest of the world’s English for singular/plural compatibility.) Lots of examples of good and bad sites, and then great summary points:

In his presentation, Cross-Media Marketing 1:1 Marketing: Providing Personalized Content to Drive Sales, at the Web Content 2008 conference here in Chicago, James Michelson proved himself to be a highly sophisticated and knowledgeable marketer. With one-to-one, the goal is to get the right message to the right customer at the right time on the right channel.

Here at the Web Content 2008 event today, one of the first break out sessions is being given by Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting on Marketing in a Connected World. Very simply, he provided five new rules for marketing.

Kicking off Web Content 2008 in Chicago is Dick Costolo from Google speaking on Hypersyndication and the Future of Media. Dick made up the word “hypersyndication” to refer to a world in which all content is distributed everywhere, where content is shared, remixed, socialized and put in places the original creator did not expect it to be put in.