This article was originally published as part of our ISITE Insight newsletter (delivered every full moon). Since it's especially relevant to our CMS Myth readers, we'd love to hear what you think.   

Searching for the perfect web content management system can be a long and bewildering journey. One littered with hundreds of vendors, aggressive sales tactics, confusing terminology and a smorgasbord of features you may never use.

Traditional thinking in the CMS selection process includes jotting down a list of desired features, watching a generic demo and evaluating vendors based on who ‘checks the most boxes’ and gives the best end-of-quarter pricing. This process is fundamentally flawed and all too often results in poor technology selections and dismal implementations.

We believe there is a better approach. One that takes a holistic look at how CMS fits into the organization and aligns technology to key business processes and marketing strategies.

Our fundamental belief is that there are not good or bad content management systems – simply ones that are a better or worse fit for each organization. We’ve developed six fit factors to consider when evaluating web content management systems.

Technical Fit

While the underlying technology should not be the first consideration, the technical fit is very important. After all, the CMS needs to fit into your existing web infrastructure, align with internal developer skill sets and scale to meet the future needs of the organization.

It becomes increasingly important within enterprise organizations that have standardized platforms and application frameworks. We’ve yet to meet a developer without strong opinions about software applications. However, it’s important that the technical fit is evaluated based on the long term needs of the organization, not the preferences of a single developer.

Cultural Fit

Talking about culture and CMS together sounds like squishy science to many involved in a technology selection process. Looking inward to assess cultural fit factors like staff skills, their adaptability and old-fashioned agreeability, can make or break the ultimate success of the implementation.

Finding publishing tools that have a familiar paradigm for internal users can help with adoption. In one case a global organization felt more comfortable with a European vendor because the product had a more familiar orientation for its international users. Sometimes a CMS just “feels right” and that’s a critical fit factor to keep in mind.

Process Fit

At the end of the day, a CMS needs to support business critical scenarios within the organization. Different site types have different processes. A large ad-supported content site has different needs than a document-rich Intranet.

Key processes may include sharing content across multiple sites, building complex forms for marketing campaigns or rapidly provisioning new microsites for sales. Organizations should painstakingly document these processes and insist vendors include them in the demos and proof of concepts.

Feature Fit

CMS evaluations all too often start and stop with the feature lists. While features are important, they should be evaluated in the larger context of the six fit factors. It’s important to isolate the feature-driven requirements for your organization that will differentiate the vendors.

Be wary of the vendor that promises to do everything within the CMS. Some of the more attractive features are often bolted onto the core product and don’t represent best of breed functionality. Keep in mind a CMS is only one piece of your web infrastructure. The evaluation process can run amuck when organizations insist on features that are not core to content management technology.

Marketing Fit

The marketing fit may be the most overlooked factor as strategic ownership of the web has swung from IT to the marketing department. For many organizations, the CMS has to support complex marketing requirements to bolster search engine optimization, landing pages, forms and multivariate testing.

CMS vendors are scrambling to sell into marketing, but many products are still far too IT-driven and ill suited to support a complex marketing organization. As with the feature fit, it’s essential to identify what your CMS will handle and where you will look to external tools. Features like analytics and e-mail marketing for example are almost always better left to an external application.

Vendor Fit

Selecting a CMS goes far beyond buying a piece of software. It’s a partnership with an organization that will be helping to drive your web infrastructure for years to come. Go beyond calling client references to look at the long term viability of the organization, product roadmap, market momentum and partner landscape. Insist on seeing the product roadmap to confirm it aligns with your future goals. Look at the training and support offerings and make sure that this is an organization you can see yourself with for at least five years.

Finding Your Match

While there is a lot to consider, finding the right CMS is one of the more important technology decisions and organization will make. A CMS is no longer a piece of software to run a website. It’s a publishing platform to run your business. Looking at the six fit factors will help you make a more informed decision and take into account the needs of the entire organization.

What other fit factors have you used to help guide your CMS selection? Leave a comment and share your story.

Last week I spoke at the Content Management Strategies/DITA North America Conference 2009, but I also took the time to attend as many sessions as I could.   In the sessions I attended I gathered some great quotes from the other speakers that really hit home and wanted to share them.

 On CMS Selection: 

• "It seems the more you pay the less you get"
• "Admission of failure can be one of the best indicators that a vendor is willing to work with you" - about getting vendors to provide references for failed implementations
• "Divorce from a partner is often harder than the domestic variety" - About parting ways from your CMS vendor.

On CMS Implementation and adaption: 

• "Projects often fail on the basis of training conducted to far before the product roll out"
• "Set your expectations low for creating a taxonomy"
• "ECM, I don't know what that means!" - From audience during Q&A
• "Middle Management if often trouble" - Talking about organizational resistance to a new CMS.
• "As long as you are using Word, I can't help you"

On selling a CMS vision to your organization: 

• "Understand your executives view of ROI"
• "The entire organization should own the content, we just need to work out the custody agreements"
• "Executives don't care about reuse, they care about the value of reuse"

We're excited to be part of an upcoming webinar on Wednesday May 6 with Nathan Williams, the Interactive Director for the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation.

You'll want to block off the hour next week If you're wondering how to plan your next CMS project (or just hear a great story from the City of New Orleans).

New Orleans’ tourism officials are working overtime to bring tourists and conventions back to the city post-Katrina. A key to the city’s resurgence is a robust, visitor-centric online strategy driven by a new web content management system. Nathan and team went through an exhaustive search for the right CMS and did extensive user experience planning to bring the new site together.

While they are in the middle of the technical development, he's been gracious enough to share his story to help others going through the CMS selection and planning process.  I'll be joining him on the webcast as will Tony White, the lead analyst for the Gilbane Group's CMS practice.

The only thing that would improve this webcast is insiting that we hold it onsite in New Orleans (we tried)Don't miss you chance to hear Nathan's story and experiences.

In the last month I have talked to a lot of people at the beginning of a CMS selection process.  For the most part these are relatively informal discussions to provide high level guidance and some help about next steps.  I typically get these calls after the first round of product demos and people are frankly a bit unclear on how to get to the next level in their selection process.  The thing I have been 'hearing between the lines' as I talk to people is that these very scripted dog and pony shows CMS vendors can conduct only end up confusing the potential customer more than help them towards a final selection.  What they often get is a solid hour or so of product greatest hits and shiny toys with only a passing reference to anything that is relevant to the customer's actual needs.  The other big factor here is that most of the time vendors know who they are up against and instead of selling to the customer needs they often end up selling against the other product(s) or spend time trying to up sell to the next level of the product or sell in-house services.

What I have been advocating to help keep everyone focused is that internally the customer comes up with three critical requirements that the CMS implementation must nail, and then provide these to the CMS vendor one week in advance of them coming back to present a second time.  This time they should present on those three items using only real world examples. The point here is to get them off script about the exhaustive feature list, ease of use, the promise that the CMS can become anything you dream and get down to how the CMS can address the real world challenges customers face.  The added benefit of using existing customer examples is you can ask potentially uncomfortable questions about how hard it was, how much customization was involved, how hard is it to manage for end users and most importantly did it meet customer expectations.

This is only one suggestion of how to get CMS vendors off script, but what I hope is that this gets you thinking about how to focus your selection process and product demos on the things that really matter to the success of your implementation.  Truth be told most customer use only about 20% of the total feature set a CMS offers anyway.  Your job is to make sure that the 20% you do use works really well for you. 

I am also very interested to hear any stories about how you got a CMS vendor off script, so please comment.  I also highly recommend you  check out this recent post by Seth Gottlieb called Death to the Features Matrix.  It has some great advice on how to shake up a selection process as well.

Metadata may not be terribly exciting, but it’s a business-critical part of making your organization work on the web.  Sadly very few organizations invest in it, let alone understand it.

The way you organize, store and categorize information matters.  It matters a lot.

After all, most organizations (and websites) are in the information services business. It’s all about finding ways to more effectively create, share, repurpose and distribute content.  Your ability to accomplish these goals depends entirely on the way content is organized and classified.

Attending SXSW Interactive this weekend, I was pleasantly pleased to see the Kicking Ass with Controlled Metadata session.  It fell in stark contrast to the typical SXSW topics heavy on user generated content, design and social media.

Most interesting to me was hearing Pandora CTO Tom Conrad talk about their approach to classifying the 600,000+ songs in the Pandora library.  He explained that Pandora employees a team of 45 trained musicians that painstakingly listen to each song and catalog it with more than 400 attributes.

These all get loaded into a database and are used to provide more relevant recommendations to listeners.  It’s a lot of work and terribly expensive, yet Pandora rightly justifies it as a necessary cost of doing business.

This classification system is a huge part of Pandora’s competitive advantage. It’s the secret sauce that drives the business and provides a high barrier to entry for would be competitors.

This is an important point to understand. The right approach to metadata can drive a sustainable competitive advantage.

Web content management projects are a natural time to reassess your approach to organizing and classifying content. To do this effectively, you need to think about content independent from the website structure, templates and creative.

It’s important to document how each of these content items will be modeled including their relationship between other content types. These are not lower-level activities to be done after you figure out the big picture thinking. They are fundamental to your overall user experience strategy.

It’s time for metadata to get the respect and attention it deserves.

In those annual surveys about business technology purchasing plans, “web content management” invariably appears at or near the top of the “gonna buy” list. And so it appears to be the same again in 2009. One indicator: A recent Forrester report says web content management purchases will continue to grow this year despite a bad economy as companies seek ways to remain competitive.

But what’s really insightful is the top reason why CMS is a target for investment in 2009.

According to Forrester’s survey data, “improving the customer experience” is the primary reason (64%) buyers want to invest in CMS technology, far ahead of streamlining the web publishing process, cited by just 25% of survey takers. (Hat tip to Fierce Content Management for the data citations.)

This trend stands for a drastic shift in favor of the marketer. In a similar survey about two years ago,  a much lower percentage of respondents (around 37% as I recall) told Forrester that “customer experience” was the motivator to adopt CMS.

Broadly speaking, CMS adoption has frequently revolved around “streamlining” process: solving the dreaded webmaster bottleneck, allowing non-technical folks (read: marketers) to update the website, giving IT a break -- that sort of thing. The decision to buy or not to buy CMS was driven by ROI, as if it were just another CRM application or accounting software package: “So this CMS thing, how long ‘til I make my money back?” the CFO would ask the IT director.

Here at CMS Myth we’ve long advocated a view that says CMS is an important, strategic tool whose investment (and success) is measured in many ways.  At the core, we believe it has everything to do with supporting successful web marketing strategies, as well as promoting strong engagement and interaction with your users. CMS is the tech glue that holds together the strategy and tactics that comprise your online initiatives. It’s not just a tool to manage the nuts and bolts of content. It’s a lot more.

Thankfully, CMS vendors have evolved since the days when hot features like WYSIWYG editors and workflow were in big, bold letters on their websites. Today, many CMS vendors are developing (and selling based on) built-in tools to promote engagement, like blogs, social networking applications, landing page testing, and other marketing-savvy widgets. Other vendors are making it easier to integrate their CMS with best-of-breed tools like email marketing applications.

Now that marketers are increasingly driving the CMS discussion and adoption, the conversation is rightly shifting toward ideas like customer engagement and content optimization – how to make the most of your website and your content to drive home a message, convince and persuade visitors, prompt them to take an action, buy a product, or become more deeply engaged with your brand. That a CMS distributes your content workload and supports a bunch of website widgets is a given.

For CMS buyers with ‘marketing’ in their job description, this evolution is great. For one, you have a better chance to influence vendor selection and demos based on the criteria that really matter to you. Ask to see and hear all the ways a CMS product supports user experience – and how one vendor does it better than the next guy.

As for CMS vendors, there are a lot of lessons here too. Here’s one: if you want to find the fastest way to a buyer’s heart (and wallet), trying asking first about what your customers are concerned about relative to their business and their website – we’d their first questions will be more around their strategic business goals, their marketing imperatives, their need for better visitor engagement and connections. Put away the technical smoke-and-mirrors around the latest point release. Instead, show customers how you’ll make their website a better place to visit and support your customer-facing goals.

Buy the Forrester report here.

Professional services are the other half of any CMS implementation, but could the services company you selected pass the same scrutiny your CMS endured during its selection process?  From some of the implementations I have walked into I would say the answer would be a resounding NO.   For every CMS platforms out there, there is an order of magnitude more companies willing to help you implement (or at least try).  So how do you pick one?  Should I just pick one off the partner page and hope for the best?

The truth is that for some CMS vendors becoming a partner requires little more than filling out a form.  Some might require a fee, and even fewer require actual training. For the ones that require training most do not follow up to ensure those trained personal are still on staff.  Often the goal for the CMS vendor is have the appearance that they have a large and vibrant development and partner community ready and willing to implement their product.  You will notice very few will go as far to certify or rate their partners. 

Now that you know that not all service providers are created equal you need to better understand what you are asking of them.  This is often tough after coming out of CMS selection process.  More often than not you are just ready to implement, not create more requirements and dig into another potentially lengthy selection process.  You will also need to consider all the other technology that will be in play during the implementation.  This might be your CRM, email marketing, analytics, an ecommerce system, or existing custom systems.  Finding a partner that can handle that plus the CMS?  Well the bad news here is that there is no shortcut.  You have to do your homework, check references, gather quotes and have more meetings.  But it is in this process a good service company will quickly separate itself by asking a lot of hard questions, and often they are questions about things you have not even thought about yet or might not have answers to yet.

On the other end no questions could be a sign of trouble and this is often where things go wrong.  We have seen more than one service contract being awarded because, to quote "They said they could do everything for X dollars and on our timeline".  All without any real questions being asked or any real scope of work being defined.  In truth most people suffer some degree of sticker shock at this stage or are under a tremendous time crunch and will leap at someone telling them what they want to hear.  The fact is it almost always costs more and will take longer than you want it to and a good services company will tell you that upfront, not when the project is already two months late and 2x over budget.

The moral of the story here is that you want to take the time to find someone with a proven track record, trained staff and experience with the type of challenges you will find in your specific implementation.  Also you want to find someone who is willing to tell you the things you don't want to, but need to hear before a single dollar has changed hands.  CMS implementation projects can be stressful and more than a little confusing if you have never been through one before.  Finding a capable partner to help guide you through it can make all the difference in the world. 

In general, the Mythbusters are keen on the mid-market web content management space - always looking for those smart solutions that are feature rich, flexible and cost effective all in one (a tall order I know).

We've seen CMS success stories with organizations that can grow into (and with) a mid-market solution. Or conversely, enterprise organizations that leverage the flexibility of a lighter weight CMS compared to more bloated enterprise offerings.

It's a crowded space that can be tough to get a handle on. CMS Watch covers 15+ mid-market vendors, but there are many more that can fall into that bucket.

2009 in particular looks to be an interesting year for the mid-market CMS market. While we don't claim to have a crystal ball (and certainly aren't calling out specific vendors), we are observing some macro trends that may have real implications for organizations evaluating mid-market web content management in 2009.

What we saw in 2008:

• An increasing number of enterprise organizations looking to mid-market vendors to replace an ECM or upper tier product. Some mid-market solutions can scale to meet the demands, while others fall short within an enterprise deployment.
• The maturity of open source solutions becoming a more legitimate option in the evaluation process
• The emergence of very solid entry WCMS products (read: cheaper).
• Mid-market CMS vendors expanding their professional services offerings to sustain revenue, often at the expense of the partner network, and far too often their customers.
• Vendors trying to boil the ocean in bolting all sorts of new bells and whistles onto their CMS platforms - resulting in everything under one roof, but rarely best of breed functionality.
• Older product architectures that are ill equipped to scale to new web publishing models - namely distributed content and multi-site management.
• Smaller vendors getting pinched by the economy struggling to provide the necessary support and ongoing training - not to mention the necessary R&D.
• The business priority of social media and community initiatives driving a whole new class of vendors that overlap with traditional CMS (a whole blog post in itself).

Building on the observations from 2008, there are other market dynamics at play:

• The economic downtown has companies of all types tightening their belts and delaying expensive projects like CMS that offer longer term ROI.
• The reality that most organizations are not implementing their first CMS. It's likely a second, third or fourth generation system.
• The rise of new platforms built from the ground up on modern architectures that address current web publishing challenges

So what does this mean for an organization evaluating mid-market content management vendors in 2009? 

• While folks have been predicting a CMS vendor shake out (and consolidation) for years, it's especially important in 2009 to take a close look at vendor stability, financial solvency and overall momentum.
• Companies looking to legitimately leverage communities and social media will likely not be best served by a CMS pure play. It will be essential to "look outside the CMS box" in putting together the overall web strategy.
• Vendors on shaky financial footing cutting back on R&D, further weakening their future relevance in the market.
• Vendors bundling pro services with their product may be a good fit, but organizations that have more strategic needs should carefully evaluate how the vendor will approach the project, and get references from similar past projects.
• With the maturity of the basic authoring tools, more attention will be (and should be) placed on the usability of the software itself and how it will enable better end user adoption.
• With an uncertain marketplace and high switching costs, re-implementation projects will likely become more popular -aligning the technology to better understood business requirements and taking advantage of new releases.

What are you seeing in the mid-market web content management space?

An enterprise web content management project may look good on paper, but it’s not all rainbows and roses for everyone in the organization. In fact, there are folks probably getting along just fine managing their own web fiefdom.

While a unified CMS strategy can be smart for the organization, it takes control away from independent web authors, changing web publishing life as they know it forever.

Dealing with the loss of total web authoring control and conforming to new rules can be tough for anyone. Coming to accept (and even love) the benefits of a new platform can take some time.

We’ve identified five stages of CMS grief that can occur though this transition. Organizations that can spot the signs will be better equipped to help make the process smoother.

Denial

The first step can be a quiet one. You likely just announced that the upcoming CMS project will “completely change the way we do things on the web -- bringing everything into a single CMS and one consistent user experience.”

At this stage most web authors will simply ignore the project and hope it goes away like most over ambitious IT projects. They have probably seen similar initiatives crash and burn. Even in a worst case scenario, they figure it will be at least a year before anything starts to happen.

Spot the signs: Things seem to be going a little too well. You’ve gotten very few comments or feedback after the initial announcement.

Cure: Have a well communicated project plan and give folks some small action items out the gate to make them part of the process.  Start a wiki or website to provide updates, encouragement and guidance each step of the way.

Anger

After the initial denial, you may start to see some fireworks. The CMS project after all is making some real traction. The new unified design is set and early training classes are underway.

The web authors realize the project is here to stay and start to get vocal. You get an earful on why the system will never work and how it will destroy everything folks have been building for years.

While a mistake not to listen, it’s important to separate the rational dissenters from the rabble rousers. Office politics will come into play as angry departments send complaints up through the ranks. It’s a chaotic and emotional period for everyone. Projects can often be stopped in their tracks right here.

Signs:  You’re having a lot of meetings to re-justify the project. Your inbox is overflowing with reasons the chosen CMS won’t work.

Cure: Genuinely listen to the issues and set realistic expectations for the transition. Have the data to back up the decisions and clearly articulate the value to the organization.

Bargaining

Cooler heads have prevailed and folks are getting smarter about dealing with the change. Your web authors are deep into training and starting to understand how the new CMS works. In fact, they are finding creative ways to work around the guidelines in building out their sites.

They propose template tweaks to better accommodate their own brands, or even plead to develop microsites that sit outside of the main site structure. It’s all well intentioned, but this stage involves a careful balance of maintaining structure and satisfying the real demands of your extended web community.

In cases of extreme bargaining, web authors may circumvent the new CMS altogether, finding their own servers and building out a site that conforms to some of the new standards.

Signs:  Someone asks for a copy of the HTML or the Photoshop file of the new designs.

Cure:  Have a well planned information architecture that accommodates an acceptable level of flexibility. Schedule drop-in labs to work side by side with end users.

Depression

All the bargaining can lead to some sad faces around the office.  After all, compromises have been made across the board.  The pixel perfect design concepts at the start of the project probably didn't quite pan out as planned with the real content. 

Frustration with the CMS sets in as web authors can’t replicate the old ways of managing web content.  Nobody is entirely happy and the many months of hard work are taking a toll on morale.
 
However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. A launch day is officially announced and folks are starting to plan some well deserved vacations.

Signs: Comparing the current site to the original design concepts. Off color nicknames about the usability of the new CMS.

Cure:  Start organizing a good governance plan and organize the web authors into a team for peer support. Identify and give extra attention to web authors who “get it” and give them a role in supporting their peer group for training and transition activity.

Acceptance

While it may have been a roller coaster ride, the new CMS is actually starting to work fairly well. The stickiest issues have been ironed out and all the content has been migrated.

Everyone involved starts to look ahead to new and exciting post-launch initiatives.  While traces of resentment exist, folks are more comfortable with the new CMS and are looking forward to seeing it launch.

Signs: Someone creates a web team t-shirt.

Cure:  Time to dust of that list of phase two items!

How have individuals dealt with a new content management system inside your organization? Leave a comment and share your story.

The world is more interconnected every day -- a fact that has important implications for web content management.

Almost a quarter of the world's population-1.5bn people-will use the internet regularly in 2009. Half of them will make online purchases. A further 400m people will join the online world by 2012. – The World in 2009, The Economist

Of the 1.5 billion people who will use the Internet regularly in 2009, only fifteen percent live in the United States. Only thirty percent speak English as their first language. No wonder it seems every week brings at least one announcement of a U.S. company launching a new international website.

The current economic turmoil is almost certain to spur this trend as companies seek to broaden and diversify their revenue bases internationally, leveraging the relative economy and ease of the web as their primary channel for doing so. Additionally, companies face the need to establish themselves in key international markets or be beaten to the punch by local or international rivals. There are also an increasing number of companies, like Home Depot and the Florida Marlins Major League Baseball team, who are launching Spanish-language sites targeting U.S. Hispanic customers.

So what does all this mean for CMS planning?

If you're just undertaking your first multilingual website development or localization project, consider yourself extremely lucky. Industry adoption of Unicode as the standard for encoding online content is one of a number of developments that have made developing and maintaining multilingual websites much easier.

Just last December [2007] there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another. – The Official Google Blog

Tools to support web localization have come a long way, as well. There are far more multilingual website development, localization and management tools to choose from today. They have also all had to innovate aggressively to compete in an increasingly crowded field and stay relevant. More and more content management systems are trying to handle multilingual website management end to end and, for those that don't, there are more translation management systems (TMS) than ever designed to work with your CMS of choice.

What all of that means to you and me is simply this: We can spend much less time on the technological challenges of establishing a multilingual web presence and much more time focusing on our business and customers. Rather than worrying about whether or not characters are going to render properly in various platform and browser configurations, we can focus on the quality of the content and overall user experience.  After all, the biggest challenge of managing a global web presence is balancing worldwide brand integrity and business goals with local effectiveness and compliance.

We’ll be exploring the global content management landscape in more detail this year on the CMS Myth. If you have any experiences with global CMS (good or bad), we’d love to hear about them.

If we've said it once here at The CMS Myth blog we've said it twice: CMS is a technology, while content management is a discipline (hey, it's even a way of life  ... for some people). Knowing the difference is especially relevant to web marketers, since they're the ones who need to fly the marketing flag and advocate for their needs when the CMS technocrats start planning your next-generation website platform.

Said another way, when it comes to CMS one person's "technology tool" is another's "marketing solution".

If this all sounds familiar to the marketers out there, consider this an invitation to a BtoB Magazine webinar I'll be participating in this Thursday, Jan.15, at 2 Eastern/11 Pacific. "What Does Content Management Have to Do With Marketing?" addresses how and why content, and content management technology, is such an important tool in the web marketer's efforts, and how you can bring that perspective to your internal discussions. I'll bring the ISITE Design/CMS Myth point of view to a discussion with Ellis Booker, Editor of BtoB, and Rob Rose, VP at on-demand CMS provider CrownPeak.

Another Gilbane conference has come and gone and the Mythbusters were once again in the middle of the action to get firsthand insight.

In fact, we’re just now gathering our thoughts from a whirlwind three days of keynotes, panels, hallway conversations and the trade show floor.

I have to admit, it feels a little bit like the movie Groundhog Day going to this show every year. Similar vendor set, familiar formats and the same core challenges around CMS. Perhaps in 10-15 more years I’ll have this CMS bit figured out just as Bill Murray’s character became a master pianist in Punxatawney.

A highlight of the show for me was being on the “Planning for a CMS” panel with Gilbane’s Tony White and Nathan Williams, the Interactive Director for the City of New Orleans. This was extra special because New Orleans was a project we all worked on together from CMS evaluation to strategic planning to implementation (launching soon!). It’s a remarkable story that I hope to be sharing about in more detail after the launch.

For now, I’ll share some highlights from the panel. Without giving a blow by blow of the presentations, I’ll recap a few of the audience questions.

What exactly does ‘out of the box’ mean with CMS features?
Great question and a slippery slope indeed. Tony cautioned that some vendors will blur the lines in demos between core functionality and add ons that have been developed as ‘demoware’ (or by third parties). It’s essential for folks evaluating vendors to know what’s core to the product and what’s not. It will affect your implementation and your upgrade path.

Is a long RFP format even useful for picking the right CMS?
There is nothing like curling up with a good 100-page RFP response on a Friday night, right? Ok maybe we need to get out more. Tony shared with the panel that if done right, an RFP can be a useful part of the process. However, he also advised to provide vendors with specific scenarios to focus the demos on, and challenge them to provide real explanations of how their product meets your needs – not simply yes/no checkboxes. He’s seen RFP responses ranging from 12 to 100+ pages and faults the vendors for not having better internal processes to deliver meaningful responses.

Are all of the user experience deliverables done before development starts?
My presentation walked through our process for user experience planning with CMS including the information architecture, template library, content requirements and more. While there are many different approaches, we almost always advise that the core UX deliverables are done up front and used to help gain alignment between the technical and business teams. With that said, some rapid prototyping early in the process can help for certain types of projects.

How do you justify the value of user experience inside an organization?
This is an entire post (or book!) in itself. In general, I usually advocate that what’s good for your users is good for business. Meaning if you can increase the effectiveness of finding information and completing transactions, there are real bottom line impacts. Beyond that, smart CMS user experience planning can reduce maintenance costs and create a site structure that can scale with your business. If you flip the question around, it’s scary to think of what it will cost the organization to not focus on creating great experiences.

Those are a few of the highlights from the panel discussion. It was a great crowd and one of the better panels I’ve been a part of. Stay tuned for more thoughts from Gilbane.

Most organizations we talk to are often looking at their second or third CMS implementation, so by no means are they strangers to the promise of web content management.  But almost half the time the specific CMS has nothing to do with problems that are prompting them to start looking for a new one.  In these cases we most often find the issues center around the following:

• Poor Planning
  • Incomplete IA
  • Bad content modeling
  • Incorrect/Poorly implemented workflow/permissions
• No adoption strategy (or also known as the 'Field of Dreams' strategy)
• No or poor end user training and ongoing internal support
• Not using the CMS features correctly
• Poor technical implementation
• Change in core requirements

The hard part about this is often so much emotion is invested into blaming the platform for the problems it is hard to take a step back and recognize that the problems are often of their own making by either rushing through an implementation or choosing the wrong implementation partner.  We will often encourage them to do a compressed CMS selection process while keeping in mind what the true costs of switching are (A discussion about true switching costs is a post unto itself) to ensure the platform is still a valid option.  After that and some CMS therapy to work out their product issues most people come to understand that the product itself is just a tool and given the correct planning and training they can be successful with it.  In most cases they are excited by the amount of time  and money they can save since they are already familiar with the product and already have a licensing agreement in place.

So when should you consider a new CMS you ask?  The following is the my list of most common reasons:

• Change in core technology platform (from JAVA to .NET for example).
• Product mismatch.  The most common scenario here is using ECM (Enterprise Content Management) for marketing driven WCM (Web Content Management)
• CMS Company issues.
  • Poor support
  • Licensing costs
  • Product end of life
• Missing key features
• Using a home grown/ custom CMS

A job opening came across my desk recently. The alumni office at New York college is seeking an online “community nurturer.” The role involves maintaining “an online community with social networking and event marketing components for over 79,000 alumni.”

Kudos to the college (Buffalo State) for recognizing an oft-overlooked imperative: if you intend to establish a successful online community, plan on staffing it with someone with the skills to tend it, to grow it, to breathe life into it.

But with CMS vendors tripping over each other to bring you bundled CMS solutions that manage your content and website as well as your online community (blogs, wikis, forums, ratings, social networking), we tend to ask the obvious: Think throwing a CMS at your content-rich website instantly solves your content and web strategy problems? No? That goes double for running a vibrant online community.

So let’s puncture this Myth-in-the-making before it grows wings: “If you build a community, will they come?” “The answer is: maybe; but it will take some serious nurturing to succeed.

Just like a backyard garden that requires watering, fertilizing and weeding long after you’ve planted seeds, growing and maintaining an online community is a process that really never ends.

There are clear parallels between the traditional website content manager role and mindset, and that of the successful web community manager.  If you’re jumping into the fray (or considering it for 2009) here are some best practice tips from what we’ve seen and learned:

1. Put your online community in the hands of someone who can live and breathe it every day. And if you can’t devote at least a part-time resource, consider holding off starting your community.

2.  Ensure your community manager has the right mix of skills. They’ll need to be ready to write, edit, create e-newsletters, evangelize topics and brands, review user-gen content, monitor comments, reach out to active members – and communicate constantly with the audience.

3. Think about giving the community manager(s) a persona – let them establish an identity, use their face and name. Establish them as a dynamic presence who represents the community and bridges your company (or college, or non-profit, or publisher) with member interests.

4. Actively foster active participation. Dynamism is key – focus on getting people to communicate, comment, share, provoke ideas and questions. Rating members based on frequency of participation, or prodding them with small giveaways for participation, can help provoke interaction, and bring new ideas to the community.

5. Develop and nurture a handful of evangelists to keep things moving.  Don’t underestimate the power of a devoted fan or follower outside your organization who brings enthusiasm and genuine interest to rev up the community and keep members coming back for more.

6. Constantly tap into the motivation and interests of your audience – define (and ask) why they’re there, what excites them, and try to serve them what they want (within reason) – and be ready to shift gears when they do.

7. Be authentic in your approach to cultivating the community and resist looking at it as a marketing lever to drive more traffic and transactions.  Avoid hitting members over the head with product messages, for example.

8. Use the community for front line research and trend-spotting, and run that up the chain at your company, incorporate it into your service, product, or website.

Do you have any best practice ideas for running an online community? We’re all ears. Please share your ideas and thoughts in the comments section or email us.

Folks in the world of web content management can likely agree that marketers are taking more ownership of the web – if not total ownership in many cases.

CMS vendors have largely made the shift to speak more directly to the needs of a marketer.This is happening with the website messaging, marketing-friendly feature lists and solution-selling scenarios developed within the sales teams.

This shift is both smart for business and absolutely necessary to meet the changing needs of the web-driven organization. However, it’s critical to take a closer look at specific vendor offerings to see if they can walk the walk that their marketing speak talks. 

After all, CMS vendors have historically been very IT focused. It’s simply not in the DNA of most CMS product management types to think like a marketer.  Some will be able to effectively turn the boat around and some will attempt to keep putting lipstick on a pig. We’re still in the early stages of determining the winners and losers.

While we’re not here to evaluate the marketing merits of individual CMS vendors (yet), we are noticing that the messaging is shifting faster than the product development. Extra features are being bolted on to satisfy a few tactical marketing needs, when in fact a more complete product overhaul is often needed. It’s unclear if this effort is truly underway behind the scenes.

This all poses a real risk for marketing-centric buyers that don’t understand the technical complexity of a CMS.  Buyers need to deep dive into marketing specific scenarios during the evaluation process, ask more specific questions and talk to marketing focused references. 

There is a difference between selling to marketers and building for marketers.  My money is on the vendors that choose the later.