Tom Wentworth's Blog

Tom Wentworth, Evangelist, brings his experience and passion for content management to his blog focused on trends and best practices in web content management and social media. As an Evangelist for Interwoven, Tom spends his time spreading Autonomy Interwoven's philosophy of using content to maximize online business performance. Born on a leap-year, Tom is a University of Illinois Fighting Illini graduate with a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science. In addition to his passion for content management, Tom is a diehard Boston sports fan and occasional karaoke singer. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn, Twitter, or FriendFeed

The CMS vendor meme

March 22, 2009 @ 6:04 am by Tom Wentworth

Here’s the Autonomy Interwoven response to the CMS vendor meme.  I hope you forgive me for being a little late to the game- it’s been a busy week.

Here are the rules:

• A CMS vendor is challenged to honestly answer all items on the “Reality checklist for vendors” suggested by CMS Watch’s Kas Thomas (aka the “we-get-it checklist for vendors”).
• If possible the vendor has to supply screenshots, links or other means to make it easy to verify the answers.
• The answers also need to be supplied in a short form of one to three stars (denoting “no”, “sort-of”, “yes”).
• Answering all questions on his blog allows the vendor tag some other WCMS vendors.
• A tagged vendor should provide a link back to the blog that tagged him.

Before answering the questions, I wanted to gain some additional perspective on the relevance of these items to our customers.  I researched each item by:

• Looking in our feature request database.
• Speaking with our Product Marketing, Product Management, and Sales teams to see if they had any specific customer insights.
• Asking customers directly.  I was on the road meeting customers earlier in the week and I ran some of these items by the customer.

Now, on to the meme.

1. Our software comes with an installer program.

Yes, and we’ve made major improvements to the installation experience over the last few releases.  For example, the TeamSite 6.7.2 installer now installs our SitePublisher authoring interface, which used to require a separate installation in prior versions.

2. Installing or uninstalling our software does not require a reboot of your machine.

A reboot is required on installation and un-installation.  We install an operating system driver that provides a filesystem view into our content repository.

There is a feature request for this item and I’d characterize the interest level as low to moderate.

3. You can choose your locale and language at install time, and never have to see English again after that.

Yes.  We use the current client browser locale to determine the language.  You can easily switch between locales without having to configure anything on the server.

4. Eval versions of the latest edition(s) of our software are always available for download from the company website.

Not at this time.

5. Our WCM software comes with a fully templated “sample web site” and sample workflows, which work out-of-the-box.

We provide a sample site called the “Component Guide” which is a reference example of the 90+ components we deliver out of the box.

We ship with a handful of sample workflows based on the most common publishing scenarios.  These workflows can be (and often are) deployed “as-is” or further customized with our visual workflow modeler tool.

6. We ship a tutorial.

Absolutely, see above.

7. You can raise a support issue via a button, link, or menu command in our administrative interface.

No.  This sounded like a good idea to me but I wasn’t able to identify any customer demand for it.  I floated the idea by a few customers I met with last week and they didn’t deem it very important.

I did add it to our feature request system so we can continue to monitor customer interest.

8. All help files and documentation for the product are laid down as part of the install.

Help files, yes.  Documentation, no.  The documentation is available for download from our customer support portal.

I wasn’t able to identify any customer requests for us to install documentation at install time.

9. We run our entire company website using the latest version of our own WCM products.

Yes.  We use our WCM platform on http://interwoven.com and multiple internal intranet sites.  Of course we’ll be looking at http://autonomy.com - stay tuned.

10. Our salespeople understand how our products work.

Yes.  We have the most knowledgeable salespeople in the industry- bar none.  I’ve spent 7 of my 9 years at Autonomy Interwoven in technical sales so I have a bit of experience on this topic!

I think some of vendors in the meme need to re-evaluate their position on this item.  Some CMS vendors have seen massive turnover in their sales organization over the last few years, both in Account Executives and Sales Engineers.  Most of the sales teams at Autonomy Interwoven have over 5 years of experience and a few have over 10 years.

That experience buys you more than just being able to click through a demo or deliver a PowerPoint.  What separates our sales teams from the pack is their ability to relate our solutions and value to the unique business pain we uncover at each customer.  That may seem easy, but for those on the customer side you know the difference between a salesperson that understands your business vs. a salesperson that wants you to understand theirs.

11. Our software does what we say it does.

Yes.  I think the best testament to this is our amazing customer list.

12. We don’t charge extra for our SDK.

Nope.

13. Our licensing model is simple enough for a 5-year-old to understand.

Since when do 5 year olds buy enterprise software?  My 5 year old niece is too busy watching Little Einsteins!

Our licensing model is obviously going to be more complex than some of the point WCM vendors given the wide variety of solutions we offer.  That being said, we have a good understanding of the typical configurations we see and for those configurations, the licensing is very straightforward.

I asked a few customers about our licensing and they didn’t seem to think our model was particularly complex.

14. We have one price sheet for all customers.

Yes.

15. Our top executives are on Skype, Twitter, or some similar channel, and: Feel free to contact them directly at any time.

Feel free to contact me at any time.  You’ll find me very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.  If I can’t help you directly, I can make a phone call to someone that can.  I’m also very active on FriendFeed where I share lots of interesting content I find related to the CMS space.

You can also find our VP of Product Marketing Seth Rosenblatt on Twitter.  Stay tuned for more names- I’ll add them to the list as I convert them!

I’ll skip the tagging step since everyone I want to hear from has already been tagged.  You know who you are!

8 comments | Category: Web Content Management

Are you archiving your websites and web applications?

February 11, 2009 @ 9:09 am by Tom Wentworth

Have you ever been asked to show what your website looked like at a specific moment in the past?

A new report from from Forrester cautions that “Web site archiving may not seem pressing, but lurks ominously”.  In the report, Forrester asks:

“How long will it be before a judge orders a company to reproduce what a certain user saw on a Web site at a certain time?”

It’s already happening. A few years ago, I received a call from one of our financial services customers telling me a story of how they were asked to recreate their website experience for a specific time-period in order to meet internal audit and legal requirements. The customer thanked me because it turned out recreating the entire site experience took only a few minutes.

How?  The customer was using a TeamSite feature called “Editions”. Editions are a read-only archive of an entire site at a specific moment in time. Before publishing any changes to the website, an Edition is automatically created, providing a complete view of the site. Need to see what your site looked like on March 6th, 2008? Just browse to the appropriate Edition and you have it instantly.

Most CMS systems only version at the file level, meaning they only allow you to see versions of an individual file. File level versioning is important, but it doesn’t provide a complete view of the website at any specific moment in time- all the images, copy, navigation, layout, formatting, etc. that make up the holistic web experience.

The problem becomes even more difficult to solve when you consider the demands of modern websites.  Modern websites are often complex web applications- consisting of code, content, and configuration. Code generally lives in a source code management system, content in a CMS, and configuration all over the place. Trying to recreate a website experience for a composite application is nearly impossible. We’ve addressed this challenge in our Composite Application Provisioning (CAP) solution. The CAP solution creates the composite application by pulling from all of the appropriate sources- source code management, CMS, application server configs, etc. and it will deploy the application out to your production webservers, application servers, and databases. And before it does that, it creates an Edition- providing a complete view of the state of the composite application at that particular moment in time.

So whether you’re dealing with a simple content-centric site or a complex composite web application, you need to start thinking about how you would recreate the site experience at a specific moment in time, if you were asked.

As always, would love to get your thoughts and feedback in the comments.

No Comments | Category: Composite Application Provisioning | Web Content Management

Four things Enterprise CMS vendors can learn from WordPress

December 30, 2008 @ 10:01 am by Tom Wentworth

2 comments | Category: Marketing Leadership | Web Content Management

Three web content problems faced by marketers

November 17, 2008 @ 4:52 pm by Tom Wentworth

I spend most of my time talking with existing and prospective Interwoven customers about their web marketing strategy. Here are three of the more common content challenges I’ve heard when talking with web marketers:

1) Content drives business- but it’s still difficult to manage.

Most companies recognize the value of content but yet they still don’t manage it well.  Time after time I hear the same stories from the web marketing teams I meet with…

“My interactive agency charges us tens of thousands of dollars to build a single landing page”
“I pay someone $500 every time I find a spelling error on my site”
“Changing the page layout on my site requires a developer but they are too busy to help”
“We can’t find our product images so we have to go out and do another photo-shoot”
“We can’t manage our own content well, now we’re being asked to manage user generated content”
“Managing our English site is challenging enough but we’ve been asked to globalize”

Managing content used to be easy when the role of content was primarily informational.  The ubiquitous ”brochureware” website of the early part of the decade didn’t require much more than publishing a few press releases and minor content updates every month.  As the role of the website has evolved from being informational to being persuasive, web marketers are taking more direct responsibility-including publishing landing pages and microsites, using rich media, and launching customer communities based on user generated content.

The solution to managing content is of course a content management system.  A modern content management system should allow web marketers to manage the entire web experience- content, landing pages, microsites, rich media, and user generated content.

2) Customers expect a personalized experience- but most websites are “one sized fits all”.

Customers expect the sites they visit to provide a meaningful, relevant experience.  You can’t just throw up a home page that lists all of your products and services and expect your customer to sift through the noise.  Instead, you need to understand your site visitors and target something personally meaningful to them.  There are lots of ways to try and understand the site visitor intent.  Here are some of the common content targeting techniques I’ve seen:

- Search Keyword targeting.  Targeting content by search keyword is an easy but unfortunately underutilized technique for delivering a relevant site experience.  Use the search keywords to determine the appropriate content to deliver.  Echo
- Geo IP targeting.  Target different content to people based on their location.  I live in New England where sadly we’re starting to see freezing temperatures every night.  A clothing retailer would be wise to show me a promotion for a winter coat while my co-workers in sunny San Jose, CA might be more interested in a promotion for warmer clothing.
-Clickstream targeting.  Looking at where the site visitor goes on your site can tell you a lot about their interest.  A site visitor that immediately navigates from the home page to a particular product or product category should probably see a relevant promotion for that product/category next time they visit the site.
- Daypart targeting.  You can infer a lot about site visitor behavior based on the time of day/time of year.  For example, a site visitor looking for an airline ticket before 6pm is likely a business traveler where schedule, not price, is the most important factor.

When all else fails, ask to visitor to self segment.  Let them tell you exactly why they are on the site and then delivery a meaningful site experience accordingly- if they are there to research, show them targeting content; if they are there to comparison shop, show them feature/function bullets; if they are there to buy, take them through a well designed buy flow.

Regardless of how you target, you can’t expect your customers to seek out and find the right content- you’ve got to deliver it to them.  Sites like amazon.com have changed the game.

3) Conversion rates hover around 2% and customer acquisition costs are rising- but companies continue to speculate on how to design a site to maximize conversion.

This is my personal pet peeve.  Every time I speak with web marketers they complain about increased customer acquisition costs and declining conversion rates.  Most web marketers focus on the acquisition side… “We’ll just hire more SEO consultants” or “We’ll just buy more keywords”.  Frankly, I think web marketers should focus on the conversion side as it’s much easier to control.  SEO is a moving target and paid search costs aren’t going down. Why not focus on something you can’t directly influence?  The key to conversion is shifting the marketing culture from a culture of speculation to a culture of testing.  Conversion rates are poor because web marketers speculate on how to best design a conversion experience.  I’ve sat in many a design committee meeting where major design decisions are made by the HiPPO.  What’s a HiPPO you ask?  It’s the HIghest Paid Persons Opinion (HiPPO)- a term I believe was originally coined in this context by Avinash Kaushik.  Instead of guessing why not just test?  Testing lets you define experiments to uncover the best combination of copy, images, page layout, call-to-action, etc. to drive conversion. Most companies see amazing increases in conversion rates through testing.

Implementing a multivariable testing program and eliminating speculation (and the HiPPO) is the best way to make sure you’re achieving the highest possible conversion rates on your site.

 

No Comments | Category: Multivariable Optimization | Targeting & Engagement | Web Content Management

Redefining the “M” in CMS and WCM

November 7, 2008 @ 11:03 am by Tom Wentworth

Everyone (I hope!) knows that CMS and WCM stand for “content management system” and “web content management” respectively.  The CMS and WCM acronyms have been used for many years to describe the content management market, management being the key word.  When companies think about CMS and WCM they are thinking about how to manage content for a website- WWW, intranets, extranets, etc.  Management most often implies how companies create, version, secure, and publish content. I think management is too limiting given the role content plays in driving measurable business results.  So, management doesn’t work so what should replace it?

I think the new “M” in CMS & WCM should be Monetization.

Historically companies have always emphasized the management of content.  Managing content is important- it helps companies increase productivity and meet content compliance and governance policies but I believe that content plays a much larger role in how companies generate top line revenue via the web.  It’s not just how you manage content, it’s how the content helps companies drive measurable business results- revenue, branding, customer satisfaction, call center, etc.  For example, Interwoven Web Content Monetization solutions (get used to it!) helped Loma Linda University Medical Center with some of their key KPIs including site traffic (1400% increase), SEO (attained #1 keyword ranking in Google for key terms), and new patient referrals (470% increase).

It’s all about unlocking the value of content.  Managing content is important but if the content is not helping drive business results, then why manage it in the first place?

Don’t just manage content- monetize it!

No Comments | Category: Web Content Management

Q: What do iTunes and LiveSite have in common?

September 29, 2008 @ 9:59 am by Tom Wentworth

The Answer:  Playlists

Let’s start with iTunes.  Over the years you’ve probably built up a huge library full of thousands (or for some people tens of thousands) of songs.   You probably have a wide variety of songs- some Rock, Rap, and maybe a few of those embarrassing Pop songs you won’t admit having to your friends (my embarrassing song is “Careless Whisper”).  Back to my point- Read more

No Comments | Category: Targeting & Engagement | Web Content Management

Using Expiration Dates in TeamSite

September 3, 2008 @ 6:41 am by Tom Wentworth

I came across an interesting blog post How Alive is Your Website? from DigiKnow. The post talks about suggestions for keeping your website current.  One recommendation for keeping your website alive is to “Keep your content fresh and accurate” Read more

No Comments | Category: Web Content Management

My favorite TeamSite feature: VisualAnnotate

August 26, 2008 @ 5:00 am by Tom Wentworth

As part of my job, I do lots of customer demos.  In my 7+ years at Interwoven, I’ve done well over 500 demos of TeamSite and other Interwoven products.  After all these years I still love seeing the reaction I get when I show customers what they can do with TeamSite.   I always get the biggest reaction when I show VisualAnnotate- a tool for adding annotations to content as it goes through an approval process. VisualAnnotate lets customers accelerate the time it takes to publish content by streamlining the content approval process. Read more

No Comments | Category: Web Content Management

Is the Corporate Website Irrelevant?

July 29, 2008 @ 3:58 am by Tom Wentworth

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about a blog post last year from Jeremiah Owyang.  Jeremiah runs a popular Web Strategy blog and has some great thoughts on social computing and other web strategy topics.

In his blog post “How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website” Jeremiah observes that:

[The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content. As a result, trusted decisions are being made on other locations on the internet] Read more

No Comments | Category: Multivariable Optimization | Online Marketing | Targeting & Engagement | Web Content Management