Content is an investment in customer experience

Now and again you run into a quote that ties things together. Some time ago I saw a presentation by Schneider & Nichols on content strategy that included the following quote:

“Content is an investment in customer experience with measurable return”

I have worked for commercial publishers for years, and am also active in content marketing. I always felt the connection between both worlds from a technological perspective, but had problems combining both business models.

This quote nicely ties both worlds together: commercial publishers have always invested in creating content to get a measurable return. The customer experience is that good that customers are willing to pay for the content. Commercial publishers measure content success by turnover and profit.

Content marketers want to create memorable customer experiences. This can only be achieved by investing in memorable content. Creating a meaningful way to measure your return is a challenge any content marketer will face. Although not as easy to measure as commercial publishers, a clear definition must and can be made to justify your content marketing investments.

Content writer by Ritesh Nayak via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Here is a previous nice quote

Alfresco Summit 2014

Update: Alfresco One 5.0 is now publicly available. Read what's new here.

October 8th and 9th I had the opportunity to visit the Alfresco Summit 2014 in London. Alfresco is an Enterprise Content Management System, so the focus is not (just) on web content, but all the content an organisation would manage: documents, assets and metadata, managed in specified processes. Alfresco differs from other ECMs through its open architecture and extensive support of standards.

Highlights

The Summit offered an eclectic mix of business, solution and technical sessions. For me as a content strategist, the highlights were:

• Search: The newest version 5.0 of Alfresco will support the newest version of the SOLR search engine (4.10). This will boost the retrieval of documents, for instance by offering facets (or better: filters. I learned managers don’t like the word “facets”. It sounds too complicated) and other improvements.
• Media Management Module: In the first quarter of 2015 an improved Media Management Module will become available, offering improved Asset Management like Transcoding Services, improved Metadata management and Sharable collections.
• WCM: Alfresco Web Content Management has spun-off in a separate product: Crafter. Crafter offers full WCM functionality, keeping all useful Alfresco features such as events, workflows etc.
• Open source SharePoint integration: Alfresco announced it is contributing its Microsoft SharePoint open source integration to the Apache Software Foundation. This integration connects Microsoft SharePoint to virtually any enterprise content management (ECM) system, including Alfresco, using the open standard CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services) from OASIS. 
• Semantic Enrichment: A case study was shown where open source tools were used to semantically enrich documents (read my earlier blog about this subject) in Alfresco. Semantic enrichments can dramatically improve use and retrieval of documents.
• Activiti integration: Alfresco integrates Activiti, a light-weight workflow and Business Process Management (BPM) Platform targeted at business people, developers and administrators. Its core is a BPMN 2 process engine for Java. 
• Fred: Our friends at Xenit offer Fred. Fred provides an (extra) intuitive user-interface on top of Alfresco, making the use of Alfresco even easier.

Retrospective

Alfresco already offered a fine palette of functionality. But ECM software often has to vindicate its existence (and licence / support fees) over shared drives or other uncertainties about generic ECM functionalities. The new functions and integrations improve Alfresco’s position in the ECM market.

De E-boekenmarkt is in beweging

Het zijn interessante tijden op de e-boekenmarkt. De markt leek een plateaufase te hebben bereikt, terwijl business en techniek nog lang niet uitontwikkeld zijn. Onderstaande figuur toont de afzet in e-books per kwartaal volgens het Centraal Boekhuis, met een flinke dip in verkopen (rood).

e-Book afzet volgens Centraal Boekhuis

Hierbij een aantal ontwikkelingen van de afgelopen maanden:

1. 2e Hands e-books
   Tom Kabinet biedt de mogelijkheid om e-books 2e hands aan te bieden en te verkopen. Dit tot grote vreugde van boekenlezers en tot ergernis van het Nederlands Uitgevers Verbond. De rechter heeft bepaald dat Tom Kabinet vooralsnog door mag gaan met zijn winkel in 2e hands e-books.
2. All-you-can-read e-books
   Schreef ik al eerder over Flat Fee lezen van artikelen, ook op de e-book markt doet dit model zijn intrede. Onder andere Scribd, Amazon, Oyster en Entitle zijn hiermee gekomen, waarbij Entitle in ieder geval ook lezen op de e-reader ondersteund.
   In Nederland is Elly’s choice gestart: 10 e-books per maand voor €2,99 per maand. Klinkt aantrekkelijk, maar helaas alleen (nog) boeken van VBK en Dutch Media, dus nog geen Spotify voor e-books.
3. E-books lenen
   Bij de samenwerkende bibliotheken kun je sinds kort ook e-books lenen.
   Inmiddels zijn er 125.000 e-booklezers ingeschreven die al meer dan 500.000 e-books uit het assortiment van ongeveer 7000 boeken hebben gedownload. Hiermee is de e-boekenmarkt aanzienlijk verruimd (zie cijfers CB).
4. Centrale e-boekenplank
   Het CPNB heeft LeesID geïntroduceerd, een centrale e-boekenplank voor e-books. Via LeesID hebben lezers een centrale toegangsplek tot alle e-books van de verschillende deelnemende aanbieders.
5. Buitenlandse e-books
   Bol.com en Kobo gaan samenwerken. Voor BOL betekent dit toegang tot een enorme collectie buitenlandse e-books en een geavanceerd technologisch platform. Voor Kobo is het een grote sprong op de Nederlandse markt

On the platform, reading van Mo Riza via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Waarom zo veel rumoer?

Kenners verwachten een grote entree van Amazon op de Nederlandse markt. Als een dergelijke speler de markt betreedt zal er veel veranderen. De markt zal (hopelijk) groeien, en de bestaande partijen zullen (waarschijnlijk) marktaandeel verliezen. Daarom is het verstandig nu nog zo veel mogelijk strategische posities te betrekken.

Wat zijn uw ervaringen met bovenstaande innovaties? En op welke verandering zit u als e-lezer te wachten? 

Meer lezen?

• InCT over Elly's Choice
• InCT over Bol en Kobo
• InCT over LeesID
• CB over e-Book afzet
• InCT over BNL cijfers

Similar needs, different results

I recently had the pleasure of concluding two consulting assignments. Though both clients have a lot in common, the outcome was quite different. Why?

Situation and solutions

Both clients are publishers that serve national and international markets. Both offer multilingual products to professional users in PDF and XML-derived formats (such as HTML or ePub). Both need to update their publishing processes to keep up with changing stakeholder demands and are faces with outdated publishing infrastructures.

Image by Sean MacEntee from Flickr

But at one client we advised an Alfresco based solution, whereas the other client we advised a MarkLogic based solution. Being so similar, why two different outcomes?

XML as design choice

Needing editing by countless authors and editors worldwide, client A implicitly chose to set an open and well maintainable storage format as a standard. Generally, (X)HTML will not suffice for publishers, failing at standardisation of contents and the quality of the printed products. So XML it is.

Some excellent Commercial-off-the-Shelf XML products are available (including SDLs Live Content and Alfresco based Componize), but the of-the-shelf part usually means complying with their internal standards: DITA. Although DITA is a great XML format, it is not suitable in all cases, as it was in this case.

Wanting more specialised workflows and interfaces, we concluded that a custom XML based CMS combined with an online XML editor would fit this client’s needs best, with MarkLogic being the best platform to implement this. Binary content (like PDF) will be supported in the system through a layer of XML Metadata.

XML as an option

Client B’s content is mainly created in separate and formalised processes, with lots of content being available only in PDF. Editing being out of this equation, re-use and workflow were of much greater importance.

This client also sees the opportunities for XML and more dynamic publishing, but the hurdles are substantially bigger, and the rewards in editing would not be felt. Rather than going all-in on XML, client B will transform selected publications to XML.

For this client the out-of-the-box functionalities like workflow and flexible content storage tips the scale to an Enterprise Content Management System. Alfresco being the ECMS of choice, this strategic platform will provide the room to manage content and changing customer needs that will characterize enterprise IT for years to come.

Conclusion

It is often said that the devil is in the details. But these details often drive big design choices. Decisive product-ownership provides the roadmap for such strategic choices.

Thesis students

Being close to the Delft Technical University, my employer has tightened our relations with universities. I have the pleasure of mentoring two students performing their thesis study at HintTech.

Krishna Akundi from TU Delft has just completed his thesis study on visualizing large news archives in the temporal perspective. From a more fundamental research of the subject, his study has transformed into the quest for finding the most usable interface to visualize news trends in topics over time.

Marian Szabo from TU Delft has just started on the subjects of finding and fixing errors in ontologies. All ontologies have the potential for errors, and Marian quest is trying to help fixing them by finding, visualizing and showing possibilities to repair the errors.

Both offer interesting challenges in the exploration, understanding and visualization of Big Content sets, especially sets of RFD.

We are grateful to Newz for use of their data and providing substantive direction.

Content Matters Podcast on Semantic Technologies

I am very happy and proud to be featured on this months Content Matters Podcast. Iain Griffin and I talk about Semantic Technologies. We discuss the general concepts and the use of these technologies in recent projects such as Newz and Kennisnet.

If you are active in Content Strategy: Subscribe to the excellent Content Matters Podcast on iTunes or Soundcloud.

Every page is Page One

In my last post I referred to the Lessons from the New York Times innovation report.
One of the conclusions was that they were focusing too much time and energy on Page One. The NY Times number of Home Page Visitors is in a steady decline, whereas Page Views are fairly constant:

In episode 29 of the excellent Content Matters Podcast Mark Baker also talked about this idea and his book: Every Page is Page One.

Marks focus is Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web, but I think his message can be translated to almost any context (it does for the  NY Times!).

Remember the days that accessing a website used to be typing in the URL or using your bookmarks? (Who still uses bookmarks? As a Chrome user: Chrome knows my bookmarks better than me).

But now, much of the traffic to websites is either through search-engines answering specific queries – so dropping off users deep into your website – or by shared deeplinks to specific pages in your website.

Both will ignore your homepage. And where the page itself will probably look OK (you will have taken care of that one), what impression does this One Page give the visitor – the visitors Page One?

Will the visitor understand you and your story from this page? Will they leave your website it at this page because they don’t understand you? Or will they visit some of your other pages, each one as important as Page One?