Web content management has way gone beyond the Web 1.0 role of publishing Web pages. My friend Geoff Bock recently wrote an interesting post, Web content management's new role: Fueling digitally driven businesses, that address ways to move your use of Web content management into this century. As he writes, “To compete in the digital economy, we actually need to use content to power useful applications for the enterprise. These are Web apps with a business purpose: They are designed to produce insights for decision-making and to deliver results.”
Geoff writes that we need to get more granular and away from a page orientation. I agree and it seems to be that increasing page views should no longer be the goal but rather increasing the number of actions you can do in a single page. Increasing page views has a bias toward increasing advertising revenue while increasing actions within a page has a bias toward increasing productivity for the company, rather it be providing customer services, gathering customer insights or improving employee productivity.
I have argued elsewhere that this is one of the differences between Web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. It is ironic that taking Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise tended to make them more productivity oriented and less marketing driven. Now perhaps some of this productivity focus might moving out into the Web. The smart companies are aligning their external Web and social media presence with their internal use of social business so this may be another source of the crossover. This alignment is one reason I like the term social business over enterprise 2.0
Geoff goes on to write about the importance of content mashups. Here is another place were alignment within the enterprise and a firm’s Web presence can bring both efficiency but also consistency of message. Moreover, mashing up data across the firewall can bring new insights. Geoff notes the need to define and maintain the various content types and “structure and manage the metadata for categorizing content types by mapping terms to controlled vocabularies, taxonomies and linked data elements wherever possible.” This can be the foundation for content alignment within and without the enterprise.
Geoff notes that some of the major vendors are getting into this game, certainly IBM with its social business focus and Microsoft with its continuing investments in SharePoint 2010 and openness to third part add-ons. He concludes that companies “should identify the business-oriented content services required to fuel their digitally driven businesses and give their customers what they need.” I would simply add that these firms need to look both inside and outside the enterprise and then align these two views.
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