Sitecore's Dreamcore more powerful than a hot Volcano!

The anticipating and excitement is building about Dreamcore, the Sitecore Developer and Partner Conference. The North American event, which is sold out and on extended capacity, is in downtown Boston next Thursday and Friday. The month following it will travel to Copenhagen for the European Community.

Dreamcore is loaded with web best practices and insight for the growing talented partner base that implements Sitecore solutions. Also in attendance are certified Developers from the End user community, so key to ongoing success. All of our technical presenters and the entire community is tweeting and blogging and amped up about it.... in fact so much excitement built up in Iceland that a volvano literally blew its stack!

Actually, this volcano really is a bit of a troublemaker. We have a number of presenter coming from around the world, some of whom are now making plans to travel around the crazy and disruptive volcanic ash that has spewn out of Iceland. This particle laden cloud is blowing all over Northern Europe. In particular our Danish colleagues are facing airport closures - but their optimism is strong! I mean after all, didn't they sail to North America from Scandinavia in wooden boats a along time ago, and that was before mobile GPS devices!

It's bizare, but our Dreamcore image, seen above, looks alot like this crazy volcano in a sunset:




Anyway, as much as it looks like it, we didn't plan our image to look like a Volvanic Sunset, but we are planning on a spectacular event nonetheless, the volvano notwithstanding. Hope to see you all there and stay tuned as we tweet and blog about it!

Increasing Online Campaign Effectiveness Video

Here is a video we did recently to describe a number of ways to use Sitecore to help marketers easily measure and improve online campaign effectiveness from Google Adwords, banners, email campaigns, and more. Enjoy!

WCM market size and jobs- real enough for Mom

I read an article about "10 Careers that didn't exist 10 years ago" and what struck me was that of these 10, four of them are right in the heart of our business, web content management (WCM). They include 1- Blogger, 2- Community Managers or Content Managers, 3- Social Media Strategists and 4- User Experience analysts.

It is a natural reaction to be excited that there is growth, interest, and demand associated with ones industry and technology. It is confirmation that, "Yes Mom, this is a real business". A bit of feeling you have arrived.

Then the irony struck me. Aren't tools such as web content management systems with social media features, in part supposed to empower writers, subject matter experts, and other expressives without extra people involved? So what is the extra help for? Is this a trick?

Well, let's see what they do. Bloggers research and write posts to communicate objectives, ideas, and positions- whether promoting for a company, organization or oneself. With the informal tone, the ability to turn on a dime, and create two way conversations, bloggers can get a lot more accomplished and interactions happening when it used to be just a broadcast.

Community and Content Managers do the same on a broader scale. They motivate and referee as well as instigate and create.

Social Media strategists- they are they ones who play chess knowing four steps ahead where they want to land and what others might do. Except the playground is twitter, facebook, blog sites, and the latest mobile mash up.

And the fourth, User Experience analysts, well they help clean up the mess normal people make when they try to become artists on the web. A great user experience is hard to describe, but you sure know it when you have a really good or bad one. It is kind of like cruising downhill on your mountain bike with your tunes blasting versus over the handlebars then into the ditch wondering how your wheel got reshaped into a mobius strip.

When we think about how much broader an audience we can now reach online, how much selectively we can messages and hear back from our audience, how much easier we can research and find crucial information, then these new roles make a lot of sense. And it becomes clear that they are more than just direct substitutes for industries where there is displacement (e.g. traditional media and advertising) but part of a larger industry.

My colleague Darren Guarnaccia has some real insight into this, and in his travels with leading analysts, sees Web Content Management as a one $Billion dollar industry, and growing to 7 times that size when you add in Email, Web and Marketing Analytics, Marketing Automation, Social media software, eCommerce etc. We need a lot of guides, mechanics, creatives and advisors as we make our way into completely new ways to interact together, and of course the leading companies are going to make this all work together as part of the expected website experience.

So yes, Mom, these are real jobs that do make a net new difference in our world!

2010 Predictions for Web Content Management and Sitecore

2010 = 2000
(but an easier and richer user experience)


In this new decade, which is kicked off by 2010, I’m predicting whatever it was we were predicting in 2000, or maybe even 1990, to be REALLY BIG this year.
Why?

I think it was Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, founder of their famed Media Lab, who said something to the effect …. What is surprising isn't our fast rate of technical innovation, instead it is the slow rate people are able to adopt it.
I am reminded of 1982, when I joined a start up in Silicon Valley, upon the recommendation of my MBA thesis advisor and the Dean of the Business School. I was a bright eyed and bushy tailed eagerbeaver, ready to sell the world on our two hot products- Email and Computer Conferencing. The efficiencies, the possibilities for instant global collaboration, a global paradigm shift!

In fact , all true! Only, we were off by a decade for email and maybe two decades for Conferencing (chat/webex/twitter/blogs). The reactions back then as we discussed email in organizations were almost comical today.

EagerBeaver: “VP Silliman, how would you like to be able to send a memo to all of your employees, and potentially many of your suppliers or customers just by typing it once on this (clunky) computer terminal and pushing the return button?”
VP Silliman : “Why would I do that when I can just Xerox the memo and drop them in the mail for just 20 cents each? Then I don’t have to buy all that complicated computer equipment and your software thingamajig!” ….Darn!

You think that was tough, imagine our computer conferencing product. Multiple computer terminals, all logged into a central server (Dec PDP 10 mainframe), able to simultaneously type and see each other’s messages simultaneously, like Facebook without the pictures.People looked at us like we were blue and had tails, and this was a long time before Avatar!

We did manage to convince one company that this was like having telex machines sending each other simultaneous faxes globally, with everyone seeing eachother’s faxes. Bechtel Construction, who had huge construction projects around the globe ‘got it’, and managed far flung global project far better than before…but they were innovators, really pre- early adopters. It took everyone else at least another decade.

So what will people be able to adopt in 2010 in the Web Content Management space?
Well, according to Interwoven’s Press releases from 2000 (the then market leader, now a much quieter subdivision of Autonomy) the big stories were:
-Major eCommerce solutions, both through integration partnerships and their own product
-Integrated Analytics and visitor and content tagging technology via acquisition, “to create a compelling and relevant Web experience”
- “ A framework for the Wireless Web, providing intelligent content management for wireless”.

The amazing irony about these top topics from 2000 is that these remain very big topics today, and with eCommerce established but still complex, analytics established but typically not well integrated into the actual web experience, and wireless /mobile here but not yet a compelling experience yet.

Sitecore has new capabilities, products and partnerships in all of these areas, and the major differences now versus 10 years ago is the complexity and cost of implementation is much lower. And the features now make the experience much richer. In a recent poll of over 100 of our Sitecore customers (we’ll be announcing that soon so I can’t leak much), over 70 % said they chose Sitecore because of the features built in and close second was its ease of use.

So I predict for 2010, now that Sitecore has the usability and complexity at a level engaging and suitable for widespread adoption, that eCommerce, Integrated Analytics and Wireless for the web will be big successes for us. We’re finally making the technology that fits our human comfort zones!

Sitecore in 2009- Website Marketing and Partners worked the best

A lesson learned from this year is that authenticity really matters, and companies are starved for the real story on what works and what doesn't regarding marketing inititiatives. Here's the background on our delivering the straight story to a number of our colleagues.

Our CIO, Kim Elsass, had an opportunity to present this fall to a group of Marketing and IT executives in Copenhagen, where he works at our Corporate Headquarters. They had asked him to look back over the past 2-3 years at Sitecore Marketing, and described what has worked and what hasn't, lessons learned, and what we are now doing differently.

Since I'm responsible for our global Marketing budget/ demand gen initiatives it made sense for me to put this together for him. But as I'm in our North American headquarters here in the San Francisco area, and Kim is a terrific presenter, we worked as a team- I wrote and he talked.

It was the perfect opportunity to pull together our ROI info for this extended period, and was illuminating and a bit gratifying to see the positive results that have occurred in the past 2 1/2 years. But in no way was I prepared for Kim's email the morning after he spoke. Here is what he said:

"Hi Paul,

I am so pleased to say that the presentation I made yesterday (Your PRESENTATION) was a fantastic success. I’ve never encountered so many people (C-level from sales, management, and marketing) so excited from my appearance. :-) I actually never managed to finish the presentation, as there were so many questions and comments underway. After the show, I was “attacked” by 8-10 managers with additional questions and some asked me if I could do the presentation for their managers in their own environment. Awesome – I’ll share the profits from the lecturing tour with you. :-) Already, I owe a bottle of Amarone from last night.

It’s a Sitecore presentation that I really can align myself with, it being light years from a traditional product presentation, but was about how to intelligently create measurable RESULTS.... "

You just love getting those emails, don't you? When I followed up with Kim he was even more effusive than his email, and was tickled that he continued to get requests for his presentation.

Kim walked the attendees through various challenges we had, solutions we tried and the results. Like the graphic at the top, he identified the initiatives and their varying ROIs, as best as we can measure it.

The summary is that the biggest winners in terms of Lead Gen ROI were our Website and our Partners. We got more revenue per cost expended through leads delivered from http://www.sitecore.net/ and our global Partners than any of the other means we tried. And believe me, we tried a lot.

Given the Economic Hurricane in 2009, in retrospect it isn't all that surprising that a candid presentation about our real world experiences and marketing ROI comparisons made for an attentive audience. Even more importantly, using your website to reach your audience is clearly a winner, and supporting your channel partners through thick and thin pays off. Frankly a lot of our competition has cannibalized their channel by taking business away to prop themselves up in these tougher times, but our ROI metrics tell us that our Partners provide great value.

Our approach is to invest even more in the initiatives that are providing the best returns, so here is to taking on more business possibilities through our websites and to many returns with our global Partners in 2010.

Sitecore is watching Google- turning the tables.

Google is everywhere , right? With so many free convenient services, and all they want to do is watch ....over your shoulder and maybe offer ads...Your searches, Gmail, Google Docs, Wave, your mobile, Chrome browser and more.

Well, who is watching Google? Well in our case at Sitecore, our Online Marketing Suite (OMS) is- and it just saved us some money and time!

We use Google ads, Bing and Yahoo Ads, and a lot of display ads as well. We have these campaigns feed into our OMS, because beyond the click performance we have visibility into visitor goals success on our website and context of the visitors' experience. We also integrate our email campaigns, PR campaigns, really anything online that ends up on our website.

A few days ago Ted, our Online marketing Ad specialist, noticed that suddenly our conversions were way down on our Google Ads. The OMS showed that it wasn't consistent across all our many campaigns, specifically the traffic from our Google Adwords wasn't engaged with our website at all, they were bouncing right away without accomplishing any goals.

Google was showing lotsa clicks, the meter was running but the wheels weren't turning on our website!

Ted then went into our AdWords campaigns and noticed some strange things about our ads and account.

Suddenly we were selling iPhone accessories! Instead of offering only our software, we had iPhone Ads popping up everywhere and linking back to our site. No wonder our OMS pointed out our conversions were lousy- other than the fact that our Web CMS allows your website to look great from an iPhone, we have no interesting iPhone accessory info on our site! So these visitors bounced.


Turns out we were hacked, or else Google accidentally merged our account with another company's AdWords account, with a name that is very close to our Sitecore name- literally the same with two letters transposed. Suddenly our ad total budget tripled, we had a new group of ads appear, and campaigns got scrambled.

Ted quickly got in touch with Google via their chat system and escalated the problem. We had to suspend our campaign, change our credit card info, and update our passwords. Of course all the crazy charges were refunded, although we lost the productivity from 3 days of online Google Ads.

The good news is by having our OMS system watching Google's system we caught this quickly, and kept the expense from being even higher. That was not our original intent, frankly. We use the OMS to integrate our multi-channel campaign results, since we do so much more than just AdWords. But, as it turned out, the OMS helped protect us as well as see the fuller online picture than presented by Google!

Sitecore wins Web Idol competition at J Boye Conference

The annual J Boye Conference held in Denmark focused on web content management, web strategy and user experience. One highlight was an interactive, crowd pleasing "Web Idol" bake off demo fest with multiple web CMS vendors showing their best 7 minute interactive demo.

For the second year in a row Sitecore won it all, with an engaging and light-hearted demo of user interaction on a Sitecore website. Lars Petersen of Sitecore, with his two alternate 'personas' rocked the house with a true life personalization-driven web form and landing page for a fun-filled beer party.

Check it out here on YouTube.

If Sitecore can do this is 7 minutes , imagine what a few weeks of work will result in!

The opening keynote was deliver by psychologist BJ Fogg, of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology lab. Fogg is an expert in online persuation and in understanding how technology is used to influence peoples behavior. It is significant that a well known researcher and innovator like Fogg was featured at this conference. Clearly it speaks to how important it is for web CMS systems to have persuasive abilities, adapt to their visitor's needs, and encourage and influence behavior.