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With a few exceptions, enterprise web strategies are owned and executed by multiple operating units – lines of business, country marketing teams, product support teams, and IT departments, to name a few. The result is often a fractured user experience with inconsistent brand messaging, siloed content, and duplicative IT infrastructure and processes. While enterprises seem to unanimously recognize and reap value from their web platform and content investments, they have also suffered entropy within the system. Those who have invested in unifying (and simplifying) their web presence after they’ve let a thousand flowers bloom will testify that herding cats from corporate communications, channel marketing, sales, product teams, fulfillment, and geographies is at least half the battle.

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you’ve wished your business had the foresight ten years ago to organize operations and define processes with the now ubiquitous web platform in mind. Perhaps you’ve also observed the tectonics of the web begin to nudge, jolt, break apart, and now move about freely in the realm of mediated user experiences. One of the lubricants has been technologically simple techniques for delivering content anytime, anyplace – content syndication with RSS and other industry or specialized standards. Rare is an enterprise web site without an RSS feeds page. Uncommitted is a user who is not familiar with at least one content aggregator such as Yahoo!, NexTag, and Bloglines.

But there’s more to syndication than RSS subscriptions to editorial content. The traditional content syndication paradigm is now being applied to article marketing, product placement, and customer alerts – that is, syndication is a means to provide compelling but unintrusive anytime/anyplace communication with customers and partners throughout the lifecycle of the relationship. Focus on an enterprise syndication strategy today will keep your company afloat in the fluid world of digital experiences and information resources. It will also keep you out of the internal log jam where content publishers cross purposes and mix messages as they extend their content assets beyond the enterprise web site boundaries.

In this discussion, I will present an approach to develop an enterprise content syndication strategy, the corresponding roadmap to execute, and relevant case studies.

1. Primer on content syndication


• Business models: The content supply chain – creator, syndicator, aggregator, consumer
• End-users: Modes of consuming syndicated content
• Capabilities: Methods of syndicating content
• Key service providers today
2. Defining your enterprise content syndication strategy


• Understanding the current situation – Who is syndicating content in your company today? What methods and capabilities are employed?
• Coming together around a unified strategy – One size fits most, or a little something for everyone?
• The relationship to your media plan – Is syndicated content information or advertising?
• Defining your target content syndication network: A disciplined approach to managing your message reach
• Establishing processes and governance
• Measuring success
3. Case studies

Implementing a web content management system can be a long and painful process. By the time you send an RFP, review vendors, make a selection, refine requirements and specs, configure the tool, develop custom functionality and, well, everything else, you’re done. You’re really finished! When you hear “WCM” in the hallways you flinch. The last thing you want to do is “operate” the damn thing.

But who knows more about how the system works, where the ghosts are, who has the best grease to get the wheels turning? Face it; people will turn to you.

The last thing you want to do is just start operating. Unless you want to be the eternal go-to person for all things WCM you have to have a plan for day-to-day operations. Creating an operations plan can take weeks, maybe months of work but it will save you countless headaches (and not a few gray hairs.)

Your operations plan will boil down to three key components:

1. Services
2. Staffing
3. Setting Expectations

The services component is like it sounds: what value add will you provide to your WCM community (business and IT). That service set is birthed from clearly defining the processes around your web content management implementation. These processes will likely include the how you manage content (author, edit, review, approve, publish); how you maintain, modify and upgrade the WCM system; and processes around users, groups and security.
There may be other processes specific to your environment like translation or workflow to print.

Staffing is people. Who, besides you, will do what needs to be done? What business roles will they play? Who will these people report to? What skills do they have or need? How many are needed today and in the next 12-24 months?

Setting expectations is crucial to your success. Communication about your operations plan, at all its stages, will set the stage for how things will play out down the road. Buy in from all levels will work in your favor—from worker bees to executive management.

The way to establish your “cube cred” is to execute the operations plan. For example, when someone requests a new authoring template you fire off the processes to deliver that service:

• Request Intake/Triage Process
• Authoring Template Creation/Modification Process
• New Functionality Training Process
• Operational Reporting Process

It has be a simple formula to be successful. If your operations are bureaucratic, form laden and sluggish then WCM stinks, or at least it will acquire that odor in a short time.

Create enough process, provide enough service, staff enough people and provide enough reporting so that your operations are “enough” for your business. Most WCM users do not work where content is the core of the business. They’re bankers or lawyers or scholars or doctors or manufacturers. So, you’ll want lightweight, agile operations so the rest if the business doesn’t get distracted by the everyday operations of WCM.

Establishing a strong operations function for web content management makes the post-implementation job easier and quickly demonstrates the business value of this significant investment.

The value of content management systems for automatically repurposing content to multiple media has been discussed, debated and presented so many times in so many different vehicles that one assumes that there is nothing more to discuss—everyone is successfully doing it.  Not so! Repurposing content in intelligent ways for even one additional medium is not as straightforward as it seems. In some cases people still manually cutting and pasting content into their website pages.  This approach is clearly highly labor intensive and is very low tech but it provides control over the placement and editing process. The content fits the website design and navigation – although much of it may have been rewritten.

But most companies try to automate at least part of the process. Unfortunately, the results are not always optimal. Had they developed media specific metadata and, in many cases, media specifc content assets, they would have been more successful.  In this age of good full-text search and sophisticated web content management tools, the basics are often forgotten.  Tools are not solutions in themselves; they are only a part of a solution. 

In this workshop, we will examine the challenges for multi-purposing web content, ways that some content companies are addressing these issues and how industry metadata standards have evolved/are evolving to support their efforts. Then we will brainstorm about how new “web 2.0” technolgies and user-added metadata might play a role.

Is your company looking to undertake a major content migration project in order to implement a new content management solution and/or retire a legacy publishing tool? If so, you’re in luck – this session includes everything you need to know to make your project a success, from getting a handle on a possible “Wild West” content situation to stakeholder identification and management, migration strategy, success metrics, launch communications and more.

Site managers are often daunted by the prospect of migrating thousands of pages of content, possibly on different sites or platforms (and often not well organized), to a new content management solution. This is for good reason – a major migration project carries a high level of potential risk as well as reward. Careful planning, stakeholder management and organizational support are the keys to success for what can be a highly complex, time-consuming and expensive process.

This session covers the following aspects of legacy content migration projects:

Project planning

1. Stakeholder identification
2. Budget/time/resource definition
3. Technologies available
4. Roles and responsibilities

Content inventory

1. Volume
2. File types
3. Audience
4. Current location/structure
5. Quality/usefulness
6. Owner identification and skill level
7. Information architecture – future state
8. Content “buckets” based on user preferences
9. Card sorting
10. Surveys/usability studies
11. Navigation structure and terminology
12. Page structure
13. Content management system architecture

Migration strategy

1. Automated, manual or combination of both
2. Phases of migration
3. Microsite structures
4. File naming conventions
5. Future state content management

Workflows and access control

1. Content form and presentation templates
2. File storage requirements/restrictions
3. Process for user training, new site requests

Content standards

1. Appropriate use of templates, graphics
2. Web writing – voice and tone
3. Approval/oversight (publishing policy)

Governance

1. Home page management and maintenance
2. Publishing community management and oversight
3. Requests for new sites, templates
4. Budgeting, prioritization of projects
5. Strategy development and long-range planning

If you’re ready to learn everything you need to know to ensure a successful content migration project, this is the session for you!

Is your web site ready to jump the chasm from static content to dynamic delivery? Find out how to bridge the gap with insight from recent Aberdeen Group research detailing strategies and technologies that enable the delivery of dynamic online content. We will explore methods for delivering contextually relevant content to new and returning users as they navigate their way through your online environment. We will also look at examples of 1:1 personalization of online content. Participants will be encouraged to share their stories for delivering dynamic content and methods for improving content relevance through segmentation and unique profile building. 

Content is more than just words on a page, it is the heart of the online customer experience. Content spans both IT and marketing groups, yet content creation, delivery and control are business process functions that influence revenue and belong in the hands of the Marketing department. According to two-thirds of companies surveyed by Aberdeen Group, content is owned and managed by their marketing teams. With the online channel quickly becoming the epicenter of the marketing universe, the success or failure of many marketing campaigns depends on the delivery and messaging of online content. Further, 62% of companies are delivering content to specific market segments and seeking ways to improve their effectiveness and delivery efforts. Contextually relevant content delivered in a dynamic fashion is a key differentiator for many companies leading their peers in online marketing efforts.

According to recent Aberdeen research, 47% of companies surveyed currently deliver static web content that rarely changes. Nearly one-third (32%) of respondents make continuous updates to their web sites by posting fresh content in chronological order. This leaves a balance of only 20% of companies that are currently executing on a truly dynamic content delivery model. Yet, dynamic content delivery is a strategy for 74% of Best-in-Class companies – which begs the question – how will they execute?

This roundtable discussion will demonstrate methods of dynamic content delivery that help companies to attain Best-in-Class status. Attendees will be encouraged to share their techniques and learn from Aberdeen’s Fact-Based research and their peers on methods for executing on dynamic content delivery models.

Traditional advertising, marketing and public relations is becoming an idea that is rapidly changing and becoming a thing of the past. Many companies both large and small are looking for ways to transition their campaigns to enter the online world and the new media we call the Web. With technologies racing to be the next big thing, companies are having a difficult time keeping up with emerging technology being used in marketing, advertising and public relations. This is a specialized area that cannot be covered by your IT department or anyone else in your operation.

With this new media and the new areas of technology, professionals are emerging to take on this new form of online campaigns. These professionals are keeping the pulse of the emerging technologies and blending those with a company’s marketing message, their advertising campaign and their way of dealing with the public. 

When looking to their own group of employees, companies now notice that their current assets do not include a blogger, a podcaster or someone that understand social networks. The only person they seem to find is that intern that happens to have a MySpace page. This is hardly the professional you would give charge to your communication department or someone you would want to give responsibility to produce the voice and image of your company.

People that should pay attention to this area of emerging technology and the people to help manage it are HR professionals, C level employees and their direct reports, small businesses wanting to compete in the larger world and anyone that wants to garner an online presence and stay ahead of their competition. This would also include anyone that wants to be the new leader in the marketing department, the advertising agency or wants to provide their clients or company an edge in the new PR.