Some people seemed a bit miffed by my last post. All that silence and then I say their product’s not as beautiful as some others. But as Arsène Wenger said, “Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”
Well I’m not in the business of software-bashing. I deal with clients who have complex systems that they’re trying to get the most of in order to boost their business. So I do want to highlight a point in the last post that some readers seemed to have missed: Tridion is a really useful tool for supporting a content strategy.
What do I mean by that? Well, as Brain Traffic tells us:
Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.
And isn’t that what you want WCM software to do? I’ve recommended Tridion on the basis that it gives web managers good visibility over who owns content on the site and where it should belong, as well as providing powerful ways to devolve ownership. There are few products that do this as well as Tridion in my opinion; although I seem to be in a minority when I say that I like the way TeamSite does it too.
But that doesn’t mean I have to like everything about the product. User interface may be a matter of personal taste (and one of the posts that I still haven’t written questions how important editorial UI is anyway). But I’m yet to see a really good demonstration of a product that supports both content strategy and customer engagement in an integrated way. I’ve seen bits and pieces in different products, but:
- where are the security and content-type models that we see for standard content being applied to UGC?
- where’s the personalisation of content based on a visitor’s publicly-shared profile, e.g. Twitter and Facebook?
- how are you tailoring your website content to relevant trends on the rest of web?
- how are the performance ratings of your page content then reflected in the way other users navigate content? Does your WCM even let you track those KPIs?
- can you promote content to a visitor based on what other people – and most specifically people that they trust – found useful or enjoyed?
Those are just examples, but fundamentally I think vendors have found this kind of integrated content engagement strategy a challenge because WCM and UGC approached content from polar opposites. I don’t think they’re wholly incompatible, but I think we’re still in an earlier stage of evolution than most vendors would want to acknowledge.
So let’s just say that true web engagement on content-driven sites is still somewhat immature, as I would suggest that there are others who might prefer to express that more robustly.
