No WEM without Multichannel WCM

As every 2 years, new words and fancy abbreviations pop up in our market. If you read reports, blog posts of specialists, it is all about Web Engagement (WEM) or Customer Engagement (CEM) which seem to become an additional layer on top of WCM or for some people even a substitute.
While it makes absolutely sense, it makes me wonder how a WCM vendor should think when it comes to strategically look ahead in terms of positioning and roadmap. Almost all WCM vendors today address that in a way already but what is next?

Why Engagement?

I am a strong believer in the fact the media industry is driving the WCM market. Publishers have embraced the digital channel quite early and develop mostly banner-ad based business models (CPM). Traffic has always been everything for them in order to generate more business.

But clicks are not necessarily engaged users. During the last years, online advertising has been going down rapidly forcing publishers to find new business models. There are no real recipe out there but a trend is definitely Performance advertising. Advertisers want more than clicks and expect more information about their customers. It basically means that digital media should be lead generating, web sites should capture leads. This is where online marketing and engagement come in. You need to target your users (segmentation), bring them a unique experience so that they are willing to register, subscribe etc. The more information you get about how they engage and interact (lead scoring) the better it is for advertisers or any online business. Developing nutrition programs to continuously track the sales-readiness of your leads becomes also important.

I guess this is why engagement has become so important and why WCM technology not only should able to handle content that will generate traffic but also enable engagement.

Should vendor focus on building a WEM suite?

Based on this context, it seems to make sense that WCM vendors should strategically invest in the "Engagement" direction(they all do!) in order to do more than how they address those issues today. But in which way?

A vendor could build his own suite, OEM with one dedicated Online Marketing Suite vendor or choose an Integration position and build plug ins with the leading online marketing suites of the markets. To have my view on that, I think that making an analogy between Online Marketing Suite and Ad Serving Technology can be interesting.

Indeed, few years back, web sites were advertisement driven and we all remember that most of our clients were willing to sell ads on their sites. In how many customer meetings did we hear the question : "and does your CMS has the possibility to handle Ad Banners?".

While some vendors decided to have their own (or OEMed) Ad Server, many vendors like eZ chose to integrate with several players because doubleclik, webtrends or OpenX were already advanced tools with different flavors and models. By integrating Ad Servers with eZ Publish, we enabled our clients to chose the Ad Server they prefer (the flavor and model fitting best their needs) while we focused on managing content better, with high load and traffic and on implementing advanced workflows and collaboration tools.

So why should we behave differently now? Why not integrating with the Marketo, Pardot,Neolane or many other tools in the market enabling enterprises to automize their lead generation and track the engagement of their site?

This is my personal view but I think that, if we had to choose and not do both, we should better continue focusing on Multichannel Content Management as we have done for the past years than build our own WEM Suite.

Multichannel WCM is the essence of any engagement strategy in the future

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

This article illustrates perfectly what I think. The Web ( seen as a protocol) is slowing down and device based applications will take over. You can even think that few users will be using a web browser in 5 to 10 years from now. However, Internet will still remain the main carrier of digital information and WCM technology will have as main purpose to reuse that content and adapt it to the different devices natively. I believe that by giving that possibility to publishers or any online business, Multichannel WCM will bring the best user experience on any device. And you could have built the best online marketing suite in the world, if your Content Management System does not allow you to please your iPad or Android user, you will never reach the same level of engagement.

More thoughts to come about WEM but eZ is definitely in! And it would be interesting to have Roland Benedetti's vision about that, VP Product Management at eZ. Stay tuned and you can check the roadmap that will be soon updated on http://ez.no.