Experience Management

If you're an insider of the content management industry, you're well of aware of the recent claims by some that the content management system is dead. If you're still using CMS as part of your vocabulary, you must not be keeping up with the times because it's all about customer experience management (CEM or CXM).  This is what some want you to believe. It's wishful thinking by those that want to be at the cutting edge of something new and believe you do that by diminishing the value of what we know currently works. Every few years we go through this movement and every time history has shown that the demise of the CMS is exaggerated.

Editor's Note: Petr Palas, founder and CEO of Kentico software, lets his voice be heard to in this week's CEO Corner. In this article, he provides rebuttal to an earlier CEO Corner written by Agility's Michael Assad. Where Assad favors a "best of breed" approach and questions the validity of CXM, Palas believe the future is in fully integrated CXM solutions. Which CEO is right? We'll let you decide...

This week, I received an email from some marketing folks that Acquia was announcing they are open sourcing their mobile application code for posting content to Drupal sites. For those that don't know, Acquia is a commercial open source software company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal. This isn't the first time Acquia and other Drupal vendors have given code back to the Drupal community and you can be assured it won't be the last.

I spent most of the last two weeks camping and hiking in the Grand Teton National Park of northwest Wyoming. If you've never visited this national park then take my word on it that Grand Teton is one of the most beautiful places a person can visit in this world. The mountains in this place peak near 13,800 feet and rise from the valley by almost 7,000 feet. Despite the warm summer much of the United States experienced, ice glaciers can still be accessed through a number of day hikes. For anyone that loves the outdoors, this place has everything in the form of wildlife, scenery, and activities. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending from your perspective), what the Grand Teton doesn't have is good 3G or 4G cell phone coverage.

Using Facebook and Twitter, Steve Burge has compiled a list of social media responses to the question, "Why does Joomla rock?". It's an interesting list of 40 tweets and FB status messages and he's conveniently categorized the responses into short answers to the question.

Why does Joomla Rock?

CMS Expo in Chicago last week gave me a great opportunity to learn about a variety of content management systems. I spent most of my time at the conference getting out of my comfort zone by visiting with those companies and open source projects that I knew the least about their products and services. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevented me from visiting with my personal favorite CMS, Drupal. By the end of the conference, I felt I needed to treat myself by attending one of the final sessions in the Drupal track, "Social Drupal".

What key activities should you integrate? In what scenarios might you be smarter to leave the heavy lifting to an outsourced solution?  What elements are critically important right now when building your social relevance in the market?  Find this out and more at this practical advice session on how you can be using Drupal to capture the Social Media audience which awaits.

My hope for the session was that it would give me good pointers for how to connect my Drupal sites better to the social web. Lullabot's Blake Hall led this information packed session. Blake began the session by pushing his vision that this session should not just be called "Social Drupal" but also "Community Plumbing (without the crack)". The proposed rewriting of the title for this session is a reminder to the audience that Drupal has always been social.

Blake started the session reminding that one needs to take a look at the bigger picture by taking a look as your site's Social Media Strategy. This strategy would include the following elements:

• Authentic Story
• Honest Dialogue
• Engage your audience
• Activate the social media

While the big picture is always nice consider it's the details that help determine whether your site is going to succeed. From this point forward Blake focused on specifics and I feverishly did my best to keep up. Some of the notable remarks from Blake that caught my attention:

• First step is to take a look at your business goals and the resources you have available when building/supporting your site. Blake of course sees Drupal as being able to address both ends of this equation.
• Some of the social modules for Drupal he recommends include Feeds, Flag, Twitter, Dashboard, Fivestar, Messaging, Radioactivity (gotta check this one out!), and Organic Groups.
• Speaking of organic groups, take a look at groups.drupal.org: especially Social Networking Sites group to tap into Drupal community's expertise on social publishing.

As some of you know, I'm very interested in how government and large organizations are using information systems, collaboration tools, and social media. This past weekend, I had a chance to read some of the trade magazines stacked under my desk and collecting dust. I came across a great article published in Government Computer News that discussed how emergency management is using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

The artice, written by Rutrell Yasin, lists five ways to use social media for better emergency response which include:

I usually stay clear of search engine optimization (SEO) discussions, but I think this video is worth your time. In the video, Corey Eulas teaches SEO tips, tricks, and best practices found to increase traffic from search engines. This talk includes examples with a look “under the hood” of a few actual sites owned by members of the audience. You will "discover how to enhance user experience and usability while making your site more search engine friendly".

One of the more interesting concepts, I think, is the many ideas for how to incorporate microblogging (think Twitter) into your content management system.  Drupal Voices via Lullabot interviews Rob Loach and briefly talks to him about his Distributed Micro-Blogging proposal which received a grant from the Knight Foundation.  The audio recording is only two mintues long but there is enough there to get you started thinking how microblogging may eventually play a role in the larger world of content management.

One of the biggest unknowns for those of us that live in the north central United States...how many Drupal enthusiasts are there in our area?  Not knowing the answer to this question has been bothering me.  I have also been a little disturbed seeing the map so empty of a Drupal user group for my part of the region.  So I'm hoping those of you that are Drupal users from South Dakota and bordering areas will join me and others in the new South Dakota Drupal