The new location is http://www.veridianmedia.wordpress.com/

Please update your records accordingly and visit our new Blog home.

Thanks and regards,

David Warwick
Veridian Media Pty Ltd

News spreads quickly and I have penned this short (I promise) piece to answer the question “what next?” for friends, colleagues and contacts that are interested.

Carefully considered cornucopia

The short answer is that I am not taking a single direction, instead I am fortunate enough to have found some conjoined activities that lend themselves to some interconnected effort. One common thread, is bringing brilliant web based solutions to Melbourne that assist clients in their digital innovation. They are …

Viocorp – www.viocorp.com – @Viocorp

Viocorp is Australia’s leading online video streaming business. Its Viostream product is a world class video content management system. The tagline “get it out there” demonstrates Viocorp’s drive to assist organizations in producing and distributing video assets over the web. I will be working with Nick Bolton @nickybee99 and the rest of the Viocorp team to launch and build their Melbourne operation.

CompliSpace – www.complispace.com.au – @CompliSpace

Another Australian success story, CompliSpace provides corporate governance programs and services. CompliSpace delivers a web platform for sustainable business growth in an increasingly complex regulatory environment. The tagline “Bringing Good Governance To Life” highlights the practicality and ease of delivery of their Intranet based solutions. As with Viocorp, I will be working with the CompliSpace team to launch and support their Melbourne operation.

Veridian Media – www.veridianmedia.com.au/wordpress – @VeridianMedia

Rounding out the trinity is my business Veridian Media. Working with some brilliant colleagues I have met along the journey, Veridian Media delivers digital strategy for marketing, social media and application scoping activities. These services will support my efforts in promoting, growing and supporting Viocorp and CompliSpace as well as provide a vehicle for industry comment and consultancy. Lets face it, who else would take responsibility for this blog and unfettered comment. Recent output includes:

IDM Magazine July/Aug 2009 – Cover Story on Twitter – “Does Twitter Mean Business”

Marketing Magazine August 2009 – “Branding a Corporate Figurehead”

Loose Ends

That pretty much covers my immediate future, although I will still have some involvement with Smart Works (www.smartworks.com.au), CM Pros in Australia and some other project initiatives just to fill in the empty spaces Thank you to everyone who has been in contact and shown support. To many of you, I will be in contact soon to discuss Viocorp (web video) and CompliSpace (intranet procedures) and how one or both of these can help you grow and improve your business.

You can contact me going forward at:
Viocorp: david.warwick@viocorp.com
CompliSpace: david.warwick@complispace.com.au
LinkedIN: www.linkedin.com/in/drwarwick
Twitter: www.twitter.com/drwarwick

Redraft of second essay from the ‘Black Art of Web Publishing’ site http://www.blackartofwebpublishing.com/

What are you trying to do?

What is your organization’s objective? How will your organization achieve this objective? How do you measure this success - what will it look like? Sound’s obvious, but like much that is obvious, it is also often forgotten or ignored as we let detail and complexity derail us.

Write down your answers and check everything that you do back against objectives and measures - make them a mantra. Even producing the answers is probably not as obvious, or as easy, as you may have assumed. Lets spend a short amount of time looking at ‘Business Strategy’ and why understanding it is so important to effective online publishing.

The ‘top of the pyramid’ - a nice view!

The temptation with online communication is to start in your comfort zone. Most authors start writing, most designers start designing, most developers start cutting code and on and on we go. As the saying goes, if you’re a hammer, most problems look like a nail!

You may not be the source of your organization’s strategy. You may not even be able to influence it in any significant manner, however, if you are going to be an effective online publisher, you had better take more than a passing interest in the strategy you are aiming to implement and deliver. So before we jump into the ‘middle of the pyramid’ - design, structure, content and message - let’s set the goal posts, so that when we get to measuring effectiveness, we have a clear understanding of what the objectives, measures and signs of success are.

Practical first steps

There is a host of material available on business strategy and planning if you are starting at the beginning, otherwise, if you already have a business plan, objective statement or marketing material, grab hold of them as a place to start. You can go the whole way and do market research, competitor analysis and apply business theory such as Porter’s 5 Forces, SWOT analysis, Gap analysis and so on. The determination here should be on the size and scope of the project you are undertaking.

If you are just looking to make sure you are heading in the right direction, then take the time to cover the basics:

1) Primary Objective(s) – What is the primary aim of the organization?

2) Target(s) – The organization knows it is successfully achieving its objectives when?

3) Method(s) – The organization fulfills its objectives by doing / producing / undertaking?

4) Market – To be successful, the organization needs to communicate with?

It is also worth documenting where possible:

5) Audience – Everyone, specific segment, geography, age, profession, or defining characteristic.

6) Stage of Development – Start-up, Early Growth, Established, Mature, Multiple/Complex.

7) Target Metrics - Such as revenue, profit, customers, growth rate, production, market share.

All of this information will assist with cross-checking online publish activity and defining tactical objectives for actions taken. Time spent in the strategy phase leads to time saved in implementation and of course a much better chance of achieving operational goals.

Now that we covered the importance of strategy (BAOWP1) and documenting business strategy (BAOWP2), the next post will be specifically discussing the crafting of a website publishing strategy that delivers on the organization’s objectives. Hold onto your strategy information and answers to the questions above, you are going to need them.

Preamble

Back in 2006, I presented a half-day tutorial entitled the Black Art of Web Publishing (hence BAOWP) examining the complexities, trends and disciplines involved in website publishing. The material for this session formed the basis for an ambitious website (time to lower your expectations), take a quick look if you must at http://www.blackartofwebpublishing.com/ (come back, don’t get sidetracked). As is often the case, the project only went part of the way to covering the territory it had carved out for itself. Of course things have changed somewhat in the past few years, most notably that a focus on websites alone is no longer sufficient coverage of the online publishing space. So as my friend James Robertson http://twitter.com/s2d_jamesr suggested sometime ago, it would be better to blog, take comments and then gather it all together.

So that is the plan. Each existing item on the site will be updated to take the passage of time into account - posted here for comment (starting with BAOWP1 - Conceiving an Online Publishing Strategy) and then aggregated back into a resource at some future point. So please, get stuck in and comment, and come back for future installments (I am aiming to do one per week).

Online Publishing Strategy – Are You Going to Succeed?

Have you ever heard of the ‘random walk principle’? In a nutshell, it proposes that if you set out walking, making random decisions about where you are going, then your finishing point (end point with the highest probability) is likely to be where you started. So why is the random walk principle relevant?

The point here is that if you start changing online messages, undertaking a redesign, or amending your online structures without a clear plan, then the most likely outcome is something no better, or no more effective than where you are right now. Taken another way, this is the argument that no matter how good your implementation skills, you need to establish (or be working to) a well constructed plan.

Making an Online Publishing Plan

Of course the plan you make will fail in some way. Nevertheless, you will have moved forward and if a planning principle is applied (plan - implement - analyze - start again) then you will have initiated a learning loop and you can make iterative improvement and modify strategy in a manner that should ultimately take you somewhere better (closer to your objectives).

Topics that will follow on from here will move through strategy creation, implementation and measurement. In practice, this is a loop that you can start anywhere (sometimes measurement of the current state works well as a first step) and create a virtuous cycle of improvement.

The next post will look at developing or understanding your organization’s business strategy.

As discussed in the preamble, please make comment that can assist with the BAOWP site http://www.blackartofwebpublishing.com. Don’t jump too far ahead just yet, remember the site content is out of date.

Thanks, I hope that these posts offer you some stimulation and support for your own online publishing activities and possibly a reminder of things you know and a resource for things you may need to explain to others.

The Playing Field

I am going to use ‘client’ rather than customer, mostly because I am talking principally about the customers of professional service organisations. I believe what follows can apply to most customers and your comments can bear this out.

Secondly, I am talking about ethical and professional organizations. We have all needed to escalate something to a manager. We have all encountered poor professional service. We have all had communication failings - often two sided. I am not exploring these aspects and as a result, and for the purpose of the argument, I am discussing goods and services provided to industry standard, both professionally and ethically.

Finally, I am not anti-client. In fact the oposite is true, the adage “the client is always right” makes for good client service philosophy because at the very least, the client is crucial, knows their business and is the lifeblood of any commercial organization. They should be respected, heard, courted, valued and ultimately the recipient of something of significant value. There is however such a thing as a #badclient …

Some Bad Client Signals

No mandate - Usually the provision of a service involves the client adopting the service and as a result some level of change. Humans generally accept change poorly. When a client does not actually want the value that flows from a service, there is no capacity for the service to deliver a benefit. This can include services not properly commissioned, services rejected by gatekeepers and my favorite because of the irony: Pro bono services accepted by charitable clients because they are come free of charge, delivered in circumstances where they are not needed or cannot be used by the client.

No respect -  The client who thinks they know better. Once the work starts (and often before), this client will give a level of instruction or embark on an ego trip because they believe their knowledge is superior to that of the supplier. In my game, this is the client who wants to tell me how to build a web CMS system after scoping their organization’s needs, without understanding that we have put more than a decade into understanding best practice in this field (enough self indulgence). Of course the supplier who thinks they know their clients business better than their client is also deluding themselves but as mentioned, we are not focussing on the supply side here.

No value - In this case, the client does not value the service enough to cover the cost of there provision. It may be a case of ‘bad-fit’, where the offering simply does not produce enough incremental value for the client to benefit more than the provisioning cost. However the truly BAD CLIENT gets plenty of value but still will not transfer any of this to the supplier. If you break this down, it amounts to their belief that they can build a sustainable profitable business but you shouldn’t be able to. A good client realises that a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit and enlightended self-interest is much better for both parties.

Narcissism -this is really the trigger for this post and I am silent on the culprit that pushed me over the edge. This client has no empathy for you (the supplier) or any other client. Give away signs: (1) deliberately sowing internal discontent by playing supplier staff off against each other, (2) never agreeing that services have been completed or properly provided, (3) every communication is a complaint and there is never a recognition of value provided, (4) services are expected to be prioritized ahead of any other client, (5) the client believes that they are the creator of all intellectual property and nothing, even IP developed for other clients, should belong to anyone but them, and (6) other blatantly manipulative behaviour. Yes, I have encountered client narcissim to this extent and I am interested in stories you may have (no names).

Too Late?

Hanging on to these relationships is false economy. A client who exhibits one or more of the above signals as a standard mode of operation is preventing you from servicing your good clients properly. They are inflating your delivery costs. They are demoralizing your staff. They are sending negative signals to the market. They will not stop and if the cancer gets bad enough they will sink you because at the very least you will loose competitive advantage. So why persevere, is it because your organization accepts the claim that ‘the client is always right’? Will you believe them over your quality staff? It is not too late, let them go and you will be transformed for the better, you may even find your other clients and your staff thank you. Please don’t send them to me

Some Early Questions

I have been working in solution sales for longer than I care to admit. When I hear “we are commissioning you because our last supplier was no good”, I still take this on face value and make the stock standard commitment that we will perform better. In reality, there has got to be an even-money chance that at least equal fault lies with the new client as it does with their former supplier. In this case, perhaps it is prudent to explore your prospect with a bit more attention. It is possible to end up with a worse outcome than failing to win a piece of business.

Why not a client credit check looking for payment history? Why not ask to speak to other suppliers? Does the client exhibit early examples of a lack of respect, lack of value, lack of operational mandate and perhaps most of all excessive self importance. Maybe do what my Grandmother suggested, take them to lunch and see how they treat people who have no power in a transactional relationship. Be warned, I will never again work for a client who tries to impress me by treating waiting staff poorly.

Please tell me what I have missed, your experiences and horror stories. Remember I am not defending suppliers, there are plenty of substandard service moments, I have experienced a bunch of them myself in just the last few days.

My premise is that if you forget the customer you will fail, however as with any relationship, no party is always right. QED - The customer is NOT always right.

Join me on Twitter @drwarwick - http://twitter.com/drwarwick. Maybe we can even start an ongoing conversation - hash tag: #badclient however no doubt a tag #badsupplier would be more successful

Thanks for your attention and in advance for your input.

Cheers and regards,

David Warwick

We are still in the throws of the GFC (Global Financial Crisis), with all the attendant effects. One of those effects is a fall in production that varies by country or any other segmentation you may wish to apply. For this post, lets consider a fairly common fall as 2 percent (see The Age article of 27 May 2009, http://bit.ly/nTbAY), this is, in simplistic analysis, the same as going backward a year. In other words our financial position, standard of living, productive power are taken back to 2007.

So why does the effect feel so much worse?

One cause of hardship is rapid inbalance and unequal distribution, something our systems don’t cope with well. Some of us are not effected at all and others are severely hurt by the shift from growth to recession. I am proposing that another, perhaps more important cause is a dramatic fall in economic velocity. Let my try and illustrate this in a couple of ways.

Lets say I am looking to invest $1m. In a period when this is going into an economy that is growing across the board, I am likely to be agressive about investment. When the economy is shrinking, I am reticent to invest and much more likely to take time determining the appropriate place to ‘park’ my investment. Even the language in such a negative climate is full of terms that imply consideration, care, delay, reservation and let me say it – lack of velocity. This is a compounding effect that moves throughout the economy, macro and micro and saps the energy that is palpable in boom times.

If we were to use fluid dynamics as an analogy, most of our thinking and discussion relates to volume (how much money) and very little is about the pressure (market demand) and speed (rate of transfer). I believe that understanding the rate of transfer, the rate of signing new business and the rate of business completion would go a long way to explaining why we all know that this is much more than a two percent reduction in GDP. Lets face it, this feels nothing like 2007.

Something else to think about …

You can find examples of the world’s increasing pace everywhere, for goodness sake, we are even walking faster (see Daily Mail article, http://bit.ly/2CTIX), some 8 percent faster than a decade ago. We expect everything faster, goods, media, news, services, basically everything. The recession or GFC is letting many of us reassess work-life balance and in many cases business itself is encouraging part-time or reduced hours of work. This is unlikely to be a permanent dynamic, our personal lives are not slowing down, we are just transfering energy, so this is not a return to some previous era or a more relaxed or clever futuristic model.

Look at SMS, Twitter, TV show titles displayed picture-in-picture or moved online, shorter newspaper and online articles, or self-serve supermarket checkout for examples of velocity delivered. In fact look anywhere you like and you will see the ’speed’ imperative in action.

So what does it mean?

Economic growth can come from a number of sources. Primary resources which as we all know are finite and running out. Labour – we can increase population although this does not deliver per-person growth. Sweat – we can all work harder. Velocity – we can all work faster, the premise of this piece, and our walking speed, communication speed and stress are all indications of this. I suggest that our velocity has limits and is in itself a finite resource. At some point you just cannot walk, read or engage with someone any faster, get to work faster or even multi-task anthing else.

So either we are heading into a future where resource, labour and personal speed (velocity) have delivered to the engine room all that they can. To borrow from Star Trek, (here you shift to Scotish accent) “I’ve giv’n her all she’s got captain, an’ I canna give her no more.” Well thankfully for Star Trek there was always an answer, the same answer that has worked for us all along – Innovation.

Not surprisingly when the chips are down we encounter the most rapid change. War, disaster, economic downturn are in many ways the catalyst for adaptation and change. Now is the time to look for innovation in your business, your life and in addressing the many challenges ahead. If you can’t or won’t deliver innovation yourself (you can of course), then at least embrace the change because what worked before won’t work now.

I have some more to say on related topics and will post again soon.

For some velocity, see you on Twitter @drwarwick. Full URL http://twitter.com/drwarwick

Social Media Marketing - Some insights from Abraham Maslow

‘Traditional media is dead’ or so goes the common discussion, usually centered around changing consumer behavior and the emergence of new media such as online social networks. Books such as Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin http://tinyurl.com/ysw9ea (a must read by the way) illustrate how traditional products (the meatballs) fit poorly with emerging media and marketing trends (the sundae). There is no doubt strong evidence to show that TV and related advertising has become less effective than it was and that the ‘broadcast’ model is not always the best approach. Tony Thomas debunks the death of traditional media in his blog http://tinyurl.com/bqu5pn and suggests that social media can amplify traditional ’solutions and create a platform that delivers more effective and powerful communications’.

Media dynamics

Personally, I think the death of traditional advertising is wrong, however so is the assumption that new media and traditional media can sit easily together. When television emerged, radio was far from eradicated from the media scene. TV did however change radio forever, some formats began to fail and some personalities in the radio era failed to survive or make an effective transition to television. Similarly the internet has not and will not eradicate TV, radio or print, however it has changed them forever and the change is far from finished. Social media is one the key Web 2.0 transitions for the internet, the delivery of a truly interactive and personal format for communication (marketing included). The biggest fundamental change is not destruction of format (print, radio, TV, etc) but rather an alternative that is not broadcast (one to many) - it is social (many to many) and as a result it is ‘messy’, different in its dynamic structure and suits Godin’s visual metaphor of a ‘Meatball Sundae’.

Making sense of social marketing

Marketing science (if I may be so bold) is predominantly addressed at understanding ‘broadcast messaging’. The result is a set of models and perceived ‘truths’ that do not fit well with heavily interactive and fragmented communication. The same models are also ineffective  at monetizing these channels. In this blog, I am looking back to 1943 and Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs as a model that can shed some light on why traditional marketing struggles in this environment, hence the title …

Maslow’s Modern Marketing Mashup

You may have studied Maslow in High School or University. If not, or if you need a refresh, wikipedia can help you out at http://tinyurl.com/kd3ok. Basically Maslow said we have a hierachy of needs, starting with physical and safety needs (lets call them practical needs for conciseness), moving through belonging and esteem (lets call these social) and finishing with self-actualization (lets call these personal - as we are talking about self-fulfillment needs).

Like many foundation theories, Maslow was discounted by later social theories for a number of reasons, usually relating to the hierarchy itself. The weakness can be illustrated by a homeless or starving poet - or any other example where multiple needs are sought simultaneously or higher-order needs are sought when lower order needs remain unfulfilled. There is also my favorite, that “there is no possible way to classify ever-changing needs as society changes” (Lim and Khruschev, 2002), as this argument suits our ‘new media’ discussion and focus on change. However in reality I don’t think that it is about changing times, but more changing personal situation, stage of life, and personal focus, or what a marketeer might call segmentation and demographics.

What can we learn from Maslow

My premise is that ‘broadcast marketing’ and most advertising has worked to target practical needs and some social needs, basically the bottom half of Maslow’s pyramid. Food, sex, health, property, money, mobility, employment and some belonging. I would go as far as saying that as it moves up the pyramid, its effectiveness weakens and by the time we are talking about social needs such as belonging,  the broadcast marketing is ‘fake’, based on aspiration rather than reality. I am arguing that marketing is ineffective in addressing the top-half of the pyramid because its very nature is divorced from individual personal fulfillment needs.

This hasn’t really been a problem for marketing and advertising until now because nothing in the media domain could get granular enough to play seriously in this space - it remained, in the main, the domain of family, friends, community, teachers and direct human interaction.

What has changed?

Emergent digital media can now facilitate direct human interaction (you all know the sites) and it can also automate, approximate and stand as a defacto for human interaction at the higher social and personal fulfillment needs and desires of the Maslow pyramid. Since this is now a reality, society has been shown that messages can be interactive, they can be targeted and they can be humanized and as a result, audiences are becoming less willing to accept poor messaging at the base of the pyramid. Broadcast marketing is becoming less effective in its heartland because the game has changed and expectations are much higher.

Authenticity

We all put up with broadcast advertising lumping us together, oversimplifying or completely faking reality to fit in a 30 second slot and considering us all stupid, largely because the engagement occurs while we are relaxing or occupied. We accepted this because it is not our core social or personal (top of pyramid) needs that were being addressed. This in not the case any longer!

Now, as with other forms of human interaction, we demand personal attention, quality of message and authenticity. This does not fit easily with marketing theory and practice, it is harder to craft, distribute, measure and monetize. Some will say that granular social marketing is the domain of individuals not organization, and yet we all need to hear from organizations at a personal and authentic level and the smarter organizations will work this out. The others, as has happened before, will become extinct and although other media will survive and flourish, the commercial organizations who cannot communicate with their end-users will loose out to ones that can.

I don’t have the answers to marketing models for this paradigm other than to suggest three guiding principles …

1) If the message is not authentic don’t say anything
2) The message needs to come from the people at the coal face with credibility
3) This is not broadcast from ‘on high’, let the community speak and generate content

Get these three right and the result will be authentic, compelling and viral.

Thanks to Maslow, Seth Godin, Tony Thomas and Brad Howarth http://www.lagrangepoint.typepad.com/ for the thought starters.

The session was sponsored by Melbourne Conversations, City of Melbourne and Future Leaders, take a look at http://tinyurl.com/d32tsz for more details.

My take-aways, coloured by my own perceptions and opinions are as follows, hope you find a gem (thanks go to the speakers and not to me) …

Professor Sue Richardson (Flinders University, Adelaide)

Commented that the two percent fall in GDP only takes the world economy back to a standard of living that we enjoyed in 2007 and in one sense is an overstated problem. The real problem is uneven distribution, and as a result the fact that the change impacts on certain segments of society much more profoundly than others.

Other observations included a increased call on the public sector and a possible reduction in the excessive work hours of recent years to a more balance work effort. As far as concerted effort, activity focussed on disadvantaged segments should be supported.

Sharan Burrow (President of the ACTU)

Discussed the ‘Double - Crunch’ of both the financial crisis and environmental crisis upon the global society. Her premise that financial institutions should reassess their purpose and realise that they exist to support communities not to profit from them and that a new moral foundation was required for international markets.

Sharan also made the point that the majority of affected people, especially in economies on their knees, did not understand how ‘toxic debt’ and globalization had taken their jobs, hours, wages and homes and that the level of anger in some places, notably Europe, was palpable.

Professor Ian McDonald (Melbourne University)

Suggested that financial innovation had helped society and that a negative overreaction was not dissimilar to the excesses of the boom period. He illustrated how humans are prone to invent stories to ’suit the circumstances’ and provide self-serving bias. The positive reinforcement of a boom market made institutions feel invulnerable and as a consequence make increasingly poor decisions. The boom stories throughout history, for example, steam, the web, and China all allow a boom period to be seen as ‘unique and sustainable’ and these constructions help us to forget or ignore the paterns of the past.

In a sense the ‘boom stories’, reinforced by medium term successes are the group equivalent of individual bias. For example, the fact that ninety-percent of drivers believe that they are of above average skill, clearly not possible is the same as financial institution believing that asset values could continue to grow at boom rates.

Marcus Padley (Stockbroker and Columnist)

Compared the financial markets fall over the past year (55 percent) to the movie ‘Das Boat’, in the sense that the market fell below its ‘designed depth’ and began to break apart. Market losses in general have three-times the emotional impact of gains and fear as a driver is much stronger than confidence.

The result is that generally humans are cautious at the bottom of a market and risk-takers at the top and that this is not the correct ‘wiring’ to make a successful investor.

Marcus made the point that the business around the markets are ‘marketing machines’ and that ‘no one will ever tell you to sell’.  In investment, the sell decision needs to be your’s alone and in a falling market cash is better than a defensive stock (which is only a stock that falls less).

Thank you to the organizers and the speakers for their insights. However as Marcus said, the conversation that is occuring now actually needed to occur sixteen months ago. At least he suggested, we have the ‘unfettered exuberance’ of his children (and their generation) who won’t remember this and will see the next boom as a permanent dynamic to sell his assets to.

This is the first and last time I will be using the acronym GFC. As far as I am concerned it is as passe as ’synergy’ and ‘best-practice’ (although I haven’t stoped using them).

Let me elaborate. No one (at least a decade ago) went into a career in content management, and even today, with the exception of few attempts I have heard about, there isn’t a University course claiming the domain in a compelling way. The closest to an aggregation of professionals working in this territory is the Content Management Professionals organization (see http://www.cmpros.org/). As an aside, if you are in Australia, join others in this ‘non-discipline’ at the CM Pros Australia Community Facebook Group.

So what is Content Management?

First and foremost it is a contemporary challenge. We face content management dilemmas at a personal, organizational and global level, as part of the sheer volume of ‘content’ that the information age has delivered to us (and the ease by which we can create our own). In some sense there has always been a ‘content management challenge’, dealt with progressively with the development of language, mathematics, publishing, cataloging and specific areas of specialty - science, accounting, journalism, teaching and so on.

Today we tend to see content management as more about non-systematic content, the type of more ‘organic’ material that proliferates with the web and is now becoming even more fragmented, voluminous, rapid and organic with the online social networking boom. Things will only continue to accelerate.

The content management challenge impacts on us all in both our personal and professional lives. The way we manage content, or more importantly sort through information and leverage the important stuff, becomes part of the path to competitive success. What can be accessed and leveraged is part of determining personal socio-economic success and at an organization level, competitive advantage and the resulting market position and financial outcome.

Given the breadth of this conversation, lets get back to something more discrete – organizational utilization of the internet. The field of ‘web content management’.

Multi-Disciplinary Content Management

In the Content Management Professionals organization, we have vendors (software houses), consultants, designers, writers, marketeers, librarians and a host of other highly skilled practitioners from impacted disciplines. In many cases, they have their own ‘discipline based’ professional association, however they come together within CM Pros because of the challenge and opportunity. As well as the need, discussed below, to call on other disciplines.

Back in 2006, I ran a half-day tutorial at Open Publish on web publishing strategy. As part of the course, I tried to highlight both the ’skill set’ (disciplines) that an organization might need, as well as the process of web publishing (both a longer build/review cycle and a shorter content renewal cycle). The resulting chart (borrowing from an earlier CM Pros content life-cycle chart and other related material) can be viewed at http://twitpic.com/3fwyz, or contact me and I will send you the document itself (david@veridianmedia.com.au).

In short summary, there is a regular cycle of content creation, processing, publishing, consumption and if the organization is smart, analysis and back to more content creation. Then there is a longer-term cycle of developing business strategy, determining the role of online tools, implementing online action and then as before, reviewing performance and back to more strategy (both organizational and online). Within this process, the skills that are called on are strategic, creative, intuitive, analytic and require an understanding of the organization, the media, the audience, trends and the available tools.

I am yet to meet the person who can claim to be a ‘black-belt’ in all of these, so I claim that this is not a discipline to itself that someone can master. In fact, as an organization trying to outperform competing organizations, I would claim that this is the classic example of where a team and multi-disciplinary focus is required. It is also why you want a ‘Content Management System’ to guide the various human inputs, become a repository for best practice and automate the aspects that can be automated. In particular to keep the organization on an iterative loop of sustained improvement.

Not with me on this?

Like I mentioned, I have been doing this a long time. I can write OK, my English good, and I have a Bachelor of Arts with an English Major to say so (blame my teachers if you pick up poor language construction - otherwise it was my fingers that slipped). I think I also understand business reasonably well, and again I have a Masters of Business Administration to say so (although I have not been as successful as others with this qualification). Add to this a long-standing involvement in the development of CMS software and the deployment of hundreds of websites. In another field of endeavor, I could have claimed to have achieved some level of mastery - not with Content Management. I know design well and have managed studios, however I am not an information designer (either trained or with a natural proclivity) - my design sucks (and I can prove it). I am also not a legal expert and I only have detailed knowledge of some business fields and markets. I am also not a specialist in rich media, advertising and I am too expensive (and easily distracted) to do data entry or repeated data analysis.

So once again, and to finalize this piece, I say ‘Content Management is not a discipline’, it is a cross-discipline team effort and if you want to be great in your own field (and have your business win online) - get the right team. Content Management is not a discipline, it is however one of the most significant challenges and opportunities for contemporary organizations, don’t put this in the hands of the wrong people or you will pay a heavy price.

The negative rests!