A Handbook for Collecting, Publishing and Presenting Content On Mobile Devices

While there are many ways to create, publish and share information across a variety of social, mobile and web channels, it’s not always easy to collect it all in one place. The folks at Infoteria, a company that develops and markets software and services that connect various corporate computers and devices, have a solution, called Handbook.

What is Handbook?

Handbook is a secure mobile document manager and presentation tool that offers a simple and attractive way to bind together documents in a variety of media types. By giving companies and consumer mobile users a way to easily and effectively share and present information both on and offline, Handbook helps organizations meet the security challenges of the BYOD mobile workforce with a centralized approach to mobile content management.

Recently, Infoteria made the Handbook content manager available for iPads, iPhones and Android devices. Now, users can bind together any combination of content, from documents and PDF files to  videos, photos, Web links and more, which users can assemble, publish and present collections of files in both online and offline settings.

This isn’t your traditional content management system. Users are able to select any content, in any order, depending on the need. Additionally, Handbook lets administrators, content creators and managers specify when particular files or pages will appear (or disappear) from view, in order to meet important privacy and security requirements.

Why Bundle Content?

Collecting information and bundling it for others makes it easier to access across different platforms, on and offline. With Handbook, you can securely share reports and presentations with meeting attendees in real time, adjust sales presentations on-the-fly to match the needs and interests of different clients, or share and publish information with work teams and vendors, collaborating as needed, without having to rebundle it each time!

By expanding the functionality to mobile devices, users can assemble, organize, share and present diverse kinds of content on any kind of tablet or smartphone.

Handbook includes Handbook Studio, a browser-based tool for uploading and managing content, and the Handbook viewer mobile application to view, browse and present content. 

Specific features include:

• Online and offline HTML5 support, allowing Web pages with many forms of moving rich-media content to be stored and viewed even when an Internet connection is not available. Users are also able to manipulate such content via hand gestures on their device — an impressive enhancement during presentations.
• A survey/questionnaire function that allows users to set up and distribute quizzes via their portable devices and show the results.
• Onscreen PDF annotation, which lets users circle or notate content using just their finger.

Those curious about trying Handbook can participate in a 30-day free trial or download the application from the Apple iTunes app store, Android Play Store or by download at the Handbook website.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

UserVoice CEO Richard White: Users Expect 'Luxury' Customer Experience #UserConf

Businesses are growing up on the Internet, and more and more, customers are used to self-service online. Businesses increasingly handle customer service via chat and social media channels. It's changing how we do business, Richard White, CEO of UserVoice said at the inaugural UserConf this week.

All Your Customer Support Belongs to Us

White pointed out that exceptional customer service is not new — we just call those companies luxury brands. But the majority of companies — who aren't luxury brands — have also seen their customers' expectations of service change.

"43 percent of people we surveyed said they could have solved a problem if they had the tools," White said. 

White's company, UserVoice is a startup that provides online forums and support systems for companies to better understand their customers. White founded the UserConf to gather people — not from the sales management or IT departments — who are focused on customer experience and let them share their ideas.

Traditional customer service is painful, and poor customer service is the #1 cause of customer attrition.

When we call our airlines or wireless companies, we expect to have to enter in our 10-digit account number, wait on hold and then have to give the number again to an agent, White said. In the future, agents will be better equipped to handle multiple channels, nearly all will respond to tweets and it will all be done in less than one day, he said. 

"As companies move to subscription-based models (Saas), customer support begins to look more like sales," White said.

Those customer support people aren't just solving problems but working with current customers to keep them coming back. The sales funnel indeed looks more like a loop in this scenario, but the kinds of problems being solved changes as well. In the subscription model, the more common problems are automated, so customer support is focused on dealing with more complex problems — even if they have fewer to handle overall.

The Digital Marketing Land Rush is Over

Companies can't simply build a Facebook app that tricks 10,000 people into handing over their contact info, and then raise a ton of money based on a gimmick, White said. Google AdWords bring in less money while the keywords cost more, he pointed out. In other words, as the Internet has grown up, it's become harder to bring in new customers in ways no one else has thought of. According to White, that means companies have to go back to old school tactics — like giving great customer service.

Editor's Note: For more insight into customer support strategies, read 5 Ways to Integrate Social Media Into Your Contact Center.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Meet the C-Suite: The Chief Marketing Officer Must Focus on the Customer

The onslaught of new technologies, media and marketing channels introduced within the past decade have definitely changed how the C-Suite approaches sales and marketing. Not only is the role of marketing included within a company’s key leadership positions, the responsibilities of the Chief Marketing Officer include more than just advertising and lead generation. In fact, it’s more common to have an executive who’s more content strategist than sales guru.

CMO: Marketing & Technology

The Chief Marketing Officer works closest with the Chief Technology Officer. At some companies, there’s been an emergence of a Chief Marketing Technology Officer, in which the executive must combine technology and analytical expertise to make sense of and leverage the vast amounts of customer and market data.

However, it’s still more common to see separate CMO and CTOs roaming the C-Suite. As a result, sometimes your digital marketing strategy is only as good as your technical infrastructure. However, like the CEO and CIO, who must focus on empowering employees through more efficient workflows, the CMO must empower customers to engage with a company across social networks and online communities.

More Challenges Than Success

In their 2011 CMO study, IBM uncovered a few common themes among CMOs, namely a need for better collaboration with CIOs, a more comprehensive focus on the customer and subsequent responsive communication, as well as a system of engagement that maximizes value with each interaction.

As a result, the study found that many CMOs are struggling to manage the impact of key changes in marketing. A successful CMO isn’t just a social networker, she needs to be a data scientist, adept at gleaning information from customer analytics and evolving key marketing messages accordingly.

It’s no surprise then that turnover among CMOs is quite high. According to a study by SpencerStuart, the average tenure for chief marketing officers of leading U.S. consumer brands is 42 months, which is higher than it was a few years ago, but half of what it is for a traditional CEO.

Customer Marketing Officer?

According to the following IBM CMO study infographic, the biggest problem CMOs have is adapting to the customer-centric social landscape. It’s not about market trends — it’s about the customer. Additionally, it’s not about the data, it’s about how data can help build relationships.

 

What Does the Future of the CMO Hold?

When the economy is good, great marketing is just icing on the cake. When times are tough, marketing is often the first to blame for bleak sales. While the CMO must focus on both data and customer relations, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line.

However, a company must invest in the cultural, organizational and technological infrastructure so that a CMO can spend more time fine-tuning key messages for the appropriate audience, rather than building the foundation upon which great content can be delivered. You can't have one without the other, and a CMO is hard pressed to do it all, making it essential that the C-Suite works together to support one another.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

OpenText: 5 Components Of its New Enterprise Information Strategy

Many companies faced with a growing number of channels and ways to access information just push ahead and hope they will hit on the right formula to stay in the enterprise information management space (EIM). Not OpenText. The changes in the market are so profound, its new CEO Mark J. Barrenechea has redefined the company’s strategy in five key areas.

OpenText’s Strategy

In fairness, there isn’t a huge change in strategy to the one that it has been following over the past couple of years, but the fact that it has been written down and that OpenText is publicizing the strategy does indicate that it is very clear as to where the company is going, at least in the medium term.

Obviously, the announcement is all part of the getting-to-know-you process between Barrenechea and the rest of the information management world after his appointment and the retirement of John Shackleton last January.

But it is also the sign of a confident company in the face of a market that is changing at an incredible rate; a case of “this is where we are, and this is where we’re going”, something many companies are still struggling with at the moment. Summarizing enterprise concerns and where the new strategy comes from, Barrenechea said:

We live in a world where the firewall is no longer the boundary for business…Today, information is mobile and lives everywhere - in the cloud and on premises. Organizations planning for the future require new, more dynamic ways to utilize information across social and mobile applications, manage everything from compliance to security leaks and enhance business processes and information exchange with customers, employees and partners…”.

Cloud, Data, Mobile Strategy

And that’s the key to this strategy. OpenText is building a business that is cloud-based, data-centric, mobile-enabled and agile. While it is not throwing out the old-ways — on premises applications and the like — it is fully embracing the new.

The change process began last year, Barrenechea says, before he came on board, but it is he who will develop and implement the strategy.

Generally speaking, it focuses on the next generation of enterprise software that will enable users to get the best out of their information, while at the same time still offering full governance, compliance and security.

Five EIM Pillars

As yet, there isn’t a huge amount of detail about this strategy, but we will be talking to OpenText over the coming days to fill out the skeleton we do have. In the meantime, these are the five pillars moving forward:

1. Enterprise content management: OpenText says that it will continue to build enterprise content management systems that offer users better insight into their data and provide more impact on their business. It also covers the development of information security solutions, ensuring confidentiality, privacy and access.
2. BPM: Another OpenText favorite and one that it will also continue to build on offering improved business impact, automation and management of business processes. In the OpenText stable it also comes with dynamic case management for multi-step processes as well and business modelling.
3. Customer Experience Management: Barrenechea also says they will be building around customer experience management with a focus on providing users with targeted and optimized information to create better relationships with their customers.
4. Information Exchange: This is one of the real enterprise sore points; how to exchange information between users internally, as well as getting information outside the fire-wall via file transfer, cloud-based file sharing and mobile synchronization.
5. Discovery: OpenText is also focusing on the discovery of information. It probably sounds a little bit more exotic than it actually is, but the basic idea is to be able to find information across enterprise systems. This is achieved through the application of intelligent metadata, as well as linking structured and unstructured information across multiple formats.

As you’ve gathered from this there isn’t a great deal of detail of how it is going to use, or develop, these five different components. In the next few days we will be talking to OpenText and will outline this strategy in greater detail then.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Optify Premium Edition Turns Inbound Marketers into Power Marketers

In June, Optify introduced a Digital Marketing Software Suite designed to help digital agencies keep track of the comings and goings across all digital channels. But what if you’re managing more than one brand or have brands that are split across countries? Can you really expect that one marketing suite can handle it all?

Power to the Marketers

Today, Optify has launched a premium edition of its Inbound Marketing Software suite. Designed for what it calls ‘power marketers’, the new edition gives unlimited access to Optify’s rich visitor and lead intelligence data, while including access to its Marketing API, multi-domain management tools, and support for more global search engines, keywords, page views and emails.

Optify CEO Rob Eleveld estimates that 10-20% of Optify’s current customers are power marketers. As a result, they wanted to target the sophisticated organization, who may have multiple subgroups, representing multiple product lines. At present, their current inbound marketing suite only allowed one domain per account and limited streams of data to tell them about their customers.

Owning the API (Before It Owns You)

With the Premium Edition, Optify thinks access to Optify's API is critical. It provides more than just generic web stats; rather it mines data better and more in-depth, allowing for better leader generation and marketing intelligence.

But just giving access to an API doesn't make marketers better. It's like opening the floodgates and if you're not prepared you could drown in a sea of data. Which is why Optify's premium edition will also provide users with the training they need to understand how to use the API and how to customize the data to fit their needs. Having a personal API coach on hand can be the difference between swimming upstream or using the stream to carry you in the right direction.

With Optify’s Premium Edition, power marketers have access to: 

• New Optify Marketing API: Easily pull data for custom reporting and in-depth analysis. Use the API to access website traffic and visitor history details for every individual visitor, lead or contact that comes to your site.
• Flexible Integration Capabilities: Pull website traffic and visitor intelligence data from Optify into any existing CRM or marketing application.
• Multi-Domain Management: Companies managing SEO and tracking the impact of marketing programs across multiple sites can now easily manage everything in one place. Includes fifteen domains out of the box, with more available as add-ons.
• Premium Access: The ability to track and analyze more domains, page views, keywords, landing pages and emails campaigns.

With the ability to manage up to 15 domains through one suite, power marketers can better monitor and manage all their accounts so they can glean information and share insights about their brands, customers and products more effectively. Additionally, the premium edition provides a evolutionary model for users who are not yet power marketers, but will soon be. The advanced analytics and access is a great, next step for when marketers start to evolve their brand and diversify their products .

Optify’s Premium Edition is available immediately for US$ 1,500/month. Other Optify editions include Express Edition for US$ 300/month and Professional Edition for US$ 600/month.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Altimeter: Content Marketing is Key to Converged Media Imperative

This year “convergence” is becoming much more than just a buzzword, particularly in the world of content marketing. As a recent report from Altimeter Group explains, three previously distinct channels are now merging to produce increasingly necessary hybrids.

The Media Trifecta

The report, “The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned, and Earned Media,” begins by defining these channels as they were originally known:

• Paid Media: display or broadcast advertising that requires a media buy, including banner ads, pay-per-click search ads, advertorials and sponsored links.
• Owned Media: content assets a brand either owns or wholly controls, such as websites, branded blogs, social media profiles, videos, etc.
• Earned Media: content that is user-generated and/or user-shared, including Tweets, Facebook updates, shares, reviews and comments made in open forums. “Another component of earned media is mentions in media or on social channels that are the result of PR or media relations,” reads the report. “For brands, earned media is the most elusive and difficult of the three channels; while it can be influenced, it cannot be directly controlled.”

The intermingling of these three approaches (illustrated in Altimeter’s graphic below) has been a natural result of digital marketing, as well as the growing levels of consumer connectivity. For example: paid advertising frequently incorporates social network-based conversations, or is re-fitted into the brand’s owned media, such as YouTube channels, for an extended shelf life. Meanwhile, owned media, such as a brand’s blog post, is now fed through social networks, often resulting in the generation of earned/shared media in the form of engagement.

“All channels work in concert, enabling brands to reach customers exactly where, how, and when they want, regardless of channel, medium, or device, online or offline,” explains the report. “With the customer journey between devices, channels, and media becoming increasingly complex, and new forms of technology only making it more so, this strategy of paid/owned/earned confluence makes marketers impervious to the disruption caused by emerging technologies.”

Strategies to Live By

But however natural, marketers are still struggling to harness the disruption this convergence has caused to their still segmented workflow. After all, brands have traditionally been organized into marketing subgroups of different territories and mindsets — not to mention departmental silos and disparate tool usage as well.

The report offers software vendors strategies for overcoming these related obstacles, including highly useful insight for planning:

• Overview and forecast of converged media landscape
• Converged media strategy checklist
• Leading vendor comparisons (including Adobe, IBM, Google, Salesforce and Oracle)
• Leveraging influencers throughout POE
• Converged media campaign case studies

Content Marketing Mayhem

All in all, Altimeter has recognized content marketing as today’s key to business success. As brands of all types continue to extend their feelers into the world of publishing, this will only prove to be more true, and a well defined strategy will be required to inspire communities to share and thereby prolong the life of that messaging.

"Preparing for Paid, Owned and Earned integration is not just a demand of present reality, but an inevitable necessity of the future of marketing, advertising, and communications,” reads the report in closing.

How are you currently managing Paid, Owned and Earned (POE)? Let’s start a conversation in the comment section below.

Editor's Note: To read more of Chelsi's thoughts on content marketing:

— Word of Mouth: Content Marketers' New Best Friend

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com