Blog - Marketing Blog

It's 2012, Do You Know Where Your Leads Are?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Now that 2012 has begun I am sure you are turning your attention to how you actually execute those plans you drew up in your Q4 planning cycle. There is no doubt that scaling the web opportunity is a major priority for virtually all marketing organizations.

But do you have tools in place to execute against that vision? Or does your Q1 priority look something like this: “Research and procure a web content management system to begin deployment in Q2 and drive improvement in Q3/Q4.” Or maybe like this: “Redesign current web site and deploy updated CMS as part of re-design deployment.”

If so, that means you are going to spend all of 2012 scraping along with whatever online tools you have in place today.Can you really afford to wait to Q3 or Q4 to have a new platform in place? Do you really want to wait out the redesign process before you have a better content management process?

The faster you can get your new content marketing software technology selected and deployed the faster you will be able to break through online.

Adjust your 2012 goal to go faster. If you can deploy your CMS a quarter earlier by focusing on products rather than platforms, what would that mean for your business? Why not get your CMS in place BEFORE your redesign? Read here how Lancaster Bible upgraded their CMS in 45 days and how you can bring that experience to your own web initiatives.

Go ahead, add six weeks from today’s date. How much MORE could you accomplish this year if you were rolling that much sooner?

Case Study: Lancaster Bible Live in 45 Days

Case Study: AIDS.gov takes on mobile web content management

Three Content Marketing Lessons to Kick Off 2012

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Fresh, relevant, engaging content.

Without it, your web site is boring, stale and completely ignored by Google, prospects and customers. We all know this, we hear it over and over again – it’s that “content marketing” thing - so why am repeating it here? Because even though we all know it, we still struggle to do it. Even here at Percussion, and we are in the web content business.

In fact, respondents to the Marketing Profs annual content marketing survey stated that producing content is their biggest challenge:

Producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers- 40%
Producing enough content- 21%

Unfortunately, there is no tool out there that will create content for us. Technology is a wonderful thing, but content creation is a creative process, and creative processes require people. People AND time – something that most marketing teams don’t have a lot of.

But there are things you can do to make developing content a little easier. Here is some advice from the experts:

Remember that content marketing is more than white papers, collateral, and case studies. Not everything has to be the great epic.

Extend your content team to include folks from other parts of the organization. You work with a lot of smart people, encourage them to share what they know.

Re-use/repurpose content - but do it right!

In short, the key is to just get started, but be prepared for sustained effort.

@megtemple

PS: Need help preparing your business case for content management? Download our free tools and frameworks for a winning web content management business case here.

Mind the Gap: Match Business Need to Web Goals or Risk Project Failure

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Every morning we have a planning meeting to discuss the organizations who have requested to see our web content marketing software products. The purpose of the meeting is to be sure we have a solid understanding of the prospects functional needs so we can highlight features and functionality of our software that will solve these pains.

The number one concern we hear from customers is that “It must be easy to use.” From there the top 5 usually follow in some order: Workflow, Content Re-use, Multi-Site and Social Media. Mobile continues to flatter to deceive despite us all twitching anxiously at the possibility of our smart phones holding a new update. Bottom line, there are plenty of tactical requirements being surfaced and plenty of suppliers waiting to exploit that.

But what I found curious was the lack of overall business goals. WHY does “easy to use” matter to the business? How will workflow drive a business outcome? What will Multi-site or Social Media do for the business?

Given this, I decided to sit out in the sales room for a few days and listen first hand to these customer conversations. It’s a very simple process: people search for content management, they find Percussion through one of our numerous channels, engage with our content and raise their hand that they are interested. We follow up to make sure they found what they were looking for, and a conversation ensues about Need.

The problem is that Need gets lost in product requirements. Often the person leading the selection process is solely focused on solving a particular pain (our current system is hard to use, or it won’t scale) or making sure that each business unit’s key features are included in the system (workflow, multi-channel etc). They either don’t know, or have already moved past the stage of trying to think about the overall business goal.

If we are not careful however, an arms war ensues where features and functions are tossed around like candy on Halloween.

What we need to do is help connect need to goals. Let’s look at Growth. Is the customer looking to grow? (Duh!) What role does the web play in that growth? How will that online growth be measured? Where does the current web site and web content infrastructure stand in the way of achieving those objectives?

The risk is that there is a gap between feature functions and measurable goals. If the customer is not careful, and if we shirk that responsibility to close the gap, the risk of project failure increases. Customers are unable to connect their requirements to their needs, and their needs to their goals, and their goals to results that are measurable and achievable.

Aside from being better sales consultants, we are also working very hard to deliver out of the box ways to address this in the software. The Dashboard in Percussion CM1 is just one example of how the customer can measure their efficiencies and effectiveness. We are also building on our experiences and providing tools to help support the business case here. Finally, we are holding ourselves accountable to asking hard questions of this marketplace; for starters: “How will you measure the success of this project”?

We welcome these conversations so give us a call (or click here and we will call you). Just know that at some point in that call, we are going ask you the questions above!

-@josephwykes

Google’s New Search + and the Impact on Content Marketing

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

In dizzying pace, Google continues to refine its search algorithm with big new things. This week comes word about how Google + shares will start to make their way into your search results.

For a recap on the details read this from SearchEngineWatch, or this interesting take from the CMO Site (including the comments as always.)

I personally think this could be a huge problem for Google in general which I write about as well here.

But what does this mean for content marketers, and your web infrastructure? Three keys to consider:

Fresh content still matters: To remain interesting and relevant, post new and engaging content frequently across your online presence. The more content you have to engage with your prospects, the more that content will be shared, the more conversations that will be created around your core concepts.
Running social and web silos, will be increasingly difficult. It’s already hard to keep up with your blogging in one platform, your social sites in a third etc. Even if you just consolidate your web and blogging platforms to make it easier to cross-share content, and then publish that content out to your social channels that is a good first step. Even better if you consider all of those areas as “nodes on a network” and publish differentiated and connected content to each.
WebSpeed is real. Many of you are just trying to figure out what the Freshness change means and now have to figure out how to grapple with what “search +” means for you. I have written before about the kitchen sink mentality. Sorry, you just don’t have time. Much like the software development world has gone Agile, so should you. Make sure you have systems, technology, processes and people in place who can adapt quickly, and adjust on the fly.

In total however, this means your technology matters more than you thought. What you know today isn’t going to be relevant in Q4.

So if you are thinking you will spend effectively all of 2012 redesigning your site and deploying a new content management platform we wish you luck on reaching your 2013 goals. Think instead about what you can do NOW to impact 2012. Take a look at how Lancaster Bible College got their new web infrastructure up and running in just 45 days.

Look at the calendar right now. Ok? Now add 6 Weeks. Doesn’t THAT sound better than the 6, 9 or (shudder) 12 month roll-out plan you were considering?

Don’t get locked in, agility matters.

@ajdun

Mass.gov Goes Live on Percussion Software

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Introducing our latest web site to go live on Percussion web content management: Mass.gov! You can read the press release here.

This was a massive undertaking on the part of the Commonwealth. Their goal with the new site and new infrastructure is to increase usability for the citizens of Massachusetts and drive deeper engagement. Read the full story here.

From the Mass.gov site

_____________________
Mass.Gov Improves Usability
Sleek look, improved navigation, better organization enhances usability for customers of the Commonwealth’s website, Mass.Gov. The redesigned website promises to improve the customer experience when interacting with Massachusetts’ government online.

Each page presents a cleaner, more stream-lined look, making pages more readable and easier to scan.
New navigation displays information more effectively so that you can find what you need more quickly and easily.
Information is better organized requiring fewer clicks and less scrolling.

Agencies throughout the Commonwealth continually strive to improve the online experience of Mass.Gov customers. The new site is a significant advancement designed to meet the expectations of customers for a quality online experience.
___________________________________

The first 10 of the Commonwealth’s sites went up in October which included the Governor’s site, and sites for the Attorney General, Treasury Department, Veterans Affairs among others. The rest of the agencies and operating divisions that make up the Mass.gov family of web sites rolled out over the next several weeks, wrapping up in December. In all, more than 250,000 pages and 400,000 content items are managed by Percussion’s technology.

The rigorous testing the Commonwealth’s team required in the selection process was impressive. We were required to show that we could publish as much as 10% of the entire site (40,000 pages) to the site in under 30 minutes. I believe we got our peak throughput all the way down to 22 minutes. That kind of throughput and scale is extraordinary of course, but the breakthroughs that make it possible are now available to everyone, even our smallest customers with just 100s of pages.

This has been a fantastic project to be part, particularly as a Massachusetts based company. Our entire team put a lot of hard work into this one, it’s gratifying to see it come to fruition. WELL DONE!

Update: CMS Report wrote up this article on the launch: Mass.gov redesigned state portal using Percussion WCM Software

Gartner: Marketing to Outpace IT as a Buyers of Marketing Technology

Fri, 6 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

One of the first questions I asked when I joined Percussion a couple of months ago was “Who buys our software?” Are they in marketing, IT, both, or some other organization? I have a long list of content to develop, and that is a fundamental question that I need to answer in order to provide the content our customers and sales team need.

Recently I listened to a Gartner webinar titled “By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT than the CIO” which directly addressed all of those questions. Presented by Laura McClellan, Gartner’s VP of Marketing Strategy, the webinar was an overview of the current landscape for marketing-related technology and services, and the “buying center” shift from IT to Marketing.

According to McLellan, marketing is firmly in control of the selection and management of marketing technology, from the initial “Determining if you have a need” through evaluation and selection. She shared some interesting data that lays it out pretty clearly.

The other question that immediately follows “Who is the buyer?” is “Who controls the budget?” In the past, technology was installed and run on company-owned servers, with IT responsible for management, support, and maintenance, so it logically followed that it was funded out of IT budgets. McLellan’s data shows that this is still the case today for “behind the firewall” or on-premise technology, but the growing number of SaaS and cloud based marketing technology apps has shifted the budget ownership to marketing.

This trend will continue as the number of hosted/cloud based applications grows. Marketing has always funded its own outsourced projects, such as PR, design, and advertising, so it makes sense that they will take advantage of hosted technology to by-pass IT and manage their own tools, using their budget to buy the technology they need.

Key points:

The strategy, sourcing, evaluation and selection of marketing technology is predominately led by marketing organizations
Marketing budgets control close to half the marketing technology purchases - as opposed to the It budgets of the past - and that percentage is expected to increase over the next 5 years
Availability of SaaS and cloud-based technology is enabling marketing to by-pass IT and acquire and manage the tools they need

This data gels with what we are finding at Percussion – in the past few years we have seen a dramatic shift in the role of marketing in the buying cycle. With that shift, comes a change in the buyer’s product requirements and expectations. Not surprisingly then, they are not as technical, and don’t really want to be technical. This means that if marketing places a higher priority on usability and easy-to-use functionality that is available right “out of the box” our challenge is to deliver a user experience that matches that expectation.

It will be interesting to see how this trend plays out in 2012, and if IT is really ready to give up control over the application infrastructure. Stay tuned!

@megtemple

Gilbane 2011 - Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me!

Wed, 7 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I have been attending content management conferences for almost a decade. Just last week I was at the Gilbane Conference here in Boston, MA. This is where many of the insiders gather to discuss what’s important now and what might be next for the CMS industry. Over the years this has been a mixed event: something of a barometer on the state of the CMS and web content management marketplace.

We pay our money and get to meet and greet. We make contacts and we hope to meet buyers. Given that it’s very much an insider’s show, there is just a bit too much posturing and it’s a bit like school: cliquey, the in’s and the outs, cool and uncool, jocks and nerds, poets and scientists, Marketing and IT. (Look how happy these Marketing and IT professionals are, you can feel the love!) And unfortunately most vendors wind up sounding the same.

What we all share, what we all hope for, are insights: impactful takeaways; new relationships and if it’s good, some real leads.

So what was different about this particular event; why write about it; what is there to share?

The sheer number of messed up CMS projects.

Messed up? Yes; messed up. Consider the following three scenarios (The names have been changed to protect the innocent):

Day one, I grab my lunch and sit down next to two women from a large non-profit. Homegrown CMS incumbent, not documented, any modifications mean a code change (think $$$). Here’s the rub – they are 15 months into a re-design project and are 6 months into a cms selection. Their hope: maybe they get live in 2012. (Any guesses to the costs?)
Then I meet a fella who is clearly an “educated” CMS buyer. Knows what he wants; uses the whole Interwoven kit AND has a “killer app” on his site that must be left un touched. Says to me “How come no enterprise vendors are here?” When pushed he goes on to qualify “you know, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft… to manage my 6000 pages and 5 authors!” (Insiders note: every vendor on the floor would have considered that to be a “normal” project.)
Finally three “interactive marketing associates” swing by. In five years they have tried Interwoven, Ektron, and now they are rolling out Sitecore. “Well it was really down to the implementation. We know, it is going to get expensive, but we hope it will be worth it this time.” (Lets be sure not to confuse hope with a strategy)

You see, 10 years at CMS trade shows and hearing these horror stories makes me mad and it makes me sad. We the “influencers” have messed this up! Seriously! How much do you think that non-profit is going to spend? What would an “Enterprise supplier” charge the guy with 6000 pages? How can you afford three different WCMS’ in five years?

There has to be A Better Way.

We have decided to take a stand against all three of these scenarios and the hundreds more that play out every day or every year. We believe that you should no longer be trapped in a never ending cycle of chasing the next big thing in web content management. We believe you should be focused on differentiating yourself on the web, and that your technology and processes should enable your success rather than stand in your way. To do that, our web content management products are at the core Flexible, Supportable, Upgradeable, and most importantly, Affordable.

Ask yourself if your current WCM software is any of those things. Unfortunately, given the stories I continued to hear this week, I already know the answer.

@josephwykes

PS: We also took a stand with how we presented Percussion at the show to clearly stand out from the crowd. Have a look at our booth graphics here. More to come on this soon!!

Gilbane Wrap Up - Three Things That Caught My Eye

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Our latest Guest Post comes from Meg Temple, our new Director of Product Marketing. Just two weeks into the job, it was a perfect opportunity for her to attend Gilbane and blog about her experience.

Last week I attended the Gilbane Boston conference. The timing was perfect for this “newbie” because I got the chance to immerse myself in web content management. As a marketing manager and content contributor, I am not new to content management – I have struggled along with the rest of you to keep web sites fresh and engaging. But I am new to this side of the house – the world of Web Content Management products, applications, frameworks, gurus, etc. Gilbane was an excellent opportunity to meet people, check out vendors and fight Boston traffic, but most importantly to listen and learn from a lot of smart people.

So what did I take away from last week? In no particular order:

“Success comes from doing something over and over until you get it right.” Keynote intro by Frank Gilbane. We all know this intellectually, but how many of us remember it at the moment of failure? Frank mentioned this in reference to developing a business but it relates to everything we do. When writing or painting (what I do in my other “life”) I have to beat back the perfectionist demon, so the more reminders of this fact the better.
“Content Marketing is the only marketing that is left” Seth Godin as quoted by Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Junta42, the Content Marketing Institute, and SocialTract. With the Google Panda changes it is more important than ever to make sure that your content is “shareable”. Joe called it “social proof” of the value of your content. When creating content think about what your audience really needs to know. Do they want a big sales pitch (no) or do they want information they can relate to, learn from or eases their pain? Think like a publisher.
“All of our channels form a messaging trail. If the trail goes cold, our audience will be frustrated,” Georgy Cohen, Crosstown Digital Communications. If you’re going to commit to social engagement in your marketing and customer engagement strategy– and you should – you better be fully committed. Monitor all your channels and RESPOND!

I took pages and pages of notes and every presentation/workshop was valuable but the 3 quotes above summed up the high level messages that I took from the Gilbane “Customer and Engagement Track.” I have already begun to incorporate what I learned from the conference into my content planning for 2012. If you manage your organization’s web content marketing strategy or execution, I highly recommend that you attend Gilbane Boston next year.

@MegTemple

Lancaster Bible College: Live in 45 Days

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Today we announced that Lancaster Bible College has re-deployed its web site on Percussion CM1. We do live announcements all the time of course, but what makes this one special and unusual is that LBC went from kicking off the project to live in just 45 days.

You heard that right.

LBC deployed Percussion CM1, set up their site infrastructure in a cloud environment, migrated their content, tested the site, and pushed go--all in just 45 days.

You can read more about their story in the press release here. But this story shows what is possible when you deploy a “productized” Web Content Management product. All of the complex customizations and lengthy services required to set up the system go away. And now LBC is off working on achieving their web business objectives that much earlier.

Lowering overall cost of ownership and speeding time-to-value are the two core components of measuring you web content management ROI. If you are ready for A Better Way to manage your web content strategy, come on in and “Meet Jane.”

Percussion CM1 Version 2 What's New Video

Web Content Management at Web Speed

Google Changes its Algorithm, Freshness Matters

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

As we are all well aware, Google changes its algorithm frequently, maybe even daily as they continually tweak the results for relevance. No surprise there, it’s one of the reasons they became the default search platform.

Occasionally they publicize a major tweak and alert the web community of a big change. In April Google made a big change targeted at content farms specifically that had been created simply to game search results. (Blog Post: Search is Dead. Long Live Search, Or Is It?)

Earlier this month, Google announced that they were going to start considering when an item was published as part of how search results are displayed. Affecting about 6-10% of all searches (35% of results), Google will now show the more recent content--or “fresher”--item first. This is great news. Who wants to be taken to an article from 1998 when searching about today’s NBA lockout. We are all versed enough in search today that if we want to go back and read about the 1998-1999 NBA lockout our search would be much more specific.

This is particularly relevant for news of course. But what about for you and I as we consider our SEO strategies? The specific language Google uses to describe the change implies that it’s really only targeted at news and topical searches, or high volume content that changes frequently—they use the example of car reviews or a search for a camera.

The freshness component could have a much bigger impact on those who are paid to manage things like “Page 1 search results.” Right, that means pretty much any web marketer who is doing their job today. Will search marketers be recommending publishing new content weekly, or at the least republishing the same content over and over again to ensure that it’s the freshest? And if so, how is that going to impact your overall web site strategy.

The potential impact on SEO practitioners is well documented in the SEO related blogs I frequent including:

Social Media Today: Google Algorithm Update - Freshness Counts Even More Now

SearchEngineWatch: Pitching to Google’s Fresh New Algorithm via News, Blogs, Events & Google+

SearchEngineLand: Google Search Algorithm Change For Freshness To Impact 35% Of Searches; Twitter Firehose Remains Off

While it’s too early to tell what the impact will be, we can say with certainty that you are going to need to have a strategy for getting more content up to your website and out into your digital channels faster. Though I am sure Google will keep an eye out to quell any content spamming, new content, fresh, topical content will expand your digital reach.

After all, as the web continues to move forward, standing still means losing ground.

What Are Your Web Content Management System Value Drivers?

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

In another guest post, Percussion Director of Product Management, Aparna Srinivasan writes about the value of web content management systems, and connecting solutions to business problems. Read on to get her take on how to consider business drivers in the context of selecting a web content management system.

Percussion recently held its annual Boston user conference and one of the highlights of the conference was the discussion around the value Percussion Products deliver to its customers –both tangible and intangible. At Percussion, we believe that we must deliver on this value by solving the right business problems for our customers. This blog post focuses on how Percussion products accomplish this.

If I frame the results of the conversation with our customers, the key business drivers are:

Web Content Management (WCM) should power the users to perform frequent and relevant content updates to the managed websites to achieve the twin goals of increasing traffic and/or conversions.
Further, WCM should achieve this with a low Total Cost of Ownership.

How do we reduce the total cost of ownership and empower users to accomplish their WCM goals? Most WCM vendors in the market can do one or the other, but not necessarily both. In fact, most of these vendors sell capabilities grouped into frameworks which require substantial services effort to perform basic web content management functions. In some cases the ratio exceeds 5 services dollar for every dollar in license.

In contrast, Percussion’s mission is to ‘Productize’ the WCM foundation for the web experience which means:

When you buy Percussion Products, services are meant to speed deployment by bringing the services ratio closer to 1:1, lowering total upfront cost invested.
Product upgrades don’t break existing implementations between successive versions, lowering the maintenance and upgrade costs.
Every capability and feature built utilizes an intuitive and easy to use interface that does not compromise functionality reducing costs associated with inefficiencies.

Percussion CM1 delivers on this Productization promise by delivering drag and drop technology and a tray of widgets and gadgets that any type of user—whether they are a contributor or an admin—is able to use with ease. Every capability and feature is built in such a manner that the complexity involved is eliminated or dramatically reduced. For example: Percussion CM1 lets a user create a blog index page and a default blog page with just 3 clicks using the Blog Wizard. Users can then manage all their blog activities from the Dashboard via the Blog Gadget.

Percussion CM1 also makes certain its users see the forest for the trees with a Dashboard of Gadgets that the users can drag and drop and customize. These gadgets help the user consume data and take action directly by:

Seeing the big picture–Traffic, Work Status, Comments and Blog activities to name a few.
Identifying where best to invest time and effort in order to produce content that generates the most return on effort.

Through three key ingredients: Intelligent Dashboard, Widgets, and Gadgets, Percussion CM1 empowers its users to create, compose and deliver meaningful and relevant content frequently. This results in increased traffic and conversion. More importantly, Percussion CM1 does all this for its customers with a significantly low total cost of ownership.

But don’t just take my word for it – Check out our intro video or sign up for a personal demo today.

--Aparna Srinivasan

Extreme Makeover: Website Edition

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

You are surely asking what is going on with our site? What is up with the crazy drawing style, and why are you putting up a splash page of all things?!!

Well, we didn’t like our web site. We knew it and you knew it. Despite powering some of the most innovative websites out there today, from Autotrader.com to Weather.com to USA.gov, we hadn’t paid much attention to our own site and it was time for a refresh.

And even though we had gotten to the goal line with a brand new, more sophisticated, more elegant, site design, we pulled the plug.

“Wow, really?”.

Yep, really. We threw it in the trash (ok, it’s still sitting on my desk if you want come by and take a look.).

We took a good hard look in the mirror and realized we needed to release our inner web company. Our product approach is different, our mindset is different, and our entire rationale for existing is different than any of our so-called competitors. Why in the world would we want to look like them too?

It was amazingly cathartic to scrap the design direction. We had been under such intense, self-inflicted pressure to get the new design up and out from under the current one that we were starting to make rash decisions. The designers did a nice job of implementing our requirements, we just had bad requirements.

We had to take a BIG pause, and remember what we are doing, remember how we are working to change the market, and how we are changing the way YOU view web content management. Once we did that, it was amazing how fast the energy started flowing.

We were so happy with the idea, we decided to tell you about it. In a world of “Webspeed”, why should you wait the 3 months or so it would take us to get something designed and live? Why not participate in the journey with us? Why not come inside and experience this together?

We know that some of you won’t get it, or are wondering why we should be so open and transparent, or even think we are too clever by half. That’s ok, you can still join us, we promise it will be fun.

In the end, in order to BE different, you have to DO different.

That starts now.

Enjoy!!

Thank You, Steve Jobs

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

As part of our ongoing internal tribute to Steve Jobs, Lorena Proia, our Director of User Experience, and the brains behind Percussion CM1 usability shares her thoughts on the passing of Steve Jobs below.

Thank you Steve Jobs. Thank you for being an innovator and most of all, thank you for being the champion of design.

Steve Jobs has done for design what Henry Ford did for the automobile. More than anybody else, Jobs understood what design is and he brought it to the masses much like Henry Ford brought the Model T to America. As Steve Jobs himself put it “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” This fundamental understanding and his appreciation for design drove him to include design in the first Apple Computer. It started there and he continued to push until he made the consumer products world stand up and take notice.

Previous to Apple, American corporations believed that “Americans don’t care about design.” In the 80s and 90s we were awash with bad design. The US automakers pumped out badly designed cars, logos looked like they were created by committee, kitchen gadgets and household goods were ‘designed’ to conform to the machinery that produced it, not the other way around. It’s no wonder then that the software we began to use went much the same way.

I can’t begin to count the amount of times I’ve heard some variation on “American’s don’t care about design, they care about price.” American’s don’t care about design? It’s not that American’s didn’t care about design, it’s that no one ever offered them a well-designed product! For what seemed like an eternity, designers fought the uphill battle of bringing design into corporate America and weren’t getting very far.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs understood something fundamental about design and incorporated it into every aspect of his company and it’s products. He understood the design axiom “form follows function”. Design follows the needs of the user, not the technology. Design can’t be slapped on as an afterthought, but needs to be integrated into the fundamental understanding of how the object, the website, or the software product will actually be used by the people consuming it. The technology then makes that vision come to life and great products are born.

Opening a new Apple product would be a thrilling experience for me. From the moment the box was opened, their products began to speak to me. As I removed layer, upon layer of design excellence I enjoyed every aspect of the journey and reveled in the nuances they brought into everything, right down to the power cord. As Apple rolled out their candy colored machines and their iPods, other computer companies began to notice something…those funny looking things sold. They didn’t just sell; they became THE thing to have. They became more than just “hot” products, they became icons. Suddenly knock offs started showing up, slowly stores like Target came along and were selling well-designed household goods, and Americans bought them. They finally had a choice, and they began choosing design.

Here at Percussion we’ve begun the journey of design and it’s not always the easiest journey. Sometimes it takes longer to think through the best way to communicate to users without words, or to research the best practices on certain design decisions. But finally, after all of these years working in design I have a shining example. “Look at Apple! Look at what Steve Jobs did. ” He didn’t compromise and he built a successful company. He loved design. He believed in design.

So thank you Steve Jobs. Thank you for proving what I’ve believed since I was in school all of those years ago: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

-Lorena Proia, Director, User Experience

WEM: Process or Technology

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

There have been some suggestions recently that Percussion has been ignoring the so called “Web Experience Management,” or WEM, market. It seems that by not plastering it across all of our communications we are somehow not that “into it.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

We share the views of other thought leaders in the industry that WEM is an important business strategy for our customers, and by extension a true business process. However, the issue is that when you try to equate technology with process you run the risk of falling into the same trap that we all fell into with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) almost a decade ago.

There are some beacons out there helping guide the way though. Scott Liewehr of Gilbane has held firmly to this view for a long time now. Fellow expert Robert Rose delivered a presentation at Gilbane Boston 2010 titled: “WCM is Dead, Long Live WCM” that was an elegant explanation of how the words may have changed, yet the problems are the same.

Over the last decade WCM has been written off a few times. Most of us remember when the NASDAQ peaked on the Ides of March 2001. When the bubble burst and we all gasped for air, the focus for content management became compliance. The market place quickly moved to ECM, Smart Enterprise Suites and EDRMS’. Off the market went chasing document/records management systems and portals--with a cursory web publisher bolted on, almost as an afterthought.

And yet WCM refused to go away. Or at least the problem of managing web content did not go away. There was a spectacular IPO in 2004 of a little company called Google and we were introduced to a sexy new term called "Web 2.0.” Suddenly the race for WCM began all over again. Forrester reminded us of the importance of persuasive content management; Personalization came back again and the social web was snowballing. And that hasn’t stopped. We have freely available web analytics solutions and email marketing is practically mainstream. The social web led by Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and now Google+ mark the next chapter in this journey.

As the industry continues to focus on the process of web experience management, or customer experience management or online channel optimization or some other “C M”, we seem to continue chasing the nirvana of a single technology stack as the solution.

Sadly, some vendors and some buyers still believe that the complexity these dream product stacks introduce is somehow worth it. That it’s OK for the “solution” to involve herculean efforts in implementation consulting and take months, even years to complete. After all, they say, think of the great benefits we will receive when we finally get it all working.

Of course by that time, the web will have changed, and then you can start all over again.

@josephwykes

In Defense of Technology

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

We have just wrapped up a big couple of weeks with the launch of Percussion CM1 Version 2 at the Inbound Marketing Summit, FutureM Marketing Week and our own Tequila Moonrise party attended by over 150 marketers. You can read the coverage of the launch here. And another customer has gone live on Percussion CM1, congratulations to Graceland University.

We work hard on how we position our products to be sure that we are connecting with your real business problems, but occasionally, we are reminded how important that is.

During the Inbound Marketing Summit we participated in a panel with several other WCM vendors. Unfortunately, the panel was not a big hit with at least the part of the audience that was actively tweeting. Jeff Cram post on the CMS Myth blog showcases many of the tweets if you are interested.

There were a number of things the show organizers might have done differently to make it go smoother (make it a breakout rather than a main session, should have not recruited a moderator on the Friday before the show to name two...) But, I do think we need to take the audience to task as well.

Aside from the lack of an open source participant, one of the main themes of the back channel was “It’s all about content guys, technology is a dime a dozen, it doesn’t matter.” And yet, the number of people at that same show who told us that they dislike their WCM was amazing. Sorry, that just doesn’t track.

Of COURSE it’s all about the content, we couldn’t agree more. But if you think technology is a dime a dozen, then you just aren’t paying attention.

We talk to dozens of companies, education institutions and government agencies of all sizes every day. I am sure that our competitors do as well. The simple fact that we are all still in business tells you that people DON’T have it figured out. It tells you that they DON’T like how their technology supports their strategy. And it tells you that technology is NOT “a dime a dozen.”

And if you are a senior marketer and you aren’t worried about how you are going to get more content online faster, how you are going to take advantage of whatever comes next on the web, or how you are going to engage better with your customers online etc, then bravo! But the rest of us are trying to push the limits of our strategy.

And that is the biggest takeaway for us—a reminder that people want their technology to help them solve their business challenges. You don’t want more complexity, or more integrations, less usability, and you don’t want your technology to get in the way of your ability to innovate online.

In the end, you want it to just work.

@ajdun

Introducing Percussion CM1 Version 2—Productizing Web Content Management

Wed, 7 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Today, Percussion has formally launched Percussion CM1 Version 2, the next step in our mission to productize web content management. You can read the press release here, learn more about the product on our product pages, or request a demo to see for yourself how we are changing the game for web content management. If you happen to be in Boston for the Inbound Marketing Summit September 14 and 15 we will be demonstrating the product at our stand and celebrating at a launch party called Tequila Moonrise on the evening of September 14th.

We here at Percussion believe strongly in delivering on the long promise that web content management should first and foremost solve the core business challenge of easily creating content and publishing it to the ever expanding number of channels. As the “Web Rate of Change” continues to accelerate, ease of use is critical as is the flexibility to adapt for whatever comes next.

Fundamentally these problems have not been solved yet. Our mission is to lead the industry toward a productized approach to web content management and away from complex technology frameworks that require substantial amounts of customization to simply get running.

While we also believe firmly in holistically managing your customer experience we look for natural opportunities to bring appropriate functionality into the WCM product. For example, managing your blog as part of your content management system makes sense, trying to use a WCM to replace your CRM as the hub of customer information does not. Forcing you to bolt on tools and services in the chase for some ill-defined future state simply forces needless complexity in the chase for more services dollars.

These complex frameworks often require four, five and even six times the cost of the license in services costs to even begin making it work for you. And much of that is spent on building or customizing core functionality that should be available out of the box. Instead, we believe strongly that you should spend your energy, your internal development time, or services dollars on the things that truly differentiate you online.

As proof of our commitment, a license for Percussion CM1 Version 2 costs $20,000 with a $5,000 annual subscription covering upgrades and maintenance. Most importantly, our deployment tools make it possible for many of our clients to deploy it on their own, without spending additional dollars on deployment services.

Percussion CM1 Version 2 represents our collective experience over the last 10+ years in web content management to ensure that the product does what you need it to do. But we aren’t stopping here. Our model of adding new functionality through widgets and gadgets coupled with our Agile development strategy means that new features and capabilities are available every four to six weeks. This ensures that you have an easily upgradeable product that gives you the flexibility to address “What’s Next” on the web.

Percussion CM1 Version 2 is just one important step in this productization journey. We are bringing this same functionality and capability to our enterprise flagship CM System as well. For example, our new Blogging functionality as well as Tags and Categories will also soon be made available as part of CM System. We are relentlessly pursuing ways to continue making it easier for you to achieve your online objectives, and we will be introducing those in the coming weeks.

It’s a great day here at Percussion. We are excited to bring these innovations to market, and look forward to continuing to bring new value to our customers. If you want to a simpler approach to how you manage your content across your online strategy, we welcome you to join us on our journey!

@ajdun

It’s Great To Be A Trendsetter

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

We announced yesterday that the Percussion CM1 web content management product was named a KM World Trendsetting Product for 2011 and we couldn’t be more thrilled. (You can read our press release here.) The team has put a lot of time and energy into our products over the years and it’s great to be recognized as an innovator in the market.

And we aren’t done. In the coming weeks we will be continuing to launch new and exciting products and features as we continue on our mission to productize web content management. We know that in the race for the next new thing, systems are only getting more and more complex, and require more and more services to customize the technology platforms rather than focusing on your own business innovation.

Today’s model is fundamentally broken and we decided to do something about it. Two years ago our Board, Executive Team, and Technology leaders said “Enough is Enough” Users want a product that just works, that they can get up and running quickly, that allows them to innovate and stay flexible to take advantage of whatever comes next on the web. The “Web Rate of Change” doesn’t allow for lengthy roll out cycles that require massive customizations. By the time you are done, everything has changed and you have to start all over again.

Its exciting times for our customers here at Percussion, stay tuned as we continue to push the envelope!

Three Things That Caught My Eye-8/12

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It was a busy week in the content management world this past week. In particular, the discussion of what to do with Federal Government websites continues. I found the following articles interesting and compelling.

Time to Pull the Plug on Government Web Sites?

Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio chimes in on the US Federal Government web site consolidation plan. It’s interesting that one of Gartner’s lead government analysts is based in Italy, but he brings some good perspectives from around the world. As is often the case, the comments may be more interesting than the actual post. A great deal of debate about this here and elsewhere on the web

Time for the Government to Plug into One Platform?

More on the one single government web site debate here from Luke Fretwell. As we wrote in this blog at the end of July, we agree completely with taking a standardized CMS platform approach. Personally I would be fine with the government using a Facebook page to provide basic information about where to find services, similar to what they put on the web. We should expect that the Government will use whatever communication means their constituents would like to ensure open and transparent citizen engagement. That said, Facebook (or Google +, or MySpace or...) shouldn't replace their efforts on the public Internet either, and I highly doubt that I would conduct any government transactions over a commercial community platform, but Web Speed being what it is, never say never!

Keeping Your Content Strategy Real

Ron Miller over at FierceContentManagement posted a fine call to arms for content strategy. It’s not enough to generate content, but rather to get people involved. He writes:

“Customers are no longer innocent bystanders absorbing your words. They are full-blown participants with opinions and the ability to generate content and you absolutely should be encouraging them to do just that. The more your customers are involved with your site, the more engaged they are with your products. The more passion they have, the better for you."

Federal Government: 24,000 Web Sites and Shrinking; A Four Point Web Optimization Plan

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

In June President Obama took to the airwaves to announce an ambitious campaign to reduce waste. The Campaign to Cut Waste sought to identify pointless Federal spending and eliminate it as rapidly as possible. As of June, as much as $33B was estimated as potential savings.

During the announcements The President also talked about a broad plan to review the number of Federal websites and take down or consolidate those that were pointless. As an example of "silly spending" he pointed to the Fiddlin Fiddlers as a "ridiculous program." In what became the signature line of the launch. President Obama famously said:

"I’ll put their music on my iPod, but I’m not paying for their website!"

And sure enough, don’t try to find that site online today, you will only see the following message:

Sorry, "www.fiddlinforesters.gov" is unavailable or could not be found.

Fast forward to July. Fed CIO Vivek Kundra launched a 17 member task force to review what turns out to be more than 24,000 Federal Government web sites, and come up with a plan for streamlining them. The notion of “one single gov web site” was even floated

In a live video chat on the White House web site. Kundra, Sheila Campbell, head of the General Service's Administration's digital government division, and White House Director of Digital Strategy Macon Phillips talked more about this initiative. They also took questions from the community using Twitter and the hashtag #dotgov, where the conversation continues today.

We were pleased to see that Percussion client healthcare.gov was held out as a model for what is possible in government web sites. Our work with a number of Federal agencies including the General Services Administration (usa.gov) and Health and Human Services (healthcare.gov, cancer.gov, and aids.gov, among others) give us an insider’s perspective on this important initiative.

Based on our experiences, there are four things that we highlight as areas of opportunity for Federal Agencies as they review their web strategies, particularly in light of the ongoing effort to drive even greater Government to Citizen interactivity.

Standardizing one web content management infrastructure across the agency: Standardizing the infrastructure under one enterprise license results in synergies and shared best practices, repositories, and other components, while also keeping costs down on licensing multiple platforms.
Moving to the Cloud for website delivery – Moving to a cloud infrastructure speeds website delivery, reduces the number of servers required to run the site, and eases access to content. This represents a strong candidate for compliance with the “Cloud First” initiative launched last year as many agencies have already determined.
Separating content infrastructure from web delivery infrastructure – Just as in the commercial sector, the Citizen is demanding information and interactivity in new ways and are adopting new technologies at an ever increasing speed. As was said in the web cast, Government agencies are challenged to prepare for the web of the future, not just catching up to today. Separating content from delivery allows agencies to focus on delivering even more content to citizens across the widest number of channels. As the web rate of change accelerates, this gives agencies the freedom to adopt new channels (such as Google +), without ripping out existing web delivery infrastructure. That would only create more costs, not less.
Ensuring reusability of Content -- Having a standardized WCM infrastructure, deploying content in the Cloud and separating content from delivery, enables easier and more nimble reuse, access, and delivery of content across sites. This allows for quicker and timelier delivery of information and enables agencies to deliver better information services to their constituents.

We will provide more details on Percussion’s Four Point Plan in the coming days. In addition to working with our customers across the Federal Government on this initiative, we are also looking at the great ideas being proposed through Twitter to hear what the community as a whole has to say.

We look forward to sharing more with you!

Related reading:
The White House Blog

Macon Phillips on the White House Blog

List of sites of Federal Government Domains on data.gov

When a Product isn’t actually a Product

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

If you are buying a software product, how much work should you expect to install the software and get it operational in your organization? What is an acceptable ratio of services to licenses? And at what point are you no longer actually buying software, but rather a framework that you customize for the specific needs of your company?

This is an oft debated question in the software community and it varies by the type of application of course. In the web content management software market, an acceptable rule of thumb was 3 or 4 service dollars to $1 in license costs. But this number appears to be rising rapidly. The Real Story Group reports that they are seeing much higher ratios. Seth Gotleib writes that he is seeing as high as 7 or 8 to 1. We have seen this ourselves in competing proposals for web content management projects.

But is that a good thing? Should customers simply “expect that kind of multiplier and budget for it” as both Adriaan and Scott imply in their articles? Is that just the price of buying enterprise software today?

To me, those kind of multiples signal that you are actually buying a Framework and not a product. Frameworks in short are highly extensible software foundations that according to PC Magazine: “take the tedium out of writing all the program code for an application from scratch.”

But why is that a bad thing in web content management? After all, this is a sophisticated technology with complex business cases, and every company has their own view of how best to manage the infrastructure of their web site. Many companies are happy to learn that they can bend the products to meet their very specific needs.

This is a problem for two very important reasons:

Upgrades: If the application framework is highly customized for your business, upgrading to take advantage of “what’s next on the web” is going to range from very difficult to impossible. New features that are developed by the vendor are not going to make their way into your install without significant work on your part. And anytime you want to make changes, your team is going to have to either go back to the original integrator, or the web dev team is going to have to devote significant time to making those updates.

Kitchen Sink Mentality: Seth frames this problem incredibly well, though he meant it differently:

Every new feature and option requires design, configuration/customization, testing, and management. The market is buying potential and the vendors are selling it — but realizing that potential isn’t free.

Because of the cost and complexity traditionally involved with deploying a WCMS, companies try to buy enough technology to last them the next 3-5 years. Which leads the company to buy more potential than they actually need, adding even more complexity. They had better get it all in the deployment now, or they are going to have to wait 3-5 years. Then, since they haven’t been upgrading their application along the way (see point #1 above) they are essentially looking to start the whole process all over again.

Instead, we recommend that when evaluating your strategy for web content management, consider how much product you are actually buying. Consider what a high services engagement costs today, but also what that means for cost, complexity and flexibility in the future years.

Given that the “Web rate of change” continues to accelerate rapidly, it is a bad idea to trap yourself in a custom application that you can’t upgrade/update. Trying to guess at what you will need in 3 years and deploying it today is a lot like gambling: you might guess right a few times, but over the long run, the house always wins.

Web Content Management 2011—“Be Flexible”

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Just getting back from the Web Content Management conference in Chicago this week. The Conference was put together by Duo Consulting and focused this year on “Going Mobile.” Aside from being hideously hot in Chicago it was great to be immersed in all things content for the better part of two days

The conference was essentially sold out, filling a large seminar classroom in the Gleacher Center on the University of Chicago Booth School of Business campus. (One bonus of the classroom setting: plenty of power outlets!) It was attended by content strategists, web marketing folks, consultants, writers and agency types—and a large-ish contingent from various parts of Canada. A few of the web content strategy world’s “glitterati” were on the agenda as well, giving the event a blue ribbon seal of approval.

You can view the slides from the event here and videos are forthcoming shortly. The twitter stream using #wccon also does a good job of teasing out good links, references and quotes capturing the key points that resonated with the audience. Scott Markle from Autotrader (a Percussion customer) was one of the few end-user presentations, but the others were long on practical advice which provided a good balance.

As it relates specifically to content management, I had the following three observations.

Don’t think of content as a page any more
This theme came up a few times in relationship to preparing for mobile and scaling content contributors. The faster you can break your organization from thinking about content in terms of its end usage, the easier it will be to create compelling content that can be reused in multiple channels.

Do mobile, do it now, but do it smartly
The good news is that very few people have the mobile-thing figured out yet. The examples of how to do it wrong are plentiful, which makes it difficult to plan for how to do it right. However, the speakers were unanimous on the following: be sure to think of the context for how YOUR users will interact with your mobile experience, and design your strategy accordingly. Test often as well because what you think may not in fact be reality.

Content Strategy is critical
Given that this was a conference essentially about Content Strategy, it’s no surprise then that this would be high on the list of takeaways. But the case was made strongly that even if you don’t have a formal Content Strategy, or a Content Strategist, take steps to get there. With a strong strategy in place, it can help set priorities for how to do things like mobile, or social, or whatever gets thrown your way next.

And it’s that “what’s next” issue that becomes an underlying theme in virtually every discussion. At Percussion we have taken to calling it the “web rate of change.” Keeping up is no longer about having the latest and greatest, it’s about having the organizational, operational, and technological flexibility to react to whatever comes next.

In that context, the three points above—free content from “pages,” do mobile smartly, and develop a content strategy—ensure that organizations have that required flexibility and can be successful in a highly changeable environment.

Percussion CM System Named Finalist for 2011 Stevie Award

Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Fast on the heals on our learning of the MITX Finalist Award for CM1, late last week Percussion’s CM System platform was named a Stevie Awards Finalist. The category this time is Best New Software Product released in the last year.

CM System, Percussion’s flagship web content management platform, powers a number of very sophisticated web sites from Autorader.com to Vegas.com, universities such as Virginia Tech, and government agencies such as the SEC.gov, USA.gov and cancer.gov. CM System’s architecture is uniquely designed to allow organizations to maintain their existing delivery tier applications without requiring those applications to be completely rebuilt.

Considering the time and money that weather.com had invested in their redesign, this “decoupled architecture” was a critical factor in the decision to select and deploy CM System. You can watch a short video from weather.com here describing this decision and value driver.

We are pleased that our web content management platforms continue to be recognized for high quality engineering, innovative User Experiences, and the platform’s role in solving our customers’ most complex web site challenges.

We are looking forward to the announcement of the winners in New York on June 20th!

Percussion CM1 Named Finalist for 2011 MITX Innovation Award

Mon, 9 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

We learned on Friday that Percussion’s CM1 web content management platform was named a finalist in the MITX 2011 Innovation Awards in the “Best User Experience” category. The design team here at Percussion has been working hard on really changing the paradigm for how content owners manage their content and this selection is extremely gratifying.

We are many, many years removed from the original promise of web content management to enable a greater number of people throughout the organization to create, approve and publish content. For many organizations, the systems have become so complex that they are developed by engineers, for engineers requiring heavy IT involvement in both the deployment and ongoing maintenance of the system. Even simple template level changes can require substantial developer time. This is hindering marketing’s ability to deliver the innovative web experiences expected in 2011, particularly for smaller organizations without dedicated web developers.

By using the language of marketing and creating a highly “consumable” interface, CM1 makes tasks like creating new templates or adjusting page flow as simple as dragging and dropping elements. These, and many other innovations, return the power to the marketing team and content owners—right where it belongs.

We are looking forward to the awards dinner on June 16th. Congrats Team!

The Rise of the App-Centric Web

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Everyone wants to be the first to proclaim “The End of the Web.” A quick Google search on the phrase turns up no less than one billion results. Yes, that’s Billion with a B.

Amazingly, I even saw an article from as early as the year 2000 proclaiming as much, though in a much different context. Today, doomsayers are pointing to the rise of mobile, the rise of the semantic web, the rise of Facebook, and now the rise of the App-centric approach to the Internet as signs of the impending fall.

Venture Capitalist Roger MacNamee rather boldly proclaimed that “right now, Apple is just killing the World Wide Web” in an article in MacWorld UK, reprinted here in CFO World.com. His premise is that with the number of iPhones and iPads in the market, Apple will dominate the next 10 year cycle of technology for the industry, and Google by comparison is stagnating.

I would add, however, that the copy-cat approach to Apps taken by the Android platform suggests it’s the App-centric view that is having a substantial impact, Apple just happens to be the one who is driving it. (Although SalesForce might want to lay claim at least to the concept with their Force platform, though in a different context) So if you add the Android App approach together with the iOS approach and the picture becomes even more complete. But let’s not forget that Google is the company behind the Android platform.

In 2010 Android and iOS devices accounted for 113M devices worldwide, a solid third of the total market. If you consider the total number of devices active in the market today and the number quickly becomes staggering. Apple alone has sold 100M units.

The argument that Apple is killing the world wide, and by extension Google, makes a good headline, but may not be entirely accurate. But the role of the “traditional web” is definitely up for debate.

It’s far more likely that our understanding of what the web means changes to allow room for the different modes of connection that are available today. Consider that the original base premise of the "web" was loosely a series of interconnected nodes that allowed for information to be broken into packets and transmitted freely from one point to another. And where each packet can be distributed independently of each other.

In the 60s, the idea was to make sure government communications could continue even if say, a small city was wiped out by a Soviet nuclear weapon. Today, the idea is to be sure that your 16 year old can fire up her iPad to watch the latest Justin Bieber video that a friend posted to Facebook.

I am pretty sure that the team at DARPA didn’t have THAT in mind when they conceived of the ARPANET. What will we think of next?

Customer Webinar Two Year Anniversary--Launching with Customers

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

It’s hard to believe that we launched our Customer Webinar Series over two years ago here at Percussion Software. We started this Webinar Series with two particular goals in mind. The first goal was to have members of the Percussion team provide our customers with presentations on an array of technical and marketing topics that were informative and innovative. For the past two years we have been successful in offering our customers presentations on topics such as SEO, Content Migration, and Active Assembly.

Our second goal, and equally as important as our first, was to give our customers the opportunity to take the stage themselves in order to present and share on their experiences, success, and lessons learned from the projects they have implemented. We are happy to announce that this month, for the first time in our Customer Webinar Series, we have turned the tables and will have a Percussion customer take a turn at leading us through some of their work and experience using the Percussion CM System.

We are delighted to have Andrew Marley & Joseph Ravgiala of American Student Assistance present on their web content personalization strategy. Andrew & Joe presented on their implementation on the Percussion Personalization Solution back in March at our Toronto User Summit, and are eager to share this presentation with the whole Percussion customer base. We invite our Percussion customers to join us for this customer-driven presentation, and hear Andrew & Joe discuss their approach to tailoring web content using their Percussion CMS.

If you are not a current customer, but are interested in this topic, feel free to submit your details and we will be in touch to schedule a follow-up meeting.

We look forward to this presentation and many more customer-led discussions in the months ahead. Please be sure to register in advance for the Webinar that best suits your schedule. Talk to you then!

-Dana

Dana Miller

Director, Customer Relations

Search is Dead. Long Live Search. Or is it?

Thu, 7 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

A few weeks ago Google announced a significant change to the algorithm that was targeted at so-called content farms. These sites simply exist to catch search traffic, make money on display ads and then pass that content on to another site. In an unusual move, Google announced the change indicating that it impacted nearly 12% of searches.

The social web immediately lit up with blogs, tweets, comments and opinions on what that means. Some said it won’t matter, some said it is the end of search as we know it. This recent article from CNNMoney.com even puts a price tag on the change: $1B in revenue “redistributed.”

As with all things, the truth is somewhere in the middle—clearly for many companies search is the ONLY thing now, and for the foreseeable future. But in the liner notes of the various articles and blogs there are some interesting stats and strategies that are beginning to show up. They look something like this in the aggregate:

Marketers are seeing declining keyword performance
Search is becoming one component of the overall digital strategy
Search marketers are very focused on integrating social channels across PPC and SEO

In a separate article about linking strategies, JC Penney reported that just 7 % of traffic came from organic search

Not surprisingly, it appears we are clearly seeing the broadening of web strategy beyond search. The goal remains to get found, and have your visitor take some action (buy something, read something, contact us, contact them, come visit etc).

Importantly, however, the location of that conversation or conversion is moving from your web site to the community as a whole. Now is the time to speed up your participation in the community--your customers may never make it to your site.

@ajdun

San Francisco User Forum

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Our Director of Customer Relations, Dana Miller, just returned from her trip to meet many of our users in San Francisco earlier this month. She was kind enough to share the following comments. Thanks Dana!

I am just back from our user group meeting in San Francisco. You can see a few pictures on our Facebook page and customer videos will soon follow.

It was great to meet several of our newer customers who are just starting on their journey, and meet face-to-face with several customers who have seen everything and done all there is to do in the web space. Our goal with our User Summits is to connect both new and experienced customers to get to know each other, share ideas, and discuss new innovations.

Our conversations were focused on best practices implementations of Percussion's CM System and our main speaker, Scott Markle from Autotrader.com gave everyone some great stories and much to think about as they refine their content model. Vern Imrich, Percussion's CTO was able to create some great discussion around usability and scalability in CM System future releases, and everyone seemed enthusiastic about the direction we are all headed!

We appreciated everyone's comments and inputs during the event. They are extremely valuable to us as we continually refine our product roadmap and support plans. Looking forward to London next week!

-Dana

Updated: 9 Examples of Effective College and University Websites

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

One of our most popular posts over the past year is the post below that takes a quick look at 9 different examples of good design for Colleges and University web sites.

All of the 8 remaining sites below are still live, though some of the images have changed as the site owners continue to update and expand their sites. Rather than create new images, I thought it would be interesting to see the difference in the live sites today as it gives some perspective on how Colleges and Universities adapt their sites over time.

Enjoy!

@ajdun

Original Post

Higher education websites often need to target a number of distinct audiences including prospective students, current students (usually the most important stakeholders), alumni, parents, teachers, and staff.

Additionally, it’s often important to maintain consistency in branding, often across departments or even colleges within a university system.

Goals

While tactics like personalization can help target content to a school’s audiences while retaining brand consistency, the best projects start with excellent design focused on site goals. For a university or college, these might include:

Increasing the number and quality of applicants
Increasing donations
Communicating information about campus life to parents and students
Increasing the adoption of student tools, such as email, calendaring, and collaboration applications.

The over-arching goal should be to make the experience of doing business with the college as simple and intuitive as possible.

Techniques

Given the tremendous amount of content (and often, hundreds or thousands of pages) required to support a college’s many goals, it’s critical that you get design right. This means:

Useful content: While not generally considered part of the design process, all successful websites begin with a content strategy. Make sure you’ve outlined who the important audiences are, and what they are coming to your site for. Have it. This includes sourcing and reusing community and user-generated content, and employing automation and personalization to serve the most relevant information to visitors.
Calls to action: Conspicuous call to action buttons highlighting the important goals for visitors (hint: Apply) are becoming a mainstay of effective, modern web design.
Simple, logical navigation: Make it obvious. Along with clear calls to action, intuitive navigation helps your visitors quickly find what they’re looking for.

In general, focus on usability and make doing business with the college as easy as possible.

Here are a few websites we found serve as examples of the best web design out there for universities and colleges.

Aurora Community College

Aurora Community College features a Web 2.0 aesthetic, useful quicklinks, and a central promotion box to highlight important content.

Nebraska Wesleyan University

This homepage features a beautiful transparent header with a split screen showing highlighted stories next to quicklinks. The horizontal navigation is simple and makes great use of white space for an elegant look.

Boston University

Boston University, one of the largest private schools in the United States, recently redesigned their homepage. A massive image links to a featured article and gives the site a great deal of visual interest, while four columns below feature important content. The horizontal navigation is so obvious and simple its perfect.

Richland College

The light design makes use of obvious nav elements, featured content lists and a large promo box, all centered around a massive “Apply Now” button.

Tufts University

A non-traditional design showcases interesting events and news at Tufts, with a small but excellent set of navigation links top left. We love the “toolkit,” and area at the top right that presents links to tools students need on a regular basis in one convenient place, as well Tufts’ social network links. Also, a great example of how a great color scheme can give a site tons of personality.

University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences

Someone has taken a page from the Obama Administration school of web design, using an elegant but immaculate layout and sophisticated typefaces. The top half of the site rotates promoted stories and features (complete with pretty images and a beautiful transparency layer), leaving tons of space for news and events below.

Hampshire College

Another decidedly non-traditional design, the Hampshire College homepage is more akin to a magazine layout. Huge images, nice uncluttered nav with direct, descriptive titles makes it easy to find what you're looking for. Square promotion boxes overlaid over the rotating image give it depth. A useful dropdown allows access to deeper pages without adding complexity to the main navigation.

Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech’s Percussion-powered site manages to present a tremendous amount of information without clutter – great use of images and a modular layout that includes multiple navigation bars, a promotion slider, a world location, and student links.

New Customer Site: www.stopbullying.gov

Wed, 9 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Today President Obama and the First Lady launched a new website called: www.stopbullying.gov. The site is running on our CM System platform. This was an incredibly quick turn project developed through our relationship with the Department of Health and Human Services.

More to come on our efforts in the government community, but we are extremely pleased to be part of such an important effort. You can view the video address from the President and First Lady on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/StopBullying.Gov, and participate in their web conference on Thursday March 10, 2011.

@ajdun

Getting Back to It

Wed, 2 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I am joining Percussion to lead marketing and strategy for Percussion as we extend the value that each of our 100 plus customers derive from both our flagship CM Systems and our newer CM1 product deeper into the market.

Percussion Customers and Staff Gather at User Summit 2010 in Woburn, MA

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We kicked off our first locally held User Summit at the Hilton in Woburn, MA this past Tuesday, July 13, with attendees from the Boston area as well as from companies and organizations all across the country.

It was great to see so many different industries gathered under one roof! A few names that come to mind: 24 Hour Fitness, MD Anderson Cancer Center, American Museum of Natural History, NIEHS, ASA, BabyCenter.com, Harvard Law School, Mathworks, Right Management, Virginia Tech and WWF.

Highlights included presentations by Percussion customers and staff:

Brian LaBrake (left) V.P. of Business Applications/ Right Management unveiled brand new site designs from his company’s offices all around the globe— including multilingual and cultural personalization tips in his presentation. Pictured chatting with Nick Lombardi (right) Percussion Worldwide Director Technical Support & IT, who presented the new Support Portal.

Dinos Papoulias (left) Web Producer, World Wildlife Federation chats with Stephen Bolton (right) Solutions Architect from Percussion Professional Services. Stephen presented new best practices and shared code on how to design templates for mobile websites.

Vern Imrich, Percussion CTO presents the company roadmap for 2010.

Ryan Choi (left) Web Architect, AMNH & Michelle Foley (right) Business Application Analyst, MathWorks brought good cheer.

Judy Gosiengfiao (left) 24 Hour Fitness and Jon Ball (right) Web producer, BabyCenter traveled from the West Coast to attend the event.

Dermot Conner (left) Web Development Specialist, MD Anderson chats with Paul Howard (right) Chief Software Architect, Percussion.

Jason Macauley (left) Director of Consulting, Percussion, Dana Miller (center) Customer Service Manager, Percussion chatting with Judy Gosiengfiao (front right) Business Application Analyst, 24 Hour Fitness, and Jay Seletz (back right) Engineering Director, Percussion.

Thank you to all the Percussion Customers and Staff for a healthy turnout. It was an excellent opportunity to match names to faces, and to share best practices across the board. We’ve already started planning the next conference to be held in California next year.

We hope to see you again soon!

Please feel free to stay in touch via Linkedin, Facebook and/ or Twitter.

9 Examples of Effective College and University Websites

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Additionally, it’s often important to maintain consistency in branding, often across departments or even colleges within a university system.

Goals

Increasing the number and quality of applicants
Increasing donations
Communicating information about campus life to parents and students
Increasing the adoption of student tools, such as email, calendaring, and collaboration applications.

The over-arching goal should be to make the experience of doing business with the college as simple and intuitive as possible.

Techniques

Given the tremendous amount of content (and often, hundreds or thousands of pages) required to support a college’s many goals, it’s critical that you get design right. This means:

Useful content: While not generally considered part of the design process, all successful websites begin with a content strategy. Make sure you’ve outlined who the important audiences are, and what they are coming to your site for. Have it. This includes sourcing and reusing community and user-generated content, and employing automation and personalization to serve the most relevant information to visitors.
Calls to action: Conspicuous call to action buttons highlighting the important goals for visitors (hint: Apply) are becoming a mainstay of effective, modern web design.
Simple, logical navigation: Make it obvious. Along with clear calls to action, intuitive navigation helps your visitors quickly find what they’re looking for.

In general, focus on usability and make doing business with the college as easy as possible.

Here are a few websites we found serve as examples of the best web design out there for universities and colleges.

Aurora Community College

Aurora Community College features a Web 2.0 aesthetic, useful quicklinks, and a central promotion box to highlight important content.

Nebraska Wesleyan University

Boston University

Richland College

The light design makes use of obvious nav elements, featured content lists and a large promo box, all centered around a massive “Apply Now” button.

Tufts University

University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences

Hampshire College

Virginia Tech

HealthCare.gov Launched! Congratulations to The Department of Health and Human Services

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched HealthCare.gov, a new website aimed at helping the public understand health insurance reform and find out what health insurance options are available and might work best for them.

We’ll be talking more about Healthcare.gov in the coming weeks, but for now – wonderful job to the entire HHS team.

It’s absolutely gorgeous, as you can see. As HHS Chief Technical Officer Todd Park mentioned in today’s live webcast, “It doesn’t look anything like a typical government website.” You can say that again – clearly the focus has been on making the user experience wonderful for the citizen, right down to the buttons allowing visitors to comment on what is most and least helpful on the site.

Besides really simple explanations of how the law is improving access to healthcare for citizens with all different kinds of needs, the website provides a tool that asks users a series of simple questions and suggests healthcare options that fit their needs. Astonishingly, it supports 3 billion potential personal scenarios or “pathways” to ensure that visitors learn about options most relevant to their lives. The entire project – including design, content, integrating health insurance plan data from thousands of sources, application development, and implementing the Percussion web content management system - was built in 90 days.

Already, it has received A Lot. Of. Press. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark on HealthCare.gov: “Overall, the deal is better customer service from government, and better return for taxpayer dollars, pretty good!”

So, from all of us here at Percussion to the team at HHS: Congrats, and thank you for all that you do.

Download the Free Webinar: Implementing Open Government: Technology and Policy

This free live webinar on Open Government will impart best practices on how web content management can make government websites more open and participatory and how it can best be implemented.

Managing Content Strategy: Clothing the Emperor By Asking Why

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

You may have been there: had a boss who told you to “throw together” a document, a newsletter, a slide deck—or some designs, perhaps. Or, just as likely, to start a blog, Facebook group, or Twitter account—without guidance on what the new channel is meant to accomplish, or who will tend it day-to-day.

A recent blog post from Georgy Cohen suggested that creating content without a strategy is the equivalent of the emperor asking for new clothes, but refusing to acknowledge that the clothes don’t exist—i.e., that the content doesn’t have a strategy. As professionals, we can all quickly create something that’s passable—for now. But if we don't understand the larger purpose of what we're trying to do (that pesky human problem), we can’t create content that will help us get closer to our goals. As a result, our website (or emperor) will have no clothes—whether we admit it or not.

Kristina Halvorson, a content strategist, helps organizations think about what their content is doing for them—and how they can make it do that work even better. Dozens of content and design professionals gathered to speak with the Brain Traffic CEO at a Content Strategy New England meetup last week. All clearly saw a need to better clothe their emperors and strategize for their sites. The "aha" moments in the room piled up faster than stale content on a website as Halvorson clearly and calmly explained what should be obvious but sadly isn't: we all need to know why we do what we do, not only so that our efforts can contribute to a larger success, but also so our websites won’t be functionally naked.

As Brain Traffic defines it, "Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content." It's pretty simple, clearly necessary, and echoes some of the content governance principles we’ve explored previously. But amid day-to-day distractions, many important components of content strategy seem to fall by the wayside, creating problems that affect everyone but that no one knows how to solve. So how do you make the step back from creating content to strategizing about it?

One of Halvorson's top tips was to simply ask why. Why am I changing this headline to say "integrate" rather than "join"? Perhaps "integrate" was identified as a keyword in the SEO strategy. Why am I making a video explaining how to use a product that no one buys? Maybe the video is key to promoting adoption. Why am I writing an article about traveling to Mexico for the website of an insurance company? Perhaps traveler's insurance is the company's current focus. Whatever the reason, know what it is. And if the reason doesn't make sense, say so.

One of my favorite event wrap-ups came from Cohen, whose summary inspired me to think in the familiar fable terms that have guided this post. She said, “Amid all the talk about content as king, here—finally—is the sewing circle working feverishly to make sure that the emperor has clothes.” I like this sartorial metaphor for the way it evokes careful planning and detailed work—not to mention ongoing tailoring and repairs.

Ultimately, the best thing any content creator can do is ask why—and refuse to perpetuate the emperor illusion if there is no good answer.

The Human Problem in Content Management

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Tony Byrne of the Real Story Group remarked earlier this month that “The future is more of a content and human problem than a technology problem.” The notion seemed to resonate deeply with his audience at JBoye Philadelphia. Having already acknowledged the issues of scale inherent in human capital - “humans don't scale,” several presenters observed - the conference seemed to move towards consensus: we often have the technology we need. But technology is subject to all the flaws of its human users. The true problem: how do we get humans to adopt and use it appropriately?

Smart planning and governance can help, as we discussed earlier this month in a blog post. Plans can and should make good use of technology to achieve strategic goals. But humans will ultimately be responsible for adopting and implementing any plan that’s created. Without intelligent adoption and usage, no technology is useful: hence the human problem in content management.

In the book Drive, business and technology writer Dan Pink suggests that “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” are what motivate us. This suggests that humans will be best equipped to use technology when they have received sufficient training to be masterful users of that technology, as well as when they have sufficient context to understand the overarching purpose of the technology at hand.

So even if human problems – adoption and usage – will continue to be our greatest challengers, we also have the power to be a solution. A comprehensive strategy, with a clear purpose that fosters understanding and adoption, is the beginning of a resolution. A successful strategy also marks the point where you can really start to get returns on technology, because your humans are able to work efficiently and with purpose, making the best use of the tools available to them. Sound too good to be true? Maybe - but with the right plan, built on the right purpose, maybe not.

3 content destination websites and what your business can learn from them

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Internet users are more empowered than ever to find what they’re looking for online, regardless of where that content lives. Content destination websites, whose business model centers around not only having what searchers are looking for, but having content that will keep them there once they arrive, have gotten very good at driving website visits and converting visitors to customers using content.

Not every business should be a destination or attempt to be. Every business, however, can learn from the tactics content destination sites employ to acquire and convert traffic. Here are three organizations from the Percussion family that fit the content destination profile, and what marketers can learn from how they succeed online.

Examples of Successful Content Destinations

BabyCenter.com

Articles, from “8 Ways to Get your Toddler to Listen” to “32 Ways Your Life Will Change,” are just the tip of the iceberg for the Web’s #1 global interactive parenting network. Expert answers, “Mom” answers, informational videos, baby names, a community in which users can form groups and post stories, photos, tips, and journals, and a bevy of useful tools such as Ovulation Calculator and Pregnancy Weight Tracker keep users finding the site - and coming back.

Visit London

VisitLondon.com hopes that leisure and business travelers to London (as well as Londoners!) will book accommodations using the website after learning about things to do, events, shopping, restaurants, and other attractions at VisitLondon.com. They can also get maps and guides to the city, as well as access a huge amount of information on travel logistics, customs and visas. User reviews of thousands of hotels from Trip Advisor often seal the deal.

The Motley Fool

Fool.com calls itself The World’s Greatest Investing Community, and provides its readers with stock tips, articles on how to invest and plan for retirement, regular columns by experts, a platform to rate and research stocks while sharing ideas, a radio show, and hundreds of community discussion boards. Overall, the site reaches millions each month through a combination of free and premium content.

The sites above use very effective techniques to be trusted sources for content in their industry. Here are some things marketers can learn from what they've accomplished:

It's About The Content

Consider all the different types of content that your readers might find useful (or entertaining): articles, blog posts, instructional videos or video interviews, how-to guides, podcasts, glossaries, diagrams, trade or industry statistics, social content, the voice of their own peers in the form of comments and reviews. Iterate and test what works on a small scale, then make the most effective content types a regular part of your content pipeline.

It's About The Experience

As much as users are empowered to find things on their own, compare the user experience of trying to find out what makes a good diaper on Google vs. BabyCenter, or try searching for which car to buy on Yahoo instead of AutoTrader.com. Good content destinations are an oasis in the desert of noise that often accompanies search engine results. They know that because you came for this thing, you might also want to see this thing. Once you find a good content destination, you're more likely to stay. Focus your planning on why the visitor should care and ask yourself whether every new piece of content or feature would add value to those who consume your content. Relevance and context are tremendously important here. That's what web content management helps you do: you've got the content - use it to interact with your customers in the most effective way possible.

3rd Party Content: Be an aggregator

As much as making your website a successful destination is about original content, its about having what your visitors are looking for. There is a wealth of content online on the topics that interest your readers, but often it's difficult to find. There's an opportunity to become the trusted destination for your readers by aggregating it. The content exists, you can help visitors find it. Import feeds directly into your CMS as reusable content items to publish on your site in lists of popular and useful content and license content from trusted sources to massively increase the amount of information you make available to your readers.

3rd Party Channels: Be ubiquitous

It's also important to get found by the people you're trying to convert, and search engines aren't the only place this happens. Find out which channels (from mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter to more specific communities like LinkedIn Groups and niche websites) your users are using most and link your content to them in an appropriate way. Submit articles to LinkedIn groups, comment on industry blog posts with links to your own take, offer up morsels to followers on Twitter with links to a bigger story.

Employ the Tools of Engagement

RSS: To both allow visitors to subscribe to your blog, increasing the likelihood that they will return to your site for content, as well as enable your own content for syndication.

Comments: To allow readers to build a connection with you around your content as well as source user-generated content.

Ratings: A simple engagement mechanism which also enables you to automate the generation of lists and suggest popular content to other readers.

Polls: Source input from your readers while allowing them to interact with the community on your website.

"Share" buttons: Whether using ShareThis, AddThis, or your own tool, give your reader's the ability to pass along your content conveniently to their friends and network. While sharing widgets have become pervasive on blogs and other forms of social content, consider adding them to all of your content.

Widgets: Create applications that, while connected to your website and content, can be placed on other sites by users. Flu.gov, for instance, allows visitors to embed Flu Vaccine Locator, Flu Map, and News widgets on their own websites and blogs, significantly expanding their content's reach to citizens.

Personalization: In web content management, relevance and context are critical. Websites can use personalization to track their visitors interests based on any kind of site interaction, referring sites, keywords searched (or even referring keywords), or explicit inputs to show them the most relevant content at exactly the right time.

Plan On It: Careful planning fosters continued success in content and community

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

When spring arrives, we often think of planting gardens and doing our spring cleaning—but how often do we apply these principles to business? A few sessions at the JBoye Conference in Philadelphia last week motivated us to think about how spring can also be an important time for clarifying our approach to content and social media strategy. Here's a short summary of those sessions, as well as a few ideas for planting the seeds of a successful content strategy in your organization.

Plan On It: Careful planning fosters continued success in content and community

Peter Kim's session on "Making Sense of Social Business" and Christine Pierpoint's take on "Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management" offered smart suggestions for dealing with potentially overwhelming tasks. Though each approached strategy from a different direction—Kim focusing on social media and Pierpoint tackling governance (as she'll be doing in her upcoming webinar with us)—their takes were remarkably consistent.

Kim put forward a project cycle consisting of "plan, construct, maintain, measure, and understand" iterations, each component aimed at ensuring the ongoing success of a project. Pierpoint proposed a similar "strategy, governance, execution, measurement" cycle for web operations management. The correlation between the "construct/maintain" and "governance" phases of these plans (visible below) clearly demonstrates that any plan is incomplete unless it's clear who will manage it and how.

Organizations often figure they'll "just try" social media or other seemingly minor endeavors without crystallizing a plan, and then lose heart when poorly aligned Tweets from junior staff fail to revolutionize the business. Pierpoint proposed a "social media litmus test" to reveal governance issues within an organization: If no one knows who should handle social media at your organization, it means you don't have an effective web operations management process or structure in place. Social media touches on so many aspects of an organization that it's understandable for an organization to be unsure who will handle it—but if an organization's governance is well defined, execution and measurement will benefit.

Even when a plan is in place, it's ultimately useless unless enacted and enforced. As one session attendee questioned, “What's the teeth?”—or, what are the consequences of not enacting a plan? This is where the “measurement” task and the iterative nature of the strategic cycle come in to play. If you’re measuring the outcome of your plan, you will be able to determine not only what has been done, but also the effects it has achieved.

Perhaps a complete strategic cycle that incorporates governance and measurement is key not only to defining the criteria for success, but also creating the conditions for achieving it. By creating an environment where people understand what the plan and purpose of their efforts are, a plan fosters employee motivation. Underscoring this point, a vendor-driven session about CMS community at the JBoye conference concluded that mastery is a significant portion of community. That is, the community members who feel they’ve mastered a skill are more apt to contribute again in the future. Likewise, employees who feel they’re contributing to a larger, well-defined strategic effort will be more motivated to contribute to their part of the cycle.

So, this spring, ensure the success of your content and communities by creating plans to drive them, or evaluating the success of your existing plans. A careful calibration of your strategic mission and the tactics for achieving it can pave the way for significant improvements both within your organization and the larger community around it, feeding the enthusiasm of already-engaged members and fostering participation among others.

Christine Pierpoint of will be joining Percussion for a free webinar on governance in Open Government on May 26th - don't miss it!

Register to Attend: Implementing Open Government: Technology and Policy

This free live webinar on Open Government will impart best practices on how web content management can make government websites more open and participatory and how it can best be implemented.

Building Effective Homepages

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Recently, our friends at CMSWire published an article entitled “The Decline of the Homepage,” alleging that because more and more visitors enter websites at specific pages, the homepage has lost its status as a critical element of an organization’s website.

While Gerry McGovern’s article makes a few good points, I would have to disagree.

Why The Homepage Is Still Important

Organizations are getting better and better at inbound marketing and consequently, more visitors are entering websites at article pages, blog post permalinks, and campaign landing pages. This long tail of content is indeed critical to traffic acquisition. The homepage, however, still remains the most frequent entry point to the vast majority of websites. Here are some reasons why:

Many potential leads use Google to search for your brand. Nearly all of these searches will list your homepage as the first result. Consequently, the homepage is the entry point for nearly all visitors searching your business name.
Your homepage is still likely to garner the most inbound links. Even though blog posts and articles might be link magnets, your homepage is where most people reviewing or linking to your business will likely link. Combining this with your own SEO efforts around important keywords means Google and other search engines are apt to offer it as a relevant result for many searches.
It’s easy to direct people to. Both for B2B companies who still drive a lot of new business with telesales, and B2C businesses that direct consumers to their website – that’s a lot of traffic being driven directly to your homepage.

While Gerry makes a good point – that oftentimes it is preferable for a visitor to find exactly what they’re looking for via a direct link or search result – many times your visitors don’t know what they need. The homepage is a perfect way to direct them. So instead of “is the homepage dead?,” the question becomes how do we make our homepages more effective?

Building An Effective Homepage

Marketers and web designers have learned a great deal about what makes an effective homepage. The goal is to take all the traffic you’ve acquired, help visitors qualify themselves as potential customers, and drive them towards a conversion.

Reduce Clutter: Reduce the number of content items on your homepage – lists and aggregation are fine if they drive towards a result, but resist the temptation to put everything under the sun on your homepage. Rather, use simple navigation to help visitors find what they need.

Mint.com does a beautiful job of laying out important information without cluttering their homepage:

Consider a large header: Large text can be in incredible effective in quickly letting your visitors know what you’re about and how you can help.Too many websites fail to help potential leads know that they’ve come to the right place.

The Onehub website, below, lets you know immediately that they can help you share files, manage projects, and collaborate with your team:

Big calls to action: Consider this question: what is the most important action you would like visitors to take on your site? Buy a product? Make a donation? Subscribe to your email list? Watch a demo? Give them a clear, obvious way to do it.

Even though AutoTrader.com, a media site, presents a lot of information on their homepage, a massive “Find Cars” button helps visitors quickly take an action:

Your homepage still presents a tremendous opportunity to turn traffic into action. Keep it focused on the actions you want visitors to take, and reap the rewards.

(Note: As I look at Percussion’s homepage, it’s clear that we’re not making use of my own advice. I’m on it. Luckily I have this great web content management system that will make changing it all a piece of cake.)

Images and SEO

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In past posts, we’ve looked at some tips for quickly optimizing page titles, H1 tags, and URLs for better results. Today we’re talking about images.

Images are sometimes overlooked as an opportunity to improve SEO results. Properly optimized images contribute to improved rankings in search and can also drive their own traffic through Google Image Search.

Optimizing Images for Search

Two elements make up the bulk of search engine optimization for your images, filenames and alternate text. Ensure that you are properly employing both.

Filenames: The actual name given to your file, such as red-balloon.jpg. In most cases, the filename should be simple and descriptive.

Alt Text: Alt text describes an image, and is used by screen readers for the visually impaired as well as rendered by browsers when for any reason an image can’t load.

Below is an example, from Flu.gov, showing an image as well as its filename and alternate text.

I like this example because it shows that any significant image asset – not just photos – can contribute to SEO.

Best Practices

Use them. Not only is it excellent page-building practice that breaks up copy and improves the readability and flow of your pages, but studies show that all things being relatively equal, web pages with relevant, well-optimized images rank better than those with none.
Employ important keywords in both filenames and alt text when possible, but don’t artificially stuff them with keywords – this can lead to penalization by Google.
Image filenames should use all lowercase letters and employ hyphens (dashes) as word separators.
Filenames and alt text should be concise – keep filenames to 3-4 words max and alt text to a short sentence.
Alternate text should describe your image to someone who cannot see it. Boy playing with dalmatian is an example of great alternate text for an image.

Images, SEO and your CMS

Here’s how easy it is to designate search engine-optimized filenames and alt tags in Percussion:

Any content contributor can quickly create SEO-friendly filenames and alternate text simply by typing it in. Because you can input them either when the image asset is being created or at any point afterwards, it’s possible to make quick adjustments to your SEO strategy as you find out what’s working most effectively.

Learn more about optimizing your enterprise websites for search engines by downloading the free webinar below:

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Packed with examples, this recorded webinar explains how Google works and provides helpful guidance on how to plan an SEO-conscious web content strategy and properly optimize your web pages for better rankings on Google.

Download it now.

URLs for SEO

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We’ve taken a look at how to create effective page titles and H1 tags for SEO, now let’s look at another important on-page SEO element: URLs.

Modern URLs

For most cases, traditional dynamic URLs have been replaced by modern, SEO-friendly URLs. There is no longer any excuse for most of your webpages having URLs that include query strings, chains of numbers and special characters, or unnecessary extensions.

A URL like http://www.yourcompany.com/products/video looks much cleaner than http://www.yourcompany.com/page/index.aspx?topic=PRODUCT::321566

Not only are the aesthetics remarkably better, but it is much easier to read. Studies have shown that people are more likely to link to (boosting search rankings) and share (boosting traffic) web pages with clean, human-readable URLs.

Best Practices for SEO-Friendly URLs

Use dashes instead of hyphens as separators. Not only does Google see them as individual words, significantly increasing the number of relevant searches for which your page might be returned, but they also read cleaner and easier to humans.
Keep URLs short but descriptive. A human being should be able to read them and easily understand what the page will tell them just from the URL. Do not try to artificially pack them full of keywords. SEOMoz correlational data has shown that “Keyword effectiveness in URLs decreases as URL length increases.”
URLs are case sensitive – use all lowercase letters whenever possible, as this is what most people will type.
Be careful with subdomains, as they may be viewed by search engines as separate domains, splitting your authority.

SEO-Friendly URLs and Percussion CMS

Percussion’s content management system allows content contributors to create search-optimized URLs. All you have to do is type in the name of the page, and it will be appended to your folder structure.

You can even easily override folder structure and create URLs like Percussion.com/campaign-page, which comes in handy for marketing campaigns and important landing pages.

Here’s how easy it is to create friendly URLs in Percussion:

And here is the resulting URL!

For many more SEO tips and best practices, check out our recorded webinar, "SEO for Enterprise Sites" below!

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Download it now.

H1 Tags for SEO

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Today we continue our exploration of on-page SEO elements with the H1 tag.

The H1 Headline

H1 headlines - text surrounded by <h1> header tags - are used to define the most important heading on a web page. If you can think of your website as a magazine, and your web pages as articles, H1s would be the articles’ titles.

Here’s a great example of an H1 headline in action (from BabyCenter.com):

This is what it would look like in the code:

Pretty simple, right?

Are H1s really useful for SEO?

For a long time, H1s were viewed as highly important to SEO. Recently, many (including SEO.moz, who perform frequent studies correlating on- and off-page factors to search rankings) have significantly de-emphasized what they believe to be the level of importance that Google and other search engines ascribe to H1 tags.

Nonetheless, we continue to recommend that web pages include proper H1s as they are helpful to users and may still carry some small SEO value.

H1 Headline Best Practices

Employ keywords but make it an appropriate title (short and descriptive of the web page’s contents).
Make it consistent with the keywords used in your page (browser) title, web page URL, and web copy.

Creating H1 Headlines in your CMS

Most web content management systems with in-context editing capabilities make it easy for those not versed in html to apply heading tags to text.

In Percussion, for instance you simply highlight the text you would like to give title status to, and select the correct style from the style drop-down:

Make sure you’re making use of this capability to provide each page with a proper H1 header.

On-page SEO elements are often the lowest-hanging fruit, opportunities to significantly impact your rankings in search results by making a few important changes. Next, we'll explore how H1 tags influence search rankings.

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Download it now.

Page Titles for SEO

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Ensuring that on-page SEO elements (such as page titles, header tags, URLs, copy, and images) are properly optimized is a critical part of getting found, particularly for enterprise or large websites that have already begun to amass a large number of inbound links (and thus authority). CMS-managed websites can also take advantage of the ability to make sweeping changes to quickly impact and improve on-page optimization elements.

Nonetheless, organizations often have questions about how to best optimize on-page elements for better ranking in search, and a surprising number of established sites fail to make proper use of them.

This week we'll be exploring best practices in optimizing on-page elements, beginning with page titles.

What are Page Titles?

A page (or browser) title is displayed at the upper-left corner of most browsers. They are also frequently displayed in search results and bookmark lists. Page titles are generally accepted to be the single most important on-page keyword elements for SEO. Not only do they directly impact ranking, but because Google displays your page title as the title of a search result, they are often your first interaction with a visitor. A compelling, accurate page title can encourage click-through and set the right expectation for a new visitor.

Your page title should describe the web page accurately and include the most important keywords you want to rank on. Here’s an example of a great page title from the website of email marketing software provider Mailchimp:

And what the source code for that title looks like:

Page (Browser) Title Best Practices

Here are some guidelines for generating effective page titles:

Employ your keyword phrase(s) early on in the title. If you include a company name in your page titles, place it after your keywords, not before:

Web Content Management | Percussion Software

as opposed to

Percussion Software | Web Content Management

Write descriptive, compelling titles in natural language. Don't just pack them full of keywords.
Use dashes (-) or vertical pipes (|) to separator your keyword phrase from your website title.
Don’t make them too long – very long titles begin to correlate to decreased rankings in search results. A good rule of thumb is around 60 characters – Google displays just under 70 characters in search results, so anything longer than that will be cut off.

Page Titles in your CMS

Your web content management software probably makes it easy to generate page titles - make sure you are using this capability to add great titles to every page on your site. Here’s an example of how you would do it in Percussion, for instance:

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Download it now.

Ask the Social Media Experts… on Twitter only?

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Percussion Staff Guest Bloggers Today:

Kerry Skemp, left, manages the proposal process and sales collateral for Percussion, and is the voice of Percussion on Twitter.

Erika Frey-Hasegawa, right, is responsible for updates to the website, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Last Thursday, MITX and the Boston Interactive Media Association gave members a chance to "Ask the Social Media Experts" at the UK Trade & Investment offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The panel,composed of social media experts Lois Kelly from Foghound, Erik Qualman from Socialnomics, Larry Weber from W2 group, and Dan Zarella from HubSpot, answered questions submitted via Twitter in advance and during the session.

MITX moderator Robert Davis, VP of Digital Marketing at PJA Advertising & Marketing, launched the discussion with great insights on starting out in social media, effective behavior, and techniques for defining and measuring success. Throughout the evening, the panelists handled the range of topics with impressive savvy. But in the audience something felt a little off. There was an elephant in the room.

Because questions were taken via Twitter, many of the audience members remained completely focused on their gadgets instead of interacting with panelists or raising their hands to ask questions. When the panelists weren't talking, the room itself was often oddly silent—except for the rapid clicking of Blackberries and iPhones. People were tweeting away. We wondered: was Twitter - a "social" tool - impeding actual connection?

Tweets were displayed on a big screen behind the panelists during the session. At times, it seemed that Tweetdeck was more active than the audience. A few bold souls stood up to ask questions, but for the most part, folks stayed behind the digital curtain—even when they didn't have to.

Twitter is a useful tool, and the social media experts on the panel provided strong rationale for its business use, showcasing statistics on company responsiveness increasing customer engagement and loyalty. However, in some cases, are social tools like Twitter preventing people from making actual human connections?

Twitter isn't always a distraction in social settings. Percussion CTO Vern Imrich had a positive experience with displays of Tweets at the Inbound Marketing Summit last fall. He found that they sparked conversation. Tweets certainly sparked conversation at the MITX panel, too—but did they need to? Couldn't questions have been raised just as easily, and perhaps even more effectively, in person? Marketers are often guilty of trying to incorporate every “shiny new toy” into their arsenal just because they are available – something we often advise against, as we do in the comments when analyst Janus Boye suggested that vendors' mobile websites and Facebook pages are critical to selection.

We’re all about Twitter and its use in communicating with customers, prospects, and our industry friends, but we do wonder if it has to be used in every situation, just because it can. Last week’s session was excellent but raised those questions for us again.

Next week we’ll address some of the insights the panelists shared.

The Private Sector Can Learn About Openness from the Government… no, I’m not joking.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Businesses who see the web as an important part of their communications strategy can learn a lot from the insight and complete approach the Administration has taken.

5 Ways E-Commerce Companies Can Use Content to Increase Conversion

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Retailers now have the tools and the data to use content to significantly impact conversion in a big way.

3 Key E-Commerce Trends for 2010

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

How do internet retailers gain competitive advantage in 2010?

We're Turning Up The Blogging Heat

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Welcome to the Percussion Marketing Blog, meet Marketing Manager Chris Oquist, and learn a little bit about what we'll be talking about.

The Drupal Gardens Affect

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The introduction of Drupal Gardens will provide many companies, colleges and non-profits with a vastly simplified CMS. The introduction also marks the beginnings of a sea change in the industry.

Measuring Marketing Results – 6 easy steps to make your organization a Quant Shop

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The first step in generating marketing results for your organization is setting up a measurement system. This will allow you to look back and determine what worked, and what didn't. These 6 steps help demystify the process.

That Sucking Sound from Down Below

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The WCM category is changing. No big surprise. But what makes the dynamics interesting is the change is not coming from the deep-pocketed, large players. Rather, the lower price point vendors are marking change and forcing others to pay attention to their product roadmaps.

Brand Building and Social Media, Pt. 3: Media Buying in the World of Social

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Social media moves the fulcrum of power away from brands and towards the small sub-set of individuals who are active and have cultivated a following. Part 3 of Brand Building and Social Media explores how this shift may impact targeting and valuation of future media purchases.

Brand Building and Social Media, Pt. 2: The Economics of Density and Leverage

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The many dimensions of influence
Part 1 of Brand Building and Social Media included the notion that the marketing campaign is losing it’s relevance as a front line tactic. At the core of a marketing campaign is a temporary and finite relationship between a brand and a prospect or customer – that being a transaction (a registration, download or checkout, a rebate, to name a few).

Similar to the concept of Relationship Marketing, the Passion Pyramid is a continuum without an end point. It is not bound by time or defined by “completion”. A customer can move fluidly up or down the pyramid, and in a non-linear fashion.

Here again is the pyramid as introduced in Part 1.

The Passion Pyramid is based upon a simple theory. A brand has a direct or indirect relationship with a person, and if a marketer is successful in creating relevant and motivating interactions, “brand love” improves. But is there another dimension to the Passion Pyramid? Consider the reach and impact of each Passion Pyramid customer or prospect. For most who visit social sites, they do little but read and observe from the sidelines. They are less involved in the brand, and therefore less likely to jump into the conversation. If that behavior is extrapolated, one can assume that these lesser involved reach a relatively small universe. .

The Power of Peer-to-Peer Influence
But what about those who are in the Discuss, Join or Lead circles (as depicted in the graphic above)? Like popular bloggers, they have a following. As a Leader shapes and influences online conversations, she creates a following. A group of folks follow a Leader that makes sound decisions or taps into the emotional motivation of a purchase in ways that no one else can match. Whatever the case, the Leader now has leverage over the brand. People follow, absorbing advice or information, and their perception of a brand changes based upon the impressions gleaned from the Leader. And quite possibly the follower’s change in perception results in a different action. Understanding the Leader’s impact on his or her following, the Leader’s value to the brand has increased by orders of magnitude. If a brand can activate the Leader, imagine how that can change the economics of media buys, research and new product launches.

It’s Not A Numbers Game
The game today in social media is about density and leverage. As a first step, marketers need to find the dense pockets or hubs of brand influencers - perhaps focusing a majority of resources on the top 5% of total target, populating . And while size still matters, understanding the impact a Leader has on the purchase habits of his or her following places immense value on that Leader. The greater the influence a Leader has over his or her followers, the more valuable that person becomes to a brand. Would I pay 2x the prevailing CPM to reach this Leader? 4x? Keep going, because if I can reach 30 Leaders with true leverage to help shape my brand, I will gladly pay a handsome sum. Buying access to my top 5% influencers beats any other media buy – hands down. When one moves many the way a Leader can, the economic model gets turned on its head.

When many marketers today make an online media purchase decision, they start by reviewing a Media Kit. Right age? Check. Appropriate income level? Check. Traffic trending up? Check. CPM in line with other purchases? Check. I for one don't believe demographics are a powerful or even trustworthy marker of purchase intent. Particularly when there is rich, interaction-level information available. Soon - I hope - the notion of target density and leverage will change the way we buy media.

Brand Building and Social Media, Pt. 1: The Brand Passion Pyramid

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Is the Marketing Campaign losing its Crown?

For those of us who have responsibility for generating tangible online results, there are few weapons more important than the Almighty Campaign. While some in advertising may use a different definition, I have always viewed an online campaign as a point-to-point exercise:

Outbound Stimulus From Brand >> Recipients Respond >> Recipients Take Action

An offer is pushed from the brand, a small percentage of recipients hit a landing page and an even smaller percentage transact. A nice, neat package. Metrics galore. And there are plenty of vendors out there to help me with list selection, predictive analytics, outbound strategies, landing page optimization and lead nurturing.

But the rise of social media has made me think a bit differently about the value of the Campaign. Although they remain critically important, response rates are suddenly not the only end game. Now, the nature of a prospect’s or customer’s interaction with a brand on proprietary or social sites provides me with potentially rich information. How vigorously are customers and prospects tracking my brand? What is spurring a rise or fall in their sentiment? Does my brand strategy leverage all of the different channels consumers are using to discuss my space or product? How are their interactions with competing or complementary products impacting their perception of a brand? And importantly, how can one use content to influence these interactions?

The Influence Game

In the world dominated by Campaigns, I had a nice tightly defined group of metrics. Most were binary. Recipients responded or they didn’t. As my targets participate on social properties, they have infinitely more points of expression. They can participate or observe. If they participate, there are varying levels of engagement and sentiment. And the metrics are more about shades of gray. Customers can now be represented along a spectrum of brand passion.

As the more passionate customers move up the scale, they join discussion groups around the brand, they formally join groups and actively participate, and are provided administrative rights to moderate and lead discussions on a site.

Alternate paths exist – the pyramid is not always linear. A consumer might very well discuss a product on a forum or ask for advice on Twitter before buying.

The end game for the marketer is to pull their target up the inverted pyramid of Brand Passion. As the inverted pyramid gets more top-heavy, the franchise becomes stronger.

So if the Marketing Campaign is to be displaced, a few things need to happen. First, analytics that help marketers segment by passion need to be nailed. Second, we need information that defines what content most efficiently moves the customer up the inverted pyramid. And third, we’ll want a way to deliver content to the pure social sites – such as forums - that will help marketers influence outcomes. I suspect these missing pieces are closer than we think...

It's all ball bearings these days

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Fletch is one of my personal heroes. He could bluff his way into any club, party or conversation. In the classic 1985 movie, Fletch (Chevy Chase) wanders into an airplane hangar in one of his many Clouseau-like costumes, picks up some tools and begins working on a LearJet. He is clearly not a mechanic, nor does he belong in the hangar. But when asked for his opinion on a certain technical matter by a pair of fellow mechanics, he responds “Oh c'mon guys, it's so simple, maybe you need a refresher course. It's all ball bearings these days.” Clearly it’s not about ball bearings, but his bravado works. No one calls his bluff and he stays in the hangar.

So it appears that IBM is pulling a Fletch. I was a bit surprised to read a recent strategic insight from IBM titled “Beyond advertising: Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer.” IBM appears to have done a fine job with research, generating 2800 responses from six countries among consumers. Additionally they conducted 70 one-on-ones with content owners, media distributors, agencies and advertisers. So far, so good.

What was a bit surprising was the rather vanilla information that came from the report and a focus on well-worn advertising formats. One example is the chart below. TV, promotions and branded entertainment. Yes, these remain relevant formats (for some), but they hardly represent new media in light of “Beyond Advertising”.

A second example of Fletch-ism is the increased need for measurement by heads of marketing. The study states “And increasingly, a new brand of Chief Marketing Officer is comfortable with – perhaps even demanding – digital, measurable formats. The implication? [CMOs] require the ability to analyze campaign results to prove the value of spending, now more than ever.” Wait… Hadn’t we already made that transformation? Aren’t a vast majority of us evaluated by leads, revenue or some other hard metric?

What was missing in the report was the lack of Web 2.0/social media. A scant four mentions. As if it is too infantile to mention. I might be breathing my own fumes, but all I see and sense in the market is the massive shift in branding leverage away from advertisers and marketers and toward customers and consumers. Is there a top e-commerce site out there without a rating or commenting function? Aren’t there forums for just about any interest where died-in-the-wool consumers can have a hand in enhancing or destroying a brand? Doesn’t the fortune of many restaurants, shops and salons hang in delicate balance of customers who are digitally connected?

But IBM does hit pay dirt. Early in the report, the authors make the point, “Becoming consumer centric requires a combination of granularity – the ability to target and reach desired consumers while measuring results – with cross-platform integration.”

The practice of marketing or selling to one – the ultimate in granularity – would arouse any marketer. As a profession, we have already begun the journey. Custom publishing, Google adwords, LinkedIn and web site personalization services begin to marry behavioral information with content. Creating context for the visitor and paying it off with laser-focused messaging or promotions is a great first step. Finishing the journey and getting to one-to-one can’t come soon enough.

A Day of Doubling

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The day the new percussion.com was launched, we experienced a doubling of traffic. Not so unusual, except for the fact that we hadn't told a soul about the launch.

Short Guys Rule

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In my present and past I have many marketing friends who directed some big brands. Really big brands: Yahoo, Sony, eBay, and some big-hankin’ Kraft products. Creating their brand persona was akin to writing NASA’s Kepler project brief – beautifully detailed, well orchestrated, and above all, little left to chance. When I see these brands in-market, I must admit I am a bit jealous. Big stuff, done well on a grand stage.

So how is a smaller business supposed to think about branding? For many non-Fortune Global 2000 businesses, the term brand can be confusing, and even a bit intimidating. Going beyond consistent colors, taglines or logo use can help the small player in a market build trust, relevance and distinction. Some small businesses reverse-justify their brand, and capture brand definition as an extension of the founder or a particularly strong-willed CEO. They become comfortable with using personality terms like “bold”, “trusted” or “visionary”.

But defining a brand is more than that. It must contain some detail. It should express a company’s reason for being, and how that reason is expressed through all touchpoints – the site, the look of the product, where the product is distributed, and yes, the logo. One of the best small business branding examples is Duct Tape Marketing – John Jantsch’s consulting business. John’s reason for being is captured in the term “Simple, effective and affordable small business marketing.” My guess is he started with that thought and used the elements of that term to anchor everything he did. His branding discipline is not only evident in the “what” (use of the term duct tape appeals to those who see themselves as the romantic David among Goliaths), but the “how” (his writing style is simple and to the point – appealing to small business owners who likely have a disdain for complicated consultant-speak). He appeals to those who have small brands and corresponding budgets.

Here at Percussion, I like the fact that I can make quick changes in direction based upon some good market information, vibes from partners and direct input from some clients. Developing partnerships takes months, not quarters. And our content editing workflow within our CMS is about as easy as it gets. The real issue is how often and to what extent I wander from our reason for being.