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Contented Management

Contented Management

Promoting social media internally

Why do so many organisations struggle to implement social media effectively for internal use? Is it because they’re seen as too costly, a fad, or a distraction from real work? Why do so many of these platforms – often predominantly designed for business use – thrive on the web but struggle for a foothold within the corporate firewall?

It appears to me that organisations try to introduce too much web 2.0 culture into these projects while continuing to have rigid expections.

The objectives for social media on the web are emergent: they are the result of uncoordinated initiatives, with the benefits only becoming apparent as the site is used. Business change on the other hand is typically vision-led: there’s a clear idea of the business benefits before work starts and these are based on evidence derived from organisational learning. Moreover, on the web, adoption of new tools is viral. Within organisations, adoption is typically enforced.

Many organisational social media projects are sold to the business by middle management, early adopters who use similar tools outside the office. They believe that because a tool is widely used externally, it will be rapidly adopted internally too. This is rarely the case. The web provides a user base that far outstrips any organisation’s and staff have more pressing priorities than trying out a new technology. Moreover, executives need a concrete business case to approve a project. Saying “Twitter’s great” simply doesn’t cut it. The differences in approach are transparent:

Objectives Driving force
Web Emergent Bottom-up
Corporate Clear Top-down

Promoters of social media within organisations must meet pre-agreed objectives and promote the tool from the lower rungs of the management ladder. This guarantees frustration all round: project advocates believe executives are being obstructive, but executives wonder why the project isn’t achieving its business case.

You need to shift the axis. Don’t focus on the problems social technologies will solve. Compel your staff to use them as a communications channel and find out what benefit they bring. You can reduce the risk of failure by constraining your spending, so the tool is less painful to throw away, but you need top-down leadership to drive the programme or people will just focus on their day job.

A few practical steps:

  1. Choose something that’s familiar and frequently used.
    Staff need to grasp the tool’s basics quickly. If it’s overly complicated, your efforts will be invested in training rather than measuring benefits. It’s also got to be something that’s used on a daily basis. If you have a wiki on best practice, for example, it’ll get contributions for a week or two then just become forgotten about.
  2. Make sure it’s throw-away.
    To prove the concept, select something cheap or hosted, with low start-up costs. And make sure that you don’t put content or data in it that’s critical to your business strategy that you then can’t get out again.
  3. Don’t customise it!
    The world is littered with pilot projects that thought they knew better than the software before they’d used it, or tried to integrate it with other tools and turned into never-ending testing. Just run the technology as it is, in the simplest way possible. If it works, then consider how to improve it.
  4. Engage key users.
    Your trial should certainly get the executive to put their mouth where their money is. If they lead others will follow. Your sample group of users — you weren’t going to roll it out to everyone at once were you? — should include different departments so that it’s not seen as anyone else’s “baby” when you finally roll it out.
  5. It’s a trial people must follow.
    Using the new tool is not optional. Ideally, they’ll use it instead of something else, so a wiki instead of a file system, blog instead of broadcast email, micro-blog instead of instant messaging. If you think of how CRM software is typically rolled out in a business, you’ll see how important this kind of enforcement is to making adoption of the software a success.

For social media to be effective in your organisation, you can’t expect it just to be taken up by the user base. You have to drive it through. But you do need to be open-minded about what it will achieve. Hopefully, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Some further reading:

Philippe Parker on 26 May 2009

Contented Management

Support your web editorial team

It’s a pretty sure-fire bet that if your website has heavily devolved authorship, or a model where lots of authors make requests direct to a central team, that you’re going to have duplicate content, incorrect content and altogether more content than you actually need.

This is usually because few people know the content really well, while those who do are seldom in a position of sufficient authority to enforce processes and guidelines to make the website a streamlined communications tool. The communications team in charge of the site are put upon by subject experts and non-web marketing managers who insist that they need a new page, often linked to from the homepage, that promotes their unique piece of content.

Unless you have a really tough manager taking charge of the site, this spells trouble. Content is added without an over-riding communication strategy and very little content is taken away. It’s a symptom that you see most often in the public sector, where people’s fear of breaching misunderstood legislation like FOI mean that content purges are rare. Consequently website management becomes unwieldy as more and more superfluous information is piled into the CMS repository. This creates its own content management issues, but the most significant problem is lack of focus on the website.

If this is the case for your website, you need two things:

  1. A clear objective for your site.
  2. A clear process for dealing with duplicate content.

When you find duplicates, or a request is made to add content that resembles content which exists already, you need to ask the following questions:

  1. Does the new content meet the website objective? If it does, process the request. If not, reject it.
  2. Is there evidence that your audience requires the information supplied by the new content. If so, process it. If not, reject it.

If the content exists already and is fulfilling its remit but isn’t being read by your audience, you have an information architecture issue. This is the justification for promoting the content as a feature on the homepage or elsewhere on the site.

These are all basic editorial issues, but if you’re suffering from them it’s probably not because you have bad editors but because your editors have little support. You need to help them develop and communicate this very simple process and ensure that it is enforced. The clarity of your process will translate into clearer content on your website.

Philippe Parker on 21 May 2009

Contented Management

People or software?

There’s a seemingly never-ending debate as to whether you choose your web content management software first or the team to deliver it. I’ve passed some comment on this myself in the past. It really comes down to Strategy 101. Are you looking to improve productivity or growth?

If you’re trying to improve your website’s revenue streams the software will offer you little. There are of course CMS out there that are sold by integrated marketing campaigners, and there are other CMS that offer strong personalisation capabilities. But fundamentally, it’s the concept and the design that will make your website better, not the underlying technology.

That’s not to say that you won’t make your life more difficult by picking the wrong tool; if you need to deliver personalised content with a CMS that only offers static delivery, for example. But if it takes you 20 minutes longer to produce the right content for your audience and deliver better advocacy and revenue, that’s a hindrance you may well choose to accept.

Nevertheless, CMS are fundamentally about improving editorial processes and governance. So if you’re trying to improve your content classification, link with other systems (like your LDAP directory) or make devolved authorship of your website easier, you must find the right tool to do this. If you pick the wrong product, you will be in for a world of painful customisations that will damage your operations in the longer term.

Of course, projects rarely have a single objective that’s exclusively sales or operations focussed. There is usually a weighting one way or the other, however.

  1. If the operational side is more important, look at the software first.
  2. If the marketing side is more important, go to an agency and ask them to recommend the CMS.
  3. If you’re trying to do both, let the agencies and vendors decide who they want to partner with in order to deliver your requirements.

More on technology selection:

Philippe Parker on 18 May 2009

Contented Management

Three little tips to reduce huff and puff

My two-year-old son is pleased to live in a house made of bricks. It affords him protection from the Big Bad Wolf.

But what the books don’t tell you is that while piglets 1 and 2 were sheltered by their less than robust housing, piglet 3 faced rocketing costs, toil, tears and the emergent threat of swine flu.

In the seldom-told sequel, pigs 1 and 2 are forced to vacate the house that was designed for one small piglet rather than three growing hogs. They lack the skill and resources to build their own brick houses and end up destitute and living in fear of Tom the piper’s son.

As an architect, piglet 3’s end vision is certainly the right one — or would be if he foresees having to accommodate his two brothers. But in order to fulfil that vision you need the skills, resources and time.

If you’ve an immediate problem finding the right shelter for your content, then long-term strategic planning for a robust future vision is likely to be the wrong approach. You need to find a quick way to protect your resources, assess the situation then plan your next step. You’re unlikely to face a fatal threat – it’ll just be lupine bluster – and even less likely to have enough time and money to mitigate against the problem anyway. Start building, see if it works and, if it doesn’t, tear it down again. Being able to manage even a small amount of your content in a robust way is better than just having a visionary strategy.

Those three tips:

  1. Choose two high-value objectives; one that should be simple to achieve and the other likely to be complicated.
  2. Select a technology to deliver these objectives that is in your existing skill set and technology stack. Only buy licences required to meet the project objectives.
  3. Implement the project as quickly as possible and evaluate the success or otherwise six months later.

ECM doesn’t have to be a swine to implement. As long as you don’t try to go the whole hog from the start you’ll avoid making a pig’s ear of the project and be sure to bring home the bacon. It’s a ham-fisted analogy, but it’s no fairy tale.

Further reading on the failings of web strategy:

  1. Anthony Bradley – Your Web Site Strategy is Destined to Fail
  2. Dennis D. McDonald – How to avoid common strategic planning mistakes
  3. Maish Nichani – Mapping your website redesign strategy
  4. Gerry McGovern – Web redesign is bad strategy
Philippe Parker on | 15 May 2009

Contented Management

Persona non grata

These days, most content-managed websites are familiar with the concept of user-centric design. You don’t present your information in a way that mirrors your organisation; you focus on your audience’s requirements and how they can meet their goals on your website.

But how should you go about this design process? There are a bewildering array of techniques that fall under the general heading of usability.

At the most basic level, you can employ an expert. Someone with extensive experience of designing customer-focussed websites is going to be of a lot more value than a non-specialist. This is a quick way to get up and running.

To give the specialist some structure, you should provide heuristics about what you want your site to achieve. The expert can then analyse your site against these heuristics and tell you if it’s likely to meet your objectives.

This is still pretty subjective stuff, so the next step would be to develop persona: constructed character profiles which represent the kind of visitors you have on your site. You can then test your site’s objectives against these user profiles.

A more tangible way of doing this is to test the objectives against real people: recruit people from your user base and test their interaction with your site in a lab, or using a multivariate testing tool. There are many agencies which conduct this user testing, but it’s often difficult to get enough users to be truly representative sample.

Probably the most solid basis for user-centred design is to consider your website traffic analytics: click-throughs, bounce rates and page hot spots. This requires considerable investment in technology and analysis. These techniques all bring value, but with diminishing returns based on the effort and cost you need to commit.

Which one is right for you? The table below provides a very cursory guide.

Type of website Testing technique
Simple web presence where web is not a business channel
Do these sites even exist anymore?		 Expert design
Brochureware: marketing-driven, but not the primary selling channel. Heuristic evaluation
Large, content-driven news or information sites. Persona development
Complex regulatory information or self-service intranet / extranet. User testing
eCommerce / point-of-sale website. Analytics-based

All the techniques will provide you with some return on investment, but it’s only the more complex or commercially-driven content that’s likely to benefit from serious user testing or analytics.

Some further reading on usability and persona development:

Philippe Parker on | 13 May 2009

Contented Management

Is SharePoint viable as a cheap ECM?

Many organisations acquire Microsoft SharePoint as a tool to manage all their organisational knowledge: documents, wiki, web. As such it serves as a cheaper alternative to the top of the line enterprise content management products. It’s certainly cheaper to implement if you just run it as out-of-the-box as possible.

It also addresses the widespread issue of how you manage version control of documents that then need to be published directly to a website, which is why so many mid to upper tier web content management vendors provide SharePoint “connectors”: Morello and Tridion are good examples.

You need to take care before asserting that SharePoint is true ECM, however. It offers practically no document automation, no business process modelling and poor integration to other applications, particularly if they’re not Microsoft based. What you get from SharePoint is a collaborative document repository that offers you pretty limited web publishing capabilities. You wouldn’t want to use it to drive a busy transactional website.

You also need to look at your website’s publishing model before considering SharePoint in any context. The SharePoint – WCM model is best suited to a very devolved authoring group publishing what’s essentially extranet-type content. If you’re publishing marketing copy, you need a specialist team of copy writers and a centralised platform for publication.

SharePoint is undoubtedly cheaper than implementing true ECM, but you get what you pay for. Before you buy, make sure that:

  • You only want to integrate with other Microsoft software packages.
  • Your audience will relate to content being produced by a wide group of authors.
  • You require minimal automation of business process through the website.
Philippe Parker on , , | 11 May 2009

Contented Management

My CMS vendor just got acquired; should I panic?

It’s all the rage for the CMS community; OpenText is acquiring Vignette.

What does this mean for clients of the two companies?

RedDot has been the web content management offering from OpenText for the last few years. It’s a pretty basic tool compared to Vignette, but this has distinct advantages: friendly user interface, quicker to implement, generally cheaper to develop basic functionality. I expect that RedDot will continue to be sold, but that there will be minimal product development. It will probably serve as a cheaper basic WCM in the same way as Alterian market Immediacy as a cheaper alternative to Morello.

The big challenge for the new company will be how to consolidate and exploit LiveLink and Vignette’s core content management offering, VCM. The offering that OpenText should be providing is end-to-end content management from documents and business process to web, but it’s going to be a substantial task to provide this through two pieces of software that are so established. LiveLink does the trick with documents and VCM does it with complex web content. But this certainly doesn’t mean that the two fit together neatly.

A significant benefit for OpenText is the acquisition of Vignette portal (VAP). This will enable OpenText to market web applications rather than just content-driven websites. Again, there will probably have to be some significant work done on the API level to LiveLink to turn this into a fully SOA-enabled platform. Nevertheless, if you’re doing business via the web — and surely everyone is these days — then a portal offering is a necessity for any enterprise content management vendor.

OpenText will be able to offer a product suite to match any of its competitors. But it will be a suite, not an integrated platform. Indeed the company has a poor track record in integrating its product suite: Gauss and ObTree anyone? Even RedDot stands pretty much alone from LiveLink. Oracle, despite its many acquisitions, has a far smoother integration of document and web content management, as does Interwoven.

So what does this mean for you if you’re about to buy? You still need to be wary of LiveLink’s web credentials; this is unlikely to improve for some time as the company attempts to make the various products work together smoothly. And if you’re about to buy RedDot, bargain hard, because I think the prices are likely to come down.

A few other thoughts on the acquisition:

Philippe Parker on , , , | 7 May 2009