SharePoint 2013 - Planning a Search Strategy

The Olympic Games and US Presidential Elections come around every four years but SharePoint upgrades come on a three year cycle. There are still organizations using SharePoint 2007 and in the process of migrating to SharePoint 2010 and now we have SharePoint 2013 in all its glory.  

Microsoft also seems to be hinting that in future there could be more frequent upgrades. Before long you will probably be able to major in Microsoft Upgrade and Migration Planning at most major universities.

My particular interest is in enterprise search and here I have to congratulate Microsoft on the progress it has made since the fairly terrible search functionality in SharePoint 2007. The company was also smart enough to go out and buy FAST Search and Transfer in 2008, but not quite smart enough about financial due diligence and building a sensible search technology strategy for itself and for SharePoint.

The Technology Story So Far

The immediate result was the arrival of FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010, abbreviated to FS4SP. This took a lot of the components of FAST ESP 5.3, suitably modified to SharePoint 2010, and offered a substantial enhancement to SharePoint Search 2010 which itself was a significant leap forward from the search offering in SharePoint 2007.

Two issues immediately became obvious. First, many companies were convinced that they now had a licence for FAST ESP 5.3 and had no idea of the real state of affairs. Second, no one in the Microsoft partner community had any idea of how to get the best (or indeed anything at all!) out of FS4SP. My experience says that not that much has changed since launch unless the company has brought in external implementation expertise.

In 2010 Wrox published "Professional Microsoft Search" by Mark Bennett and his colleagues that covered all the Microsoft search products (including FAST ESP 5.3) in 450 pages. It is an excellent book because of the substantial amount of guidance it gives on the skills and management attention needed to get the best out of any search application.

It was not until earlier this year that Microsoft itself published "Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint," which runs to 450 pages just on FS4SP. There are so many omissions from this book that it would take me the rest of this column to list them, but the most notable are no references at all to using search logs to manage search performance and a total absence of any indications of the staffing requirements to support the product. It creates the impression that search implementation is a project, when at the minimum it is a program and in reality it is a journey without end. 

The other significant problem is that (unlike the Wrox book) the book does not tell you what FS4SP does not do. A good example is document thumbnails, which out of the box are only supported for Word documents and Powerpoint files. Certainly there are some good third-party solutions (Documill comes to mind) but that misses the point.

Fortunately there are many excellent search implementation companies (Comperio, Findwise, Raytion and Search Technologies for example) that can really make FS4SP sing and dance but that inevitably adds to the implementation cost. Even then, any company running FS4SP probably needs a search support team of at least 3-4 people full time. A look at Sadie van Buren’s invaluable SharePoint benchmarking service shows search way down the list in maturity of implementation.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Warning Signs Of David Petraeus's Fall, And How To Find A Way Forward

World-class organizations--the U.S. military included--are greater than their high-performing leaders. Here are the warning signs that an organization may be susceptible to malfeasance, and how to recover after the fall.

The recent spate of transgressions, whether by high-profile CEOs or general officers, should elicit reflection about what we expect of top leaders, and what organizations should do when those leaders let us down. Our social networks are ablaze with laments by people who have lost their heroes--“first Lance Armstrong, now Generals Petraeus and Allen, who will be next, are there any heroes we can count on?” It’s a vulnerability we’ve brought on ourselves by viewing integrity as a heroic personal characteristic, rather than a pattern of daily decisions or a set of organizational standards.

As to the former view, America would be much better served by finding heroes closer to home, in teachers, coaches, police officers, grandparents, nurses, and other everyday champions who maintain integrity in our society every day. Famous personalities are idealized and will be undercut by human frailty, sometimes publicly, sometimes not. Great organizations--and Livestrong and the U.S. military are great organizations--gain their strength from the collective integrity of their everyday heroes.

The path ahead for great organizations that suffer senior leader malfeasance starts with accountability. David Petraeus's quick and decisive resignation was the first step back into his lifelong pattern of doing the right thing that will lead inevitably to personal reconciliation and future public contribution. Organizations need to take swift action to reestablish their collective integrity following a senior leader mistake, because great organizations are invariably greater than their high performing leaders. Does his loss make our country less safe? Hardly. Military leaders take great pride in building organizations that maintain high performance following the unexpected loss of a leader; it would be a leadership failure to create an organization that fell apart when the boss goes down. Leaders of Petraeus's stature are not isolated geniuses--they are a near movement, organizing and blending their intellect with those around them into systems of thinking and doing. Part of their success is reflected in the counterintuitive reality that the greatest can always be replaced. To think otherwise is to embrace the antiquated “great man” view of leaders through history.

If egos are at the core of senior leader transgression, be highly cautious of buffers that grow between the leader and the greater organization.

Most explanations for bad personal decisions among top-tier leaders involve unchecked egos, and the expansion of a leader’s personal staff in organizations with otherwise austere personnel practices is a clear indication that the individual is taking precedence over the organization. In the military, tradition holds that flag officers have a small personal staff that includes an Aide-de-Camp. In the past 20 years, however, new follower roles have emerged around these military leaders—tiger teams, special initiatives groups, strategic communications advisors, protocol hostesses and social liaisons (a la Jill Kelley), special historians, biographers, videographers, all arguably focused more on the leaders themselves than on the organization broadly. Little wonder that egos expand to the breaking point. While regulations focus on the appropriate use of official aides, these sketchier positions have no such limitations. A general or admiral can literally surround themselves with buffers of personal staff, pulling advice and decision making closer to themselves and away from more formal organizational staff structures that are less likely to produce protective, fawning sycophants who are more tolerant of (or willing participants in) ethical transgression. The result is over-fed leader egos and limited access by others in the organization. This organizational phenomenon is worthy of scrutiny in all large organizations with powerful leaders, not just our military.

There are clear lessons here for those who can clear their heads and hearts of the schadenfreude that accompanies public scandal. Think of integrity as an organizational quality to be nurtured daily. Avoid hero worship and the false perception that integrity is a heroic personal characteristic. The best organizations hold leaders accountable, and the best leaders are quick to hold themselves accountable. Great leaders have already made themselves expendable. And if egos are at the core of senior leader transgression, be highly cautious of buffers that grow between the leader and the greater organization. Perhaps the most important lesson is that the ongoing and passing scandals are not a requiem for heroes, but a rare glimpse into the simple human frailty of some of our finest leaders.

--Retired Brigadier General Tom Kolditz is a professor in the practice of leadership at the Yale School of Management. He led the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, for 12 years, and was founding director of the West Point Leadership Center. He is the author of In Extremis Leadership: Leading as if Your Life Depended on It. Follow him on Twitter @thomaskolditz.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Marketing Automation: From Lead Generation to Sales Management

B2B selling organizations today rely on marketers to generate the leads necessary to start their efforts, and marketing organizations rely more and more on technology to generate those leads. But it's time now to connect the dots between marketing and sales.

The technologies marketers use include behavioral analysis tools (tied to dynamic site content), mass emailing engines, campaign management workflow and lead scoring dashboards. The next step is bringing together these technologies with those used by sales organization to ensure end-to-end sales and customer management.

Moving Outside of Email

“You gotta get out of email. It's getting less and less effective,” said Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua in a recent interview with Direct Marketing News. Eloqua is one of the leading providers of marketing automation software and a vocal advocate for alignment of marketing and sales organizations.

Most marketing automation vendors today have a strong focus on email marketing. And while email isn’t going away, neither is the frustration with campaign generated email, legitimate or spam. When marketing departments send out large “blasts,” they typically have no relevance or context to individual sales cycles being nurtured by sales. Those blasts could be responsible for “channel conflict” and be delaying sales success.

Time for Sales and Marketing to Meet

Sales people don’t live in the marketing world and most wouldn’t know how to. And marketing people don’t live in sales and usually don’t want to.

This disconnect has been resolved by a few vendors. Eloqua offers integration with Salesforce.com (SFDC), Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle/Siebel CRM On Demand. Partdot, recently acquired by ExactTarget, integrates with SFDC. So, what do these platforms do that sales can see?

Pardot scores contacts and leads in SFDC. It also shows marketing activity for contacts directly inside contact records. Even more impressive though is how Pardot campaigns can be managed directly from within SFDC. Most CRM applications are weak in this area, even a heavyweight such as SFDC. Of course for such magic to occur, users of SFDC must install a Pardot AppExchange app and this is where eyes start to glaze over for all but the most sophisticated companies.

Marketing automation vendors seem aware they are lacking in sales integration. Eloqua focuses on campaigns based on sales pipeline stage. It’s either build or buy and buying seems to be a way beyond email. Recently, ExactTarget acquired Pardot. And Teradata scooped up German firm eCircle.

Perhaps the real sign that marketing automation is seriously transforming will be its step into sales technologies.

Image courtesy of Vaju Ariel (Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: To read more by Steve, check out The Need for a Simpler Enterprise CMS Sharing Interface

About the Author

Steve Youngblood is the CEO of Salestrakr, a SaaS based CRM application focused on small to medium businesses. Steve is also a regular contributor to CMSWire. Steve has been a founding member of a number of software companies and has launched new applications across the world. Steve's expertise is in product creation and sales and has deep interests in user experience, social crm and web collaboration.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Empathy: The Web Professional's Greatest Skill

The trend towards greater and greater customer empowerment requires a deeper and deeper understanding of customer needs.

“When people, teams, and organizations develop new products and services, they tend to have endless discussions about what users or customers need, who customers are, and what features the design of their offering should have,” Tomer Sharon, Search UX Researcher at Google and author of recent book, ‘It’s Our Research’, states. This is what I call designing with five smart people in a room drinking lattes syndrome.

“Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley and a Stanford university professor, says there are no facts inside the building,” Tomer says. “Development teams cannot make decisions without developing customers first. Not products, not technologies: Customers. He coined the mantra, "Get Out of the Building". What he means by that is that developers of products should get up from their comfortable chairs and proactively seek opportunities to learn from their customers about their needs to be able to understand what the company's business model should be.”

Tomer cites “intuition” as one of the primary reasons people don’t get out of the building. In a modern, complex, constantly changing world, intuition is a dangerous thing. Intuition is essentially learned behavior patterns. It speaks to the past. If the same basic event keeps recurring then intuition is great. But if the world is changing rapidly, intuition can be disastrous.

“Some people are just scared of what they'll hear,” Tomer states. “They are afraid of failing and of invalidating their assumptions. Actually, they don't consider their assumptions as such. They think they are facts. It is our jobs (UX practitioners) to help people recognize their assumptions.”

One very interesting technique Tomer uses to combat ‘stay in the building’ syndrome he calls Field Fridays. “Field Fridays are an excellent opportunity for software engineers to meet users face to face, see how they use their products, and learn about their behavior. During these events, a team of engineers moderates 20-minute interview sessions with real users, speed dating style, on a Friday morning once a month. I started this program since I was amazed to learn that some engineers work on products for 3 years without meeting a single human being who actually uses their code.”

Tomer says that divergence between what the team thinks the customer will do and what the customer actually does happens on a daily basis. And don’t trust what customers tell you, either.

“Navigational search queries are ones where users use Google to search for websites or webpages,” Tomer states. “For example, when I enter "netherlands wikipedia" into the search box, I am conducting a navigational query. When I am entering "population size netherlands" into the search box, it is not a navigational query since I don't have a specific site in mind. When you explain this concept to Google users and ask them if they conduct navigational queries, they usually tell you they hardly do them. Yet, when you ask them to complete a certain task or if you analyze usage logs or even the same person's web search history (after getting their permission of course), you find they do many navigational searches. Humans are very bad at analyzing their behavior (past, present, and future) and they tend to rationalize it so they look good, reasonable, and smart. I try to focus my research on observing behavior rather than listening to what people say.” 

About the Author

Gerry McGovern, a content management author and consultant, has spoken, written and consulted extensively on writing for the web and web content management issues since 1994. His latest book is titled The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Evolving Role of Content Management in Modern Intranets

As 2012 comes to a close, it’s safe to say that the modern intranet has become a mission-critical resource for most in mid to enterprise sized organizations. If we were to look at an intranet today and compare it to the 2009, 2006 and 2003 versions within those organizations, the differences would be nothing less than striking in terms of their effectiveness and impact on the overall organization.

One might reasonably ask what is the role of content management in today’s intranet, and how is it evolving?

Those of us that design and implement these experiences know that content management has an essential role in any interactive project, but understand that an Enterprise CMS isn’t a panacea; there’s plenty going on in a modern intranet these days that’s not content. Today’s intranets are dynamic, social, highly collaborative experiences that connect people to all sorts of content, data, applications and, perhaps most importantly, to each other. 

Content Management in Action on Today’s Intranet

While enterprise social capabilities are clearly essential, a practical intranet implementation simply can’t succeed without some “traditional” Enterprise CMS feature support. For example:

• Easily adopted tools: Non-technical content contributors must be able to create web pages, documents, centralized asset libraries for video, images, etc. This is especially important for inherently social content like blogs, wikis, and threaded discussions. If you want people to create and share, it can’t be too difficult or time consuming.
• Governance tools often found in the Enterprise CMS stack: Editorial approval workflows, security enacted via permissioning and personalization, revision control with audit trails, analytics containing access data. These are especially critical for any group beholden to a standards body (Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SEC, etc.).
• Templating concepts: Structured/normalized content and branding/design standards are usually necessary, especially when building an organization’s primary intranet site.

Taxonomy Matters

The CMS often provides the core "glue" for all collaborative experiences on an intranet: the classification engine.

A well implemented Enterprise CMS with a robust classification engine for taxonomy, folksonomy and metadata is at the heart of any intranet with “long-legged” strategic goals. While technical scalability is essential, a “killer back end” isn’t nearly enough on its own. Here’s how I’d define “robust” in this context:

• The classification engine has to be easily adoptable, by information architects, librarians, subject matter experts and the entire contributing user base alike.
• The same terminology within the enterprise classification engine must be universally available to all content — and people. All related implementation decisions should be non-technical in nature. For example, a major adoption barrier in SharePoint 2007 was rooted in an inability to share terms across Site Collections.
• Folksonomy and controlled vocabularies must have an inherent relationship. Tools that allow for easy promotion from the former to the latter, along with the ability to define synonyms, must be available to SMEs and librarians.

Where Social and Collaboration Fit In

Wait, aren’t intranets all about enterprise social connections and collaboration these days? Why the taxonomy rant?

This isn’t an “either/or” decision point. At a minimum you need a cocktail of content management tools, Enterprise Social feature support and a super-reliable search engine to unlock the potential of the intranet and raise an organization’s IQ. Consider how combining these tools can become an “intranet trifecta,” if we tune and prioritize search result ranking, using:

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Customer Experience: Serving the Customer, Building the Brand

As customers become more powerful, organizations need to become more flexible and responsive. 

“Yes, consumers are more demanding, time-starved, informed and choice-saturated than ever-before (we know you know),” the Trendwatching article entitled "Servile Brands" states. “For brands to prosper, the solution is simple though: turn servile. This goes far beyond offering great customer service. Servile means turning your brand into a lifestyle servant focused on catering to the needs, desires and whims of your customers, wherever and whenever they are.”

Consumers are more demanding today than ever before. However, this gives rise to a paradox. On the one hand, they feel much more in control and empowered. They want to make the news on social media, not just consume it. On the other hand, they feel under pressure. “A survey by research company Datamonitor found that 44% of consumers across 14 countries now say that it’s difficult to manage their daily obligations and find time to relax,” Trendwatching states.

So, consumers need help. But they need it on their terms. They want it all and they want it easy. They want to free up more time so they can be more engaged. They want to communicate more with family, friends and peers. The more they learn the more they learn to distrust official sources, whether they be governments, media, religions or brands.

Trendwatching quotes a range of studies which show a sharp decline in consumer trust. For example:

• Only 47 percent of consumers around the world say they trust paid media (television, magazine and newspaper ads), a decline of over 20 percent since 2009.
• Only 29 percent of consumers in Brazil, China and India say that it pays to be loyal to favored brands

At the heart of most organizations is a belief that they are special, unique, that they are the center of the universe. The potential customer is an unbeliever who needs to be converted to the right path. Once they see the light and purchase the product they will be forever loyal. It’s all about conversion.

“Understand that the days of revered brands are over,” Trendwatching states. “It’s not about telling your customers that you are important, and they can have a slice of you if they pay for it. Instead, it’s about telling customers: 'Whatever you need or want, we’re here to help' (or even better, 'We know what you want, here, we’ve already done it for you').”

Service is hard. It requires a degree of humility. Focusing on being loyal to the customer rather than trying to make the customer loyal to you runs against traditional organizational thinking. To be a servant in the world of the customer is just too hard for many egos.

Walking with the customer on their journey and making things better along the way is not nearly as exciting for many marketers as sitting there as some maestro defining the journey that you will then convince the customer into taking.

We now live in the customers’ world. Brands are at best guests at the table. It’s a world of peers and sharing, of comments, ratings and reviews. It’s a show me world. It’s a world of service. 

About the Author

Gerry McGovern, a content management author and consultant, has spoken, written and consulted extensively on writing for the web and web content management issues since 1994. His latest book is titled The Stranger's Long Neck: How to Deliver What Your Customers Really Want Online.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Interview: Michael Orbach from Cascadia Capital on the Evolving Customer Experience Market

The rise of social media has radically altered the state of customer communications. Organizations now have unparalleled insight into customer wants, needs  and — more importantly — into their perspectives. But consumers have gained a tremendous amount of influence, with social networks literally giving a global voice to every customer. This means that delivering a positive customer experience — tailored to individual expectations — is now a critical part of marketing and customer service.

Thus, the market for customer experience management (CXM) technology has grown significantly in importance in the past few years. CMSWire recently had the chance to discuss CXM technology and market trends with Michael Orbach, Managing Director of Cascadia Capital, a boutique investment bank specializing in private and public growth companies in the social and digital media sectors, among other markets. 

CXM — What Is It?

Orbach began his commentary by briefly providing a firm definition of CXM, which can be a somewhat nebulous term.

“CXM fits into the marketing automation sector,” he said. “In this broader sector, you have solutions that perform functions like marketing surveys, customer polling and web content management. But CXM focuses on how businesses interact with consumers at the point of product.”

Although CXM solutions can be used in virtually any industry, Orbach used the successful coffee retail chain Starbucks as an example to illustrate how CXM actually works.

“Starbucks interacts directly with consumers at the store level and uses feedback to improve corporate performance," he said. "The segment is extremely dynamic, and it all starts with customer interaction.”

However, Orbach cautioned that customer feedback must be meaningful. “You need something more than, ‘The girl behind the counter is pretty’ or ‘This place is dirty,’” he stated. “That doesn’t really tell you much.”

How Does CXM Work?

CXM technology helps companies ensure they collect meaningful customer feedback in a timely manner. “Surveys often have a gamification aspect to create an initiative to participate,” said Orbach. In the case of a retailer like Starbucks, gamification might extend to the back end so local store personnel are also incentivized to encourage customer participation. Technologies such as mobile devices — along with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter — can also help organizations obtain instant feedback, which allows for faster response to any customer issues or concerns.

In addition to providing an adequate and timely customer feedback mechanism, CXM solutions also must provide a means of interpreting feedback once it is collected. “There is a complex analytics problem,” said Orbach. “You get a lot of data in a short time. In the case of Starbucks, they need to analyze feedback and then deliver results to the store manager and regional manager, as well as to the corporate entity.”

Orbach said the potential for high volumes of immediate data created by the ubiquity of mobile devices and social media also necessitates a strong analytics component to any CXM solution.

What Is the Market Like?

Considering how important CXM has become in an era of consumer empowerment and instant global communication, it’s not surprising that Orbach sees a very healthy market for CXM

“There is a lot of CXM activity in terms of mergers and acquisitions and financing,” said Orbach. “Oracle acquired RightNow, TPG invested $1 billion in SurveyMonkey, Fizzback was bought by Nice.”

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Optimizing Organizational Effectiveness Through Social Business

Many organizations today are seeking opportunities to be more responsive and effective. Typical goals are to improve sales efficiency, accelerate innovation and increase responsiveness to customers. As companies have leveraged the benefits of external communication using social networking, leading organizations have recognized the potential for similar impact through full transformation into a social business.

Collaboration in Demand 

IBM's 2012 CEO Study identified that collaboration is the number-one trait CEOs are seeking in their employees, with 75 percent of CEOs calling it critical. A new, unprecedented era of internal knowledge sharing, catalyzed by “digital natives” entering the workforce, brings expectations of connectedness and contributing to the overall organization. Becoming a social business drives both the cultural change as well as technology adoption required to meet the expectations of employees as well as customers, partners, and suppliers.

The largest potential for improved collaboration is insertion of social into business processes. Inside the organization, this can lead to measurable improvements in the responsiveness and close rate of salespeople, faster delivery of new products and shorter cycle time in providing customer service. There are efficiency benefits as well, as organizations turn from sending information in private channels such as email to sharing information through social file repositories, wikis, blogs or profiles.

Putting Social to Work at IBM

At IBM, we have proven the value of social business tools in several ways. Here are a few examples:

• Our inside sales organization has increased its successful conversion rate for leads and opportunities, based on utilization of internal social tools. Salespeople now have direct access to product expertise and information, which they can then utilize to address customer requirements and objections more quickly. We have measured a several percentage point improvement in results which can be directly correlated to the use of internal social networking.
• Project teams at IBM increasingly are comprised of talent clouds, where the best subject-matter experts and skilled leaders are assembled for a particular activity. To help identify and leverage expertise, employees create and maintain their own organizational profiles, including much richer data than the typical corporate directory. IBMers document their technical skills, spoken languages, customer affiliations, interests and previous employers, all of which feeds into an expertise location system.
• Unstructured activity tracking has replaced formal project management for group-oriented task management. The activity-centric model provides significant improvements versus email oriented approaches, which tend to focus on individual to-dos and keep most of the knowledge hidden in individual user mailboxes. 
  Shared activities store everything from meeting minutes to presentation material to document templates, all in a outline-oriented shared repository. Activity contributors typically can be added by anyone already involved, ensuring that new contributors are enabled organically.

In my own experience, the motivations for participating in internal collaboration through social business tools are clear. My daily email volume has decreased over the last three years, despite greater responsibilities. The constant inbox assault of requests for current presentations, attempts to locate me or determine the status of current projects or activities has all disappeared.

By providing all of that information through our use of social business tools, those IBMers who I normally interact with or influence can find useful information on their own, by utilizing tags, search tools or notifications. This has resulted in a transformation of email into a social mail experience, where only relevant content arrives in my inbox with a faster path to action.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Building a Social Media Team: The Community Manager

Social Media has evolved from its beginnings as a recreational pastime into a tool for communication, social activism — and of course, business. While even the most conservative organizations are incorporating social components into their operations and strategy, many continue to struggle with exactly how to get started. An almost infinite number of consultants, books and articles offer guidance on strategy, but many fail to answer a key question: who will actually do the work? In the first installment in our six-part series, we take a look at building a social media team.

First Things First

Organizations of all sizes and types are embracing social media. But just as there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, social media goals vary as well — by business type, budget, philosophy and industry. Some view social as a marketing channel to reach new customers; others leverage it more for customer service purposes. Still others only participate as a defensive mechanism to avoid reputation damage. Before building a team, it is critical to have a social strategy. 

This guidance isn’t limited to social media. But given the age of social and urgency of social initiatives in many businesses, some leaders choose to believe social media teams can figure everything out along the way.

They won’t.

Throwing people together and assuming they will find a common goal — one that will be compatible with the company's business strategy — is a recipe for disaster. In extreme cases, it can lead to a very public and expensive disaster.

This doesn’t mean every organization must engage in endless strategy discussions. Small businesses may be able to define goals in a meeting or two. After establishing a strategy, prioritize goals and needs before moving forward. Identifying goals will help provide direction and clarify the scope of activities the team might perform such as:

• Listening and following up
• Content creation
• Monitoring and analytics
• Setting internal social media policy

In addition to the strategy, it is important to have strong, engaged leadership (somebody had to set those goals, right?). The leadership function could be described as a team role, however, that person (or leaders' group) is often external to the team performing day to day activities. The leader is typically responsible for getting buy-in with other executives, and becomes the “face” of the initiative to encourage adoption (and the intersection of social with other corporate programs). Although we don’t explore the leadership role, it is very critical for ensuring the long-term success of social efforts.

The Community Manager

The Altimeter Group conducted a survey of 144 social business program managers at corporations with more than 1,000 employees. The firm used the data from this survey and a few other studies to create the report, "Social Business Readiness: How Advanced Companies Prepare Internally" detailing the ways in which companies prepare to engage in social media. The guidance was helpful, but not all companies are enterprise class, nor do all organizations want to engage — at least initially — in activities as comprehensive as those described by the firm.

There are a few roles which we will explore in the series, that are essential for any social effort. Keep in mind that these are roles, not positions. It is possible for a single individual to serve multiple roles as long as the individual is able to address all of the responsibilities.

The first role organizations should consider establishing is the external liaison — or as it’s more commonly known, the Community Manager. This person performs a vital function — even for companies not attempting to create throngs of enamored fans on social networks — because social inherently requires interacting with the public. The community manager is the point of contact between the organization and the public. Before social media, this role might have been handled by corporate communications. But it has become clear that traditional corporate communications strategies aren’t adequate in an environment where 140-characters can travel the world — and handicap a business — in seconds.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Path from Fileshare to SharePoint

One of the major complaints about SharePoint is that, while it contains the potential for expanded business productivity and automation, within many organizations it has become yet another file share. 

While that may be true, the primary difference is that, unlike those old file shares, SharePoint has the potential to be expanded upon. It is the sleeping giant in the organization. And funny enough, one of the major trends these days is movement of old network file shares and their vast volumes of unstructured data into SharePoint.

Let's examine why this shift is happening. For one, the adoption lifecycle for SharePoint as a platform is maturing, with over 80 percent of the Fortune 500 companies either owning 2010 or planning to move to 2010. SharePoint adds many benefits that file shares just can’t provide, including retention policies, taxonomy and metadata, business productivity through workflow and forms, and robust document editing and versioning capability, to name a few.

The number one reason organizations delay their file share migration to SharePoint is fear of the unknown — they simply don't know where to start.

Understanding the Options

According to my colleague Mark McGovern, the logical place to begin the planning process of moving network file shares to SharePoint is to do an inventory, and determine which types of file shares are appropriate to migrate and which are not:

Some questions to ask during this process are: What is the volume of content to be moved? How often is it accessed? Does it need to be retained for a set period due to compliance reasons? Are the documents highly collaborative? Lots of small documents that are modified frequently and need to be retained for a given period would be a great candidate for migration. It is usually a combination of factors that determines the decision."

The next place that many organizations get "stuck" is in deciding the method for the migration. Depending on the skillset on hand, the timeframe in which to move the content or the complexity of content (multiple versions, historical metadata or maybe just the sheer volume of content), administrators can attempt to do it manually, they can engage their developers to write some custom code or use PowerShell scripts, or they can purchase one of many 3rd party tools on the market that support the SharePoint environment.

As Mark points out, the answer to that question — as with all difficult decisions in the SharePoint world — is that "It depends."

Mark adds,

There are pros and cons of each method. For example, when uploading files manually, the CreatedBy, CreatedDate, ModifedBy and ModifiedDate are not maintained. For legal reasons, this loss of historical metadata may rule out this method. Fortunately, there are tools on the market that can retain this important metadata."

Migration Considerations

Most file shares have become a dumping ground for content. While there may be valuable content within your system, it is likely you also have massive amounts of duplicate, outdated and unnecessary content that should be purged from your system. As you prepare to move this content, some questions you should ask include:

• Do you know what content is out there?
• Do you know who owns the content, and whether it even needs to be moved? (maybe it can remain, but indexed and therefore searchable)
• Is the folder structure important?
• Do you need to maintain historic metadata?
• Is the plan to move the content as-is and decommission your hardware, or will you attempt to organize/clean up the content prior to your migration?
• Will some content remain on the old system? (it might be tied to other internal tools that are not yet ready to move to SharePoint, or may never move to SharePoint)
• Are you planning to apply metadata and taxonomy? (using the existing folder structure, or creating a new taxonomy)
• Are users driving the clean up and tagging process, or is it an administrative effort?

Whatever method you decide to employ, the single most important aspect of migrating file share content to SharePoint is the metadata applied. As much as possible, make sure that you tag your documents with metadata during the migration, as applying metadata later can be labor-intensive, and you may introduce a greater potential for human error (you miss some of the content, don't apply new metadata or content types everywhere). Adding metadata tags during the migration makes your content more “findable” and easier to surface through search or through SharePoint's social capabilities.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Marketing vs IT: Who Drives the Customer Experience? #BMAthriving

For many organizations, their definition of customer experience falls into a customer support department heavily staffed to keep wait times for call centers low. But that’s missing the mark.

Customer experience truly stands as the one way to create a lifecycle story for customers across all channels. And with today’s über online customer, marketing spend has geared up to outpace IT in technology to get the right infrastructure in place. In fact, if Gartner research is any indication, CMOs will have larger IT budgets than CIOs within the next five years.

That was the discussion at a recent Business Marketing Association (BMA) regional conference in Denver. Designed to facilitate conversations between marketing and IT executives, the agenda included insights from leaders in customer experience, as well as experts in content marketing who help keep customers engaged across all channels.

Forget the Warm Fuzzies

Customer experience isn't just a feel-good tactic; it's a foundational element in acquiring, serving and cross/up‐selling customers. Marketers have to understand how to design the customer experience, enable it and use it to grow value because today, it’s the experience that defines organizations. There’s a big difference between problem solving for customers and creating delight. Customer support addresses the former while customer experience delivers the latter.

But to create a truly meaningful customer experience, companies have to be prepared to measure everything they do throughout the customer experience lifecycle, from strategy to delivery. Doing so requires a solid foundation in technology because it’s metrics that create understanding around where and how often a customer engages and then generates the ability to create a consistent experience across all touch points — social media, apps, email, a phone call, click-to-chat and so forth.

With the plethora of things and ways to measure customer experience, panelists talked about the need to simplify measurement. One approach is Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS simplifies data collected into one number that can be tracked over time, reported quickly and allow for adjustments in processes rapidly.

Creating Digital Conversations

Since customer experience is intended to create meaningful relationships, one of the linchpins for making this happen is content.

If you expect customers to keep coming back to you, it’s because you have content that matters to them. Content creates conversations, but it has to be a two-way street. Some companies focus on listening to customers, which is an indisputable first step. But there also has to be a point when they engage. How would you feel if you were at a cocktail party and someone followed you around all night but never said a word? Creeped out, most likely.

Once you have your content marketing plan and platform in place, companies have to resist the urge to control the conversation. Communities want to interact, to comment, share perspectives and openly criticize what doesn’t work. That’s hard for some companies to stomach. But authenticity is a big part of the customer experience and building engagement.

Looking Ahead

Customer experience is a challenging world and will continue to become more complex over the next 24 months. In looking down the road, the panelists spotlighted some key trends:

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Is Marketing Absorbing IT's Role for Marketing Automation? #BMAthriving

As the role of marketing grows with importance within organizations, budgets have begun to shift as well. With marketing becoming increasingly technology based, it now stands as an indisputable driver of IT purchases. So much so that Gartner research predicts that by 2017, CMOs will have larger IT budgets than CIOs.

That was the discussion at a recent Business Marketing Association (BMA) regional conference in Denver. The event was designed to bring together both marketing and IT executives to facilitate conversations on how to better work together as roles, processes and outcomes continue to evolve.

Two closely tied panels during the day included demand generation and marketing automation. Speakers from the corporate, agency and technology spheres shared their perspectives on current challenges and future trends for both demand gen and marketing automation.

No Small Change

Raab Associates predicts that 2012 revenues for B2B marketing automation systems will jump 60 percent, surpassing the 50 percent spike in 2011. Reaching US$ 525 million in revenues this year will certainly underscore the fact that not only do enterprises lean heavily on marketing automation, so do SMBs. This means that companies can now take smarter action in connecting with their customers and prospects, and also can track what’s working, what isn’t and rapidly adjust.

No More Random Acts of Marketing

Marketers need to think first about the early stages that encompass integrated marketing management — the operations side of the house. By better understanding their processes, one company streamlined enough to increase its productivity threefold. Now, they’re also able to consistently measure their results and make smarter decisions once they engage with a prospect.

One of the transitions that panelists see from marketing holding control of their IT infrastructure, is that the skillsets that marketers need as technologists vary drastically from that of the IT department. Today’s marketers need to understand how to align the processes, platforms and people in order to accomplish business goals of the organization. This requires knowing how a technology infrastructure helps move them in the right direction faster.

What are the top things that companies can do to make their demand gen and marketing automation programs more effective today?

1. Clean up your database: Data is everything to a marketer. Make sure yours is clean and that you’ve removed emotionally disengaged contacts. Once complete, you’ll immediately have a much clearer picture of your reach and effectiveness and how to woo sales qualified leads (SQLs).
2. Make your content relevant: Speak to your audience from a buyer’s perspective, not yours as the seller. Keep content current. Understand your goals for the next 12 months and how you expect to interact with prospects. Automation puts the right content in front of the right buyer at the right time.
3. Rally the troops: We’ve moved beyond the traditional art and copy aspect of marketing, and now have to integrate code into all of our decisions. This means getting everyone together — marketing, IT, sales and finance — in the same room early to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and understand the path to reach them.
4. Know your KPIs: While SQLs tend to serve as the ROI metric for most companies, those with a more sophisticated outlook have a model that allows them to push deeper into the funnel. With data feedback on multiple areas, marketers will then understand what KPIs have the most meaning, and let technology help make these areas even more effective.

What’s on the Horizon?

With all that’s changing and at such a rapid pace, understanding tomorrow’s trends is paramount for making decisions today. These panelists had consensus on a few key directions for the future:

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Major U.S. News Sources Continue Drop in Credibility

If the credibility of major U.S. news organizations keeps declining, at what point are they no longer “mainstream”? That’s one of the questions that emerges from the results of a new study.

The study, released last week by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, covered 13 major news organizations, including the New York Times, USA Today, the three cable news channels, NPR and broadcast TV news.

Republicans’ Views

The average positive believability rating for the 13, measured as 3 or 4 on a 4 point scale, is 56 percent of respondents, down from 62 percent in 2010. Ten years ago, that figure was 71 percent.

Pew said that every news outlet it measured has experienced a double-digit decline since 2002, except local TV news and daily newspapers. The survey, taken July 19 through 22, queried 1001 adults. A rating of 4 indicated that the respondent believed all or most of what the news organization reported, while 1 indicated the respondent believed “almost nothing” from that source.

The report noted that partisan differences have increased as Republicans’ views of news organizations’ credibility erodes. Only Fox News and local TV have positive believability ratings from two-thirds of those who identify as Republican. The situation is reversed with Democrats, who rate news organizations with a 3 or 4 — except for Fox News.

Local TV news currently rates highest, with 65 percent of respondents giving that source a 3 or 4, and CBS’ 60 Minutes news magazine show is close behind at 64 percent.

NY Times, Fox, USA Today

ABC News is third at 59 percent, followed by the Wall Street Journal at 58 percent, CNN also at 58, CBS News at 57, NBC News at 55, and NPR at 52. The bottom three are the New York Times, Fox News and USA Today, each at 49 percent.

The Time’s believability rating has dropped nine points in two years, from 58 percent in 2010, comparable to USA Today, which had been 56 percent. The Journal has dropped only 4 points since 2010, but a whopping 19 points since 2002.

Local newspapers’ believability remains about the same as two years ago, when it was 59 percent, compared to today’s 57 percent. MSNBC has dropped from 60 percent in 2010 to 50 percent, and both CNN and Fox have fallen 7 points over that period.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com