The CMS Myth

The Three P’s Changing the Face of Online Content

David Aponovich — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:29:47 +0000

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with fresh survey data on how Americans consume their news.

The findings have big implications for any organization for which content management and content strategy play a role in supporting, interacting with and delivering information to customers. Read: this has tentacles that reach far beyond news organizations and news consumers, deep into the evolving behaviors of all consumers in the age of iPhone and Twitter.

First, the key findings: the Internet, according to Pew’s research, is now the third most popular news platform, behind only local and national TV news. It’s ahead of newspapers and radio – no surprise there.

But the more compelling info relates to the Three P’s of the research study’s findings. According to Pew:

‘The internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:

• Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.’

For news and non-news organizations, the Three P’s pose many questions around content (and content management) that beg answers and point to opportunities:

• Do you have an effective strategy for delivering mobile content to your diverse audiences? With the rise of the iPhone, iPad and other phone and reader devices, what is your plan, and will you get left behind as your readers/customers move their experience to these platforms? Content management platforms are part of the solution here, but require extensive planning and prioritization to prepare to roll out effective content experiences tailored to these platforms.

• Do you have an effective strategy for personalizing the online content experience? This question also goes far beyond the personalized news feeds or news content tailored to your preferences – if you’re a corporation, or a brand, or a college, or a non-profit: are you prepared for this inexorable shift to more personalized content experiences? The good news is CMS platforms are working overtime to deliver on the promise of if not personalized then (at least) lightly customized content experiences.

• Do you have an effective strategy for utilizing social networks for connecting your information to readers/customers? Implicit in Pew’s research is that social networks have fast become not just platforms for dissemination of information, but also effective filters on the river of news and information that flows toward us all. Your trusted friends (even the 1,000 people you follow on Twitter) serve as unofficial editors delivering their ‘best of’ links and news and content they think you should know about. It’s a stark wake up call to traditional publishers and communicators whose branded influence (hello, networks and newspapers) are waning perhaps even faster than they think. The opportunity if you’re a corporation or brand is to determine how best to harness social networks and turn these trusted sources of information into active distribution channels for your content.

Is WordPress a CMS?

Jeff Cram — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 05:39:06 +0000

So, here’s a question…is WordPress a CMS?

And be careful how you respond.

The debate hit Twitter tonight triggered by a relatively harmless Tweet from Dirk Shaw:

I’ve been a part of similar discussions on how WordPress can or can’t scale to support larger sites. It wasn’t until another vendor and a CMS evangelist piled on in unanimous agreement that I felt the need to offer a brief reply in disagreement:

I’m not one to defend any one vendor, but it’s a silly argument.

Of course WordPress is a content management system. It’s technology that manages website content. And it manages quite a few websites I may add. I know plenty of fairly robust sites that get along just fine with WordPress. There’s of course a legitimate debate on what types of sites are best suited for WordPress.

But apparently I hit a third rail in the CMS world, because the comments kept flowing.

A number of other folks weighed in, including several that agreed that WordPress should be considered a CMS.

In the grand scheme, this is a relatively trivial debate. Even the folks siding against WordPress as a CMS were for the most part arguing for a different label or pointing out that it wasn’t “enterprise” enough to be considered a true CMS. Toss in a few open source fans and the debate can get religious in a hurry.

This is where the CMS world goes sideways. It’s insider baseball at the expense of the end user trying to make heads and tails of their web publishing strategy.

It still remains a vendor and consultant dominated landscape of folks trying to frame the space based on the tools and put up artificial walls based on product price points or analyst quadrants/waves. And yes, I lump myself into that bucket, although I try my hardest to stay on the outside.

Don’t even get us started on what to call our space (ECM, WCM, CMS, CM).

So, should WordPress be called a content management system? Absolutely.

Does it matter? Not really.

Stop letting people use your CMS

Jeff Cram — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 05:15:19 +0000

Seth Gottlieb at Content Here is on a roll lately with some great thinking.

His post on The Myth of the Occasional CMS User was timely based on some conversations we’ve been having around the office. There is a lot to unpack in it, and of course anything with Myth in the title catches our attention.

Seth summarizes a frequent pain point with CMS rollouts:

“Often, one of the big justifications for a CMS is removing the webmaster bottleneck and delegating content entry to the people who have the information. The implicit assumption is that everyone wants to directly maintain their portion of the website but technology is standing in the way”

He goes onto explain all the reasons why this can wreak havoc and have people assigning blame to the wrong areas. He correctly points out that CMS failure often comes down to expectation setting, a topic we’ve covered here on the Myth as well.

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen organizations buy a CMS, take their same content structure, and simply distribute authoring ownership to every far flung corner of the organization. And let’s not entirely blame the organizations. It’s how CMS is sold. And it’s a myth, straight up.

Here’s a familiar scene.

You have dozens of users in CMS tool 101 training sessions with no idea why they are there, no familiarity with the publishing model and no incentive to learn how to keep their piece of content up to date which rarely needs to be updated anyway. This never ends well.

And the CMS technology itself only magnifies this problem. Content management systems do a lot of things well, but they are not built for the occasional user. Far from it.

They typically expose all the functionality you need to build pages and sites, but they are not organized around supporting task-based content entry. And occasional users have very specific tasks.

I know vendors will disagree, highlighting things like inline editing, roles based security and workflow. But in almost all cases, it still doesn’t work for the occasional user. The pain far outweighs the gain.

So, I’ll take it one step further than Seth. Stop letting people use your CMS unless they are an integrated part of your web and editorial team and need to be in it on a regular basis. Even then, they may not need to be in the tool.

Seriously, don’t let them in. Even if they beg.

Build other processes for allowing them to request updates and get content into the system. Lie if you have to (sorry, all out of seats!).

Your content publishing process should be oriented to serving your site visitors (content consumers) not the internal structure of your company.

Build an editorial process and team that supports getting this content published in the most effective way possible and stop forcing administrative assistants to sit through tools training.

Everyone will be better off.

Ready to find a new web CMS?

David Aponovich — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:59:25 +0000

The CMS-focused website Fierce Content Management asked me this month to write up my 2010 advice for finding a web content management system. (Hat-tip to FierceCM editor Ron Miller for inviting me to contribute; his site and newsletter are must-reads for anyone tuned into content management.)

My advice rolled up several of the key ideas we espouse here at the CMS Myth, including our central belief that you shouldn’t just throw software at your website. As we tell people every day, CMS isn’t a silver bullet.

The article (“Finding the right web CMS in 2010”) was a quick hitter, packing a lot of ideas into a short column. But the CliffsNotes version of our 2010 CMS buyers’ tips goes like this:

• Think about strategy first, technology second
• Bury the CMS feature matrix
• Don’t expect to find “the best” CMS
• Measure CMS against your key fit factors
• Tap the community for validation
• When in doubt, ask the experts

Anyone who’s needed to identify a web CMS solution knows it can be daunting work. If you’re in the CMS buying market in 2010, things aren’t getting much easier. You’re sitting at the nexus of hundreds (thousands?) of potential solutions. Marketing thinks it wants this set of features, IT needs that. Execs just want a new site running with CMS. You’re managing a budget and a timetable. Vendors sound more and more alike the more you read about their products and see their demos.

Stay tuned to The CMS Myth. Over the next few weeks we’ll dive more deeply into some of the advice in the Fierce Content Management article.

And, offer your feedback and ideas in the comments section. If something’s worked for you, let others hear about it. If you’re stuck, we’ll do what we can to offer our ideas.

Our Department is Different!

Jeff Cram — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:02:26 +0000

If you’ve been through an enterprise CMS rollout, you’re probably familiar with these four simple words.

“Our department is different!”

This is a common and legitimate response from groups used to managing their own websites. They argue that their needs are so specific there is little chance a common template can work.

After all, while the CMS adds new capabilities for many groups, it ultimately takes away control. This can cause, shall we say, tension (to put it nicely). Yes, we’ve seen tears shed, fists pounded and even jobs lost in these situations.

It’s understandable, really. Because it’s about much more than adopting new technology.

It’s about ushering in a new publishing model and realigning your website’s user experience to external stakeholder goals. It’s about investing in a common platform and standardizing experiences across disparate sections of your site.

This is especially relevant in higher education, government and healthcare where the internal structure of the organization doesn’t map to the website visitor’s goals.

So, are all departments different? Of course. And how you handle those differences can make or break the success of your CMS rollout and end user adoption.

Here are some lessons learned from working with a variety of large decentralized organizations.

Listen first. Hold kick-off meetings with every individual group to talk about the process and better understand their current publishing model.
Make the right promises up front. Address changes to the editorial process and web governance head on.
Don’t over promise on technology. Inevitably people will find a reason to hate a CMS and the more the technology is hyped as the silver bullet the harder the fall.
Don’t sugarcoat it. If your web strategy diminishes the role of a department, be up front in explaining why and tie it to the larger goals of the organization.
Take a holistic look at the user experience. Tie the role of each department to your user personas and don’t lose sight of that perspective. Understand that some departments won’t align to primary personas and dig deeper to understand their audience goals and secondary personas.
Remain open minded. A one size fits all approach will not likely work. Determine which groups and systems need to remain stand alone and allow for customizations.
Go easy on the workflow. Resist the temptation to enforce a standard workflow across departments. If the editorial process didn’t exist before the CMS, the new workflow will be an epic fail.
Let them make some choices. Provide a tool kit of options they can customize rather than a final template. Focus on best practices, standards and guidelines.

And if all that fails, you may want to run for the hills! Battling internal politics is not for weak or timid.

2010 web strategy survey

Jeff Cram — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:49:07 +0000

As you wrangle those 2010 budgets and plot CMS world domination, it’s a good time to reevaluate your overall web strategy. How are you prioritizing initiatives? Are budgets increasing? How effective were your 2009 efforts? What are new areas of investment?

We’re putting together our second annual Web Strategy Report in partnership with ISITE Design.

Take part in the survey and we’ll send you a copy of the final report to help you with your own strategic planning. It’s only 10 questions and one lucky respondent will win an Amazon Kindle.

Take the 2010 Web Strategy Survey

Q&A: An interview with Susan Parker from Mass.gov

Jeff Cram — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:41:17 +0000

We were fortunate to catch up with Susan Parker at Gilbane’s 2009 Content Management conference in Boston this week.

Susan is the Director of Mass.gov and is responsible for managing the State of Massachusetts’ online strategy in connecting more than 150 different state agencies, departments and services into a unified online experience. In short, both a daunting and exciting challenge.

In addition to being a keynote panelist at Gilbane, Susan was gracious enough to sit down with the CMS Myth for a discussion on how she approaches the web strategy, governance and technology behind such a massive and decentralized organization.

Hi Susan, it’s great to talk with you. So tell us a little bit about what it’s like to run a website for an entire state?

I’m glad that your perception is that Mass.Gov is “a” website – that is as it should be.

Technically though, behind the scenes, it’s dozens of websites that we’re working to simplify and consolidate into a handful of consistent sites. There are also a lot of transactional web applications with Mass.Gov branding.

My organization maintains the top level Mass.Gov website, that aggregates links to all other state sites; we also provide a centralized web hosting and publishing platform that most of state government uses. We are part of the Executive Branch so legally anyway, we can’t “run” the entire state’s web presence, though the other independent offices and branches can (and do, to varying degrees), “opt in” to using Mass.Gov’s platform and brand.

Does Governor Patrick ever mix it up in the CMS, or does he have people for that?

I don’t think Governor Patrick has ever mixed it up directly with our CMS, but I know that he has tweeted and blogged. He really is a proponent of using the web to promote civic engagement. He has a Director of New Media & Online Strategy, Brad Blake, who is responsible for his website, mass.gov/governor, and its many innovative uses of social media to stay connected.

For example, if the Governor tweets about signing a bill, his communications team can use the CMS to quickly post the text of the bill, embed video of his remarks at the signing, and link off to photos, press releases and other pertinent information

What has been your experience implementing and managing a web content management system for such a large and decentralized organization?

Challenging to say the least. It’s really more than a web content management system. We’re also providing comprehensive information architecture services, web best practices and web publishing templates. This all helps provide a single face of government online.

Traditionally, staffing for websites was all over the map; there were “haves” (agencies with relatively large, highly skilled teams and slick websites), and “have nots” (agencies without a web presence at all, or very dated websites).

In trying to level the playing field, it’s really tough to satisfy both camps. For some our CMS is still too hard to master. For others who were used to “hand coding” their sites, it’s perceived to be too restrictive. While we’re constantly battling “We’re different, we’re special, so the rules of consistency don’t apply to us,” there are some times when one size really doesn’t fit all. Our current CMS doesn’t accommodate such needs very well.

Government sites often represent the internal structure of the organization, but it looks like Mass.gov is organized around key stakeholder needs (residents, business, visitors). How do you approach planning the information architecture of the site?

We view it as a work in progress, but I am so glad you noticed!

The high level breakdown used on the top level site was the result of some analysis done in the early days of Mass.Gov (2000-2001). It’s pretty similar to the constituencies and task-oriented sub-groupings used on other state portals, but we need to continuously subject it to usability testing and fine tuning. We also recognize that many customers navigate and find content in other ways –by specific agency, by granular topic (either via search or an A-Z subject list) and via external search.

Is there a centralized team that supports the website? How are you staffed and what do you see as the key roles necessary for success?

We have a very small team of 13.5, about half technical and the other half focused on business, project management and information architecture activities. The latter team is responsible for maintaining the top level site and migrating agencies to consolidated sites using the Mass.Gov templates.

I think it’s crucial for any organization that maintains web content to have a lead information architect. Some other roles include an HTML web standards specialist and a social media coordinator. Again though, behind the scenes there are many other websites; the agencies are responsible for the content on those sites and staffing models vary. Some have strong, centralized teams, while others don’t.

We deal with a lot of CMS myths here on the blog. What’s the biggest misconception about CMS internally that you’ve had to overcome?

I remember in the early days of Mass.Gov, before I was in my present position, that there were visions of highly decentralized publishing.

Folks thought that with a very sophisticated CMS, automated workflows, and some templates, we’d see agency heads, press secretaries and lawyers publishing their own content directly to the web. (Well, maybe I exaggerate a little…).

Aside from being an unrealistic vision of what attorneys and press secretaries are willing and able to do, it neglected to account for a strong centralized information architecture to ensure the content fits together in a coherent, user-focused way.

In fact, that whole concept of “information architecture” was new to us. I don’t think any of us really understood we were “doing “information architecture until around 2003. Before we bought our current CMS, there were visions of highly structured data being compartmentalized into XML and being reused on across many sites and devices. Well, everything’s in XML now, but it’s not compartmentalized in a way that lends itself to such reuse. It’s still a worthwhile goal, but is going to require much more work and analysis to realize that vision.

What advice would you give someone just starting a large content management-driven project?

Clearly document your high level needs and challenges and get stakeholder agreement on them.
Governance is very important. Changing out a tool is a perfect opportunity to revisit your processes for managing content.
Get good information. Spend money on vendor neutral reports. You need to go beyond the big generalist consultancies to get the details.
If you are buying a product, you need to be ready to compromise. This is not custom development. In a proof of concept, consider adjusting your business processes to fit the product rather than the other way around.
Figure out how you want to support a new system going forward. If you don’t want to have to rely on consultants in the future, be sure you factor that into your decisions up front.
Analyze total cost of ownership up front, not just purchase and initial implementation. Big ticket items to include are staffing and infrastructure.
Don’t buy more than you need. Keep it simple but scalable. Focus on your core business needs.

How is the site evolving to meet the needs of its residents? Any big changes planned for 2010?

We are in the midst of a major retooling and redesign project. We are seeking to replace our current content management and delivery system, which will hopefully make web publishing a lot simpler and more feature rich. This in turn will hopefully lead to an improved end user experience.

We’re also going to be doing a redesign of our layout and navigation based on a usability analysis. In addition to our governor, state agencies have been making good use of social media. Our Department of Public Health has been using its blog to get the word out about H1N1. You can expect to see increasing use of social media like blogs, Twitter, video and more, in addition to opening up data for use by the developers, researchers and the general public.

Thanks for your time Susan!

Be thankful for your CMS

Jeff Cram — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:47:52 +0000

Ok, there are certainly more important things to be thankful for than a piece of technology.

But in the spirit of the holiday it’s nice to recognize all the good things web content management does for you.

Sure, CMS implementations are hard. Documentation may be less than stellar and those pesky WYSIWYG editors can give you anything but ‘what you see.’

But this isn’t 1997 anymore. We’re now managing publishing platforms with a gaggle of sites, localized content and complex marketing demands. Web two dot whatever means everything is social and your content is getting distributed to far flung parts of the Interweb.

Dreamweaver or (gasp!) FrontPage won’t exactly cut it anymore. And I don’t care if you hand code your HTML. We need CMS.

So, let’s be thankful we have a bounty of options when it comes to smart CMS technology. Let’s also be grateful that vendors are still innovating and technology is getting better for the marketers who now run the websites.

Most importantly, let’s all kick back and have a relaxing CMS-free Thanksgiving break (For our US and Canada readers at least).

I mean it. Stay out of those systems! That’s what the ‘scheduled content’ feature is for.

The sweet spot for WCM services

Jeff Cram — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:50:15 +0000

Web content management implementations require a careful blend of skills to succeed. But what should you look for in an external WCM services provider? We see three core disciplines necessary for success — User experience strategy, marketing enablement and enterprise IT.

What’s more, the sweet spot for a good partner lies in the intersection of these three areas.

We’re seeing it increasingly difficult to bring together multiple vendors or rely on a software vendor’s professional services group. Even if you have in-house capabilities, a partner well versed in all three areas can make or break success.

So what are the core disciplines?

User experience strategy
Your WCM services partner needs some serious UX chops that go far beyond visual design. Information architecture, content strategy, user research and social business design all drive web content management success. Taxonomy and meta data are business-critical planning processes, not just WCM product features. And don’t forget the ability to apply that same user-centered rigor to your internal stakeholders in designing workflow and editorial processes. This means a dedicated UX practice, not a creative that happens to do information architecture.

Marketing enablement
Organizations need a marketing-smart WCM services provider. Period. Focus on enabling marketing by looking for partners with a deep understanding of how the WCM supports the entire marketing ecosystem. SEO, e-mail, analytics, PPC, campaign management, lead generation, personalization and social networks all factor in here. And don’t think all marketing-savvy partners get it. These skills are often so siloed they end up at an arm’s length from the core implementation.

Enterprise IT
Even mid-market WCM solutions have significant technical complexity with many internal and external integration points. A good services partner needs to go beyond having core competency in the WCM software and fit the implementation into a larger IT ecosystem. As WCM becomes the hub for your overall web infrastructure, it becomes about much more than putting a few good developers on a project. Think platform, not product. UX focused partners can have a hard time in this area.

Who will provide your business social apps?

David Aponovich — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:41:00 +0000

The emergence of social media apps for business, a.k.a. Social Business Software (collaborate, chat, follow, feeds) is turning into an exercise in convergence, as in: where will your social media apps converge with your other content-centric apps?

The larger question is quickly becoming: who will (or should) eventually provide your social media tools and applications? Your existing or new web CMS vendor? ECM software vendor? CRM vendor? An upstart social media company? What about Microsoft SharePoint?

Traditional web CMS vendors are racing at breakneck speed to expand their platforms to offer intranet-focused social media apps in conjunction with traditional content management. Yet look at the upcoming Gilbane Content Management conference in Boston and you’ll see a high-tier sponsor is Jive, a solid leader in the emerging class of Social Business Software providers speedily making inroads into enterprises and department-level deployments.

And now here comes Salesforce.com with the pending 2010 launch of its Chatter social platform, which promises to meld collaboration, profiles, feeds, status updates, and more, with its widely used CRM (and marketing automation!) tools in the expanding Salesforce cloud.

Want a glimpse into what’s already a maze of confusion? Check out the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, which tries to position social app vendors into a coherent array of available choices. And there are no lack of choices – we see web CMS, enterprise CMS, social business software apps, portal vendors, large suites, standalone apps all over the grid.

Is it possible to make an educated vendor selection with these widely scattered options? Or is the diversity of providers offering up more confusion than clarity?