For the last few years, vendors, gurus and analysts have been trying their best to come up with a new acronym to encompass the business needs surrounding Web Content Management. Web Content Management or WCM is a dated and imperfect term to be sure - we all know the Web is not just the Web these days, it pretty much means any channel, sometimes even offline channels. Still, there's something interesting about all the new options. Gartner's new name is Online Channel Optimization or OCO. Forrester calls it Customer Experience Management or CXM. And the lingering favorite of many vendors is still Web Experience Management or WEM. Notice anything yet? In all of these new terms, the word that's no longer there is "Content." The C stands for Channel or Customer or is gone altogether. What happened to the Content?

The most amazing part of the missing C-for-Content is that it comes on the back of the year that Apple and Steve Jobs finally made it to the top of everyone's "we want to copy" list. Lest we forget, before the iPod was the iPod, and the iPhone was just a twinkle in Jobs' eye, Apple turned the corner with iTunes. The success of iTunes came so early that it arguably made the iPod and Apple what it is today. Beyond their incredible commitment to design, Apple also made the decision that Content mattered. The iTunes storefront design itself was nothing special, nothing Amazon hadn't done before. The iPod device was still in first generation. Back then, it was purely the content you could get via iTuens - the first legal alternative for folks to get access to music - that opened the flood gates.

This doesn't mean we all should strive to become Content providers or media moguls like Apple. The lesson is broader and simpler - content is the basis of success. Content gets you found online. Content causes people to visit, sign up, give you a lead, or pay you something. Content is what your customers engage with, what they comment on and share with their friends.  But here we are, opening 2012 and all the vendors and industry gurus want to focus on everything else but Content; how many channels you use, how well you use channels, what the broader customer experience is when interacting with you, and on and on. Meanwhile, the one thing that matters above all else - your content - is completely taken for granted.  Without relevant engaging content, what exactly were you planning to put into all those optimized channels?

So yes, WCM is a dated and imperfect acronym. But the C is the least of the problems. The W for Web could use refinement (check this Wired article out and you might be thinking we should use an I for Internet again). But if we leave the technology argument aside for a moment and focus on cash - cost savings or revenue generation - then the real problem with WCM is the M for Management. Management of content assumes the content is already there, just needs to be organized, versioned, stored and so on. But the lesson of Apple suggests that what we need to do with content is not "manage" content but generate content faster, find better content, make content accessible, make content do something for you - leads, visitors, conversions. In other words, use content to Market yourself, to bring in audiences and keep them coming back for more. 

We don't obsess here too much about acronyms.  Customers don't buy acronyms, they buy solutions. But the CM that makes the most sense to me is Content Marketing.  At least that describes the real business problem that Percussion is determined to solve.

When a new release comes out, everyone wants to hear about what it does. Well, you can go read the Percussion CM1 Version 2 announcement for that. I'm here today to give you the real news about Percussion CM1 Version 2. It's much bigger, and it's coming to ALL the Percussion WCM products. Percussion is finally, at long last, and unlike any other vendor or open source community, offering an enterprise class WCM that is a Product.

Confused? Let me explain.

First, go ask your WCM administrator whether your system does something. Anything. It doesn't have to be leading edge like "does our WCM do HTML 5 yet?" you could try "does it make sure we always have ALT text on images?" or how about "does it require an approval before my change goes live?" Ask about any real world business need you have and the answer you will get from the WCM owner is always some variation of "well, it can be made to do that if you want it to." The same answer will come out of any panel of gurus, analysts, CTOs and WCM consultants.

In the WCM market, everyone is channeling the Pink Panther's Inspector Clouseau, "I suspect everyone and no one!" All these WCM "products" do everything and nothing. The reason is simple, none of these enterprise strength WCM "products" are actually "products." Instead, they are general purpose WCM platforms on which YOU the customer (or your consultants) builds your WCM application, often called your "implementation." Trouble is, for real world people, the implementation IS the WCM. You only hear about it after something goes wrong:

• Don't like that edit form? We built in too many fields in our implementation. 
• Alt text not being enforced? We forgot to turn on validation in our implementation. 
• Upgrade didn't work? The software upgraded fine, it's just the code in our implementation that didn't survive. 
• Can we do the iPad, HTML5, or anything new ever? Sure, but we just need to add support for that in our implementation.

Every one of these changes to the implementation requires huge cost, time and effort. But as the Web is so elusive, it's often hard to justify this expense. By the time you are done, the web will have moved on to the next thing. Can't we just manually check our Alt text? Is the iPad really worth the development time? Is there a new device, standard, channel (whatever) coming out soon anyway? In short, we give up. We live with it as is and just hope the WCM doesn't get in the way. Our collective dependence on "the implementation" is not simply the proverbial elephant in the room, it's an angry elephant charging through a tiny packed room of screaming helpless marketers with no where else to go.

Somehow the WCM industry - analysts and consultants, open source communities, vendors - have all managed to accept or promote the concept that in order to build your own unique custom Web presence, you ALSO need to build your own unique custom WCM application. It's not about "buy vs. build" with this crowd, but "buy then build."

Percussion is done with the "buy then build" concept of WCM.  The WCM application should not be an "implementation" of a product. For Percussion, the WCM application IS THE PRODUCT. And this is not just for some low-end, limited, entry level WCM customer either. Enterprise strength, high scale deployments and best-of-the-best web sites need a WCM Product too! No matter who you are, Percussion believes you should be building differentiation online, custom sites, web applications, and web experiences, NOT building your own custom WCM application for your authors and editors, leave that part to us. 

And that's where Percussion CM1 Version 2 comes in. Percussion CM1 has always been "WCM that's a product." There is no implementation. Sure you get to build your own custom sites and templates and pages - but the WCM application is defined by what you buy, by standard interchangeable Widgets and Gadgets that you drag and drop in combination to make your own custom sites and pages.

The concept was so revolutionary, that we soft launched it a year ago as simply an "out of box" WCM for entry level buyers without development resources. No more. Percussion CM1 has officially come of age with the latest version, and it's only growing as the 2.x releases drop adding more scale, more widgets more of everything that enterprise class customers need. In Percussion CM1 Version 2, the Widget and Gadget library has been expanded to social media, we've added the latest Semantic Web capabilities for dynamic tagging and categorization, and much much more. More importantly, Percussion CM1 Version 2 is the trail head for where Percussion is taking ALL of our WCM offerings. Everything is going Product, it's only a matter of time and how you get there.

Having said all that, we're not sticklers. If you really must implement your own custom WCM, the room with the stampeding elephant is still available - but you're going to have to let yourself in.