It's no secret that I'm not a big fan of what the content management industry is calling 'Customer Experience Management', or CXM. To be clear, I firmly believe that it's important to manage your customer experience. What I don't believe is that your content management system vendor has the answer.
Yesterday, Robert Rose from Digital Clarity Group posted a great article on CXM. However, I came to very different conclusions based on the facts he described.
Thanks to Blend Interactive's Corey Vilhauer, I was reminded via an email blast that this is the last day to register for the Now What? Conference at the "early bird" price. This one-day conference is designed to help anyone who works with a website post-launch answer the question, “How do we keep our website useful and relevant?” The conference was created to help bring together web and marketing professionals from across the region to hear from some of today’s leaders in web project management, web governance, and content strategy while talking shop with colleagues and speakers.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is defined as the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results but as search engine providers are constantly tweaking their indexing algorithm website owners should review the SEO techniques they utilize for their own site.
Following are some of the key optimization parameters that the author believes will contribute to the improved SEO Ranking:
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.
"The most successful people online, starting with Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, or Guy Kawasaki, all have one thing in common. They maintain a very active blog. At the end of the day, this is where your online home base resides.
If you want to succeed online, get a blog (via Tumblr, WordPress, or Typepad) and start crunching out quality content. It's the lifeblood of your online presence."
- Ilya Pozin, 7 Habits of Web-Savvy Entrepreneurs, Inc., July 5, 2012
During the Memorial weekend, I decided to pull the plug on the CMS related news feeds we were streaming into Planet CMS. One of CMS Report's biggest strengths has always been pointing people toward the right direction in their search for content management systems. Knowing that one site couldn't support all the stories that needed to be written about CMSs, we began to rely more heavily on using a news aggregator within our Drupal CMS to provide you the links and excerpts to articles written elsewhere. I did this all with good intentions, but Google apparently disagrees.
“Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.”
- Matthew Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, Quoted by Bobbie Johnson, "New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way", May 23, 2012
François Hollande won the presidential election in France last week, with the help of an impressive campaign and content management system SilverStripe.
Hollande’s website http://francoishollande.fr was the web-based focal point of the door to door campaign and functioned as the main communication tool throughout the whole election period. In the month before the election, the site had three million unique visitors and ranked 15th most visited information site in France.
As an online marketer, I used to work in different environments, but since joining Foliovision, I spend virtually all my time on our clients’ content management systems. Some days ago, I logged into a completely different CMS after a long time. It didn’t look bad at first glance, but spending just a few minutes working with this interface was enough to see the striking difference between this CMS and our own; this one was really medieval! I am a marketer, certainly not a hard-boiled developer, and for the first time, I’ve summarized my thoughts about what makes a good CMS. These are the pillars of success but also the risks involved.
I. Low initial costs
SubHub.com today launched its new Drupal 7-based Content Monetization Platform (CMP), featuring the world’s first Drupal-powered app store.
SubHub's new CMP enables anyone to design and launch a content website in under five minutes, and make money from their content by incorporating optional apps such as paid membership.
The app store -- the first of its kind for Drupal modules -- enables website owners to add functionality simply by selecting an app and adding it to their SubHub website. Initial apps include MailChimp, Google Analytics, content feeds and YouTube. Some of the apps are free (e.g. Google Analytics) and some of them will carry a small recurring charge (e.g. paid membership functionality).
Any developer can submit an app to the SubHub app store to be made available to SubHub’s growing network of website owners. New apps will be added regularly. SubHub will share revenues with the app developer.
“We have two core objectives. First we want to give non-technical people the opportunity to build an outstanding website using Drupal, one of the leading open-source content management solutions," said Evan Rudowski, co-founder of SubHub. "Second, we want to give Drupal developers the opportunity to make money from the modules they have spent hundreds of hours building.
"Our customers gain great functionality, and developers make money -- it's a win all around," Rudowski said.