Contentions

Our Sample RFI for WCMS has been a ongoing success for Percussion. But as commentators note, CMS features are tricky to categorize and vendors are hard to differentiate in detail based on a spreadsheet style approach. In fact we warn in our Sample RFI itself:

"Rather than provide functional check boxes, we recommend a more open ended approach to questions so that you can get a better understanding of the depth, familiarity and polish (pre-packaging) that each vendor provides"

A recent review with a customer highlighted this challenge. The customer was moving from their phase one implementation to plans for phase two and they wanted a thorough review various initiatives. One of these was their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. Typically, say "SEO" to a WCMS vendor and you get back the following list:

• Friendly URLs and enabling users to edit the URLs generated by the sytem
• Metadata, enabling users to enter the "page title" or "html title"

We certainly oblige in these obvious areas, with some particularly nice management of URLs. (Some vendors are still pitching the totally useless very dated importance of auto-tagging for keywords that then end up in html "meta" tags in the page header. Sigh.)

Tellingly, this customer saw the standard points I had listed out and said; "Well, we're already doing the obvious stuff with URLs and page titles, anything else?"

My first thought, was, "wow, this is going to be a good call." They wanted to actually improve their SEO, not get a dump of "SEO features." Nice.

So what does matter for SEO (other than the obvious)? Simple: Inbound links and click-through rates on those links, particularly as it relates to the search terms in question. Simple to say, harder to actually do anything about. But it turns out, a WCMS& is not totally helpless in this regard either. For starters, the focus of the content on the page is huge. With good old "content reuse" (a feature only an information architect could love) CM users can crank out more and more focused pages because they spend less time repeating the various calls-to-action, link lists, and other easily reused page elements.

More recently, it turns out people link more often to pages that get blogged about, tweeted about, commented on, or generally have some conversational appeal (people link to what they care about, go figure). If the WCMS helps you link your content outward into that conversation, you'll generally see some up tick in inbound links too. So in the end, I spent some time showing them our latest 6.7 demo example of "tweeting from CM System" complete with BitLy URL aliasing - but now as an example of how to drive up inbound links.

So is it, "Twitter - Social Media feature" or "Twitter - critical part of SEO" strategy? Try fitting that in a spreadsheet.

Tony Byrne of CMS Watch had an interesting post today on the role of WCM and social media. He does a very good job detailing all the benefits and use cases for "publishing to social networks -- Twitter, Facebook, LikedIn, et. al. -- out of your CMS."  I assumed at first he was only covering these "publishing from the CMS" scenarios because the rest of the story was too big for a blog post.  But at the end, he seemed to suggest that publishing was the only thing a CMS does.  In his words:  "let's not confuse publishing with interacting. Your CMS won't help you participate in a LinkedIn discussion or retweet an interesting post."

To understand why a WCM system CAN help you interact, we need to make one critical observation.  While we live in a "conversation economy" the conversation is largely going on about content. All comments and ratings, and a huge percentage of blog posts and tweets are in reference to some "original" piece of content - an article, another blog post, a product description page, or some content someone posted somewhere.  For example, my own blog post here today is in response to a post of Tony's which was in turn a post about a vendor conversation he had, now captured in their report.  

The conversation food chain goes something like this:* 

• someone writes an article or uploads a video
• someone else blogs about the article
• still another blogs about that blog post
• someone else tweets about the "great" blog post that had covered the blogger who was blogging about the original article
• someone else mentions the tweet in their facebook status update
• sprinkle with comments, retweets, and more blog posts and facebook updates, all cross linked of course

Get the idea?  Content is how we tie conversation to the real world, to products, services, to causes we support or experiences we had and want to share.  That's where a content management system comes in.  A CMS -- or at least a WCM -- is about getting value from content however we can.  When we focus on "publishing" as the main way to get value from content, its just that old "one way communication" mind set creeping back in.  

When evaluating a WCM, customers need to go beyond the old one-way use cases where content flows from knowledge worker to web site. Today, WCM users need to add these responsive use cases where the task and time is not driven by the business but by these external conversations:

• Relevance - Does the WCM help me find content in the system that might be relevant to a conversation?
• Agility - Does the WCM allow me to make changes to placement, features, and even generate new content fast enough to actually respond to the conversation?  
• Process - Does the WCM presume discrete update cycles with extensive governance and versioning, or does it also allow a free form "post it and update it" mode of constant change that reacts to the more fluid feedback cycles of a conversation?

And, most importantly:

• Use and Reuse - does the WCM allow me to not only capture and reuse external and social content, but also mix it in equally with our own, whether embedding it or linking it?  

This is not merely some set of content ingestion features either.  Too many systems segregate the "social content" into some special silo or sub site, even though we know that community content is far more effective and more sought after by consumers than corporate content.  This is about the WCM helping you to transform your own Web presence into the same mashup of content and conversation as the sites and personal pages of those we seek to reach or influence. Using WCM in this manner is about reversing the flow of content, directing it from outside to in and back again.  That impacts the whole system; processes, actions required, updating cycles, even formats used, and yes, publishing. 

In other words, this is the content version of "crossing the streams" -- it sounds dangerous and breaks a lot of the rules we're used to living by, but it's essential for success.  

*P.S. those of us who get paid to generate content often perform this entire cycle ourselves: we write an article, then blog about our article, then tweet about our blog post!