Filed under Content Management

I have to admit, after reading Understanding Twitter, that I didn’t get it either.  When I logged on for the first time last week, though, The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel, had already put my email address in as someone allowed to voyeur-in on him.  So I did.  And I like the way he uses it.  It defies the “navel-gazing” description that some give Twitter.

Scott’s twittering is helping me get it.  Here’s why. Take a look at some of his entries, such as this one: “The Twitter message only had one word, ‘Arrested’,” which referred to a recent CNN story about a young man who freed himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word post sent from his cell phone. As a matter of fact, even CNN is Twittering (as Scott also points out). This is the kind of information sharing I’m interested in—and will likely stay tuned for.

As I started playing around with Twitter, my mind became a jumble of ideas thinking about all the possible ways a tool like this could be used in business or education.  I see where companies like Comcast, are using Twitter to feed outage updates and other customer service information to customers. (Too bad they can’t tweet me the new PIN that’s required to access my account information I’ve been trying to get for a month.) And you might have to forgive the hokey “Comcast Cares” logo floating around on the page, but they must care—at least a little—if they are trying new tools to reach customers.

Most of what I’ve read about Twitter discusses using the tool to communicate to outside customers, but other than that, couldn’t Twitter be used for internal communications? Could collaborators on a single project tweet one another to give status updates? Legal might tweet  Communications, “Signed off on CEO quote about how the IRS sucks,” implying that a press release is ready for the next step in the process.

With a tool like this, managers could keep an eye on the progress of team projects, see where things get stalled, and even tweet the team with information as basic as, “So and so is out today. Pls move this forward and circle back to him tomorrow.” You don’t need more than 140 characters to say that.  Mash it with a wiki and you have a free system that allows you to communicate with followers, contribute content, and keep an eye on the whole process to boot. This seems much simpler to me than the typical check-in-check-out-and-email content management tools we’ve all grown accustomed to.

I see this working in the classroom, too.  Students, who previously used clunky message boards to collaborate, could use Twitter to tweet each other about a project. “Gerbil seems nervous on diet of Red Bull and Skittles. Switching back to gerbil feed tomorrow,” and document the whole process for everyone—including teachers—to see.

So, I guess I’m starting to get it a bit more, but like so many other new tools, it’s gonna take me some time to realize its full impact on my life and my work. I’d like to hear how others may be using Twitter for internal communications.  In the meantime, I think I’ll check out what Scott’s doing right now.

What about using a wiki as a war room, a single location for strategic action-packed activity surrounding a specific set of goals? Wikis have lots of great features that make it an ideal collaborative web space. We’re not the first to think of this either - this article from a wiki about using wikis for Project Management discusses Building a Virtual War Room. But Duo has an excellent example of using an internal wiki page as a command center, a war room of sorts.

Duo uses its internal wiki to document and collaborate on mission-critical projects, like Chicago Park District registration. When the throughput gets intense, the Duo Consulting team uses an internal wiki as a war room for troubleshooting a web application that contains underlying SQL queries to help Chicagoans register for park department offerings. The wiki becomes a strategic command center, a virtual room from which information is gathered and decisions are made. With a slogan for Chicago Parks like “Come out and play” a war room metaphor seems opposite to the end game, but the team must attempt fully concentrated efforts and strategic decision making from one location. There are a couple of reasons why the wiki is so useful:

• there are so many people involved, with so many time-critical tasks and dependencies, that one central location that shows the progress prior to registration helps keep the team on track as a team
• during registration itself, there are so many people monitoring so many different aspects of the application all at once that they need one central location to store that information, as well as knowing who is responsible for following up on any immediate issues
• the wiki engine itself does an awesome job of syntax highlighting and storing SQL queries
• the team can use the wiki as a task list, crossing off items as they’re done.

A specific scenario as an example: one team member might log an issue where a patron can’t register for a particular class. The site is giving the user conflicting information about whether the class is sold out already or not. Another team member might throw up the raw database SQL for that class display on the wiki, and a third team mate might closely analyze that SQL for clues as to what the underlying issue really is – all within minutes, because it’s so important for people to be able to register for these programs as quickly as possible. It’s like the wiki page is the heads-up display in the war room.

Kelly Tetterton, director of development at Duo says, “In some ways, I would imagine working on Chicago Parks Department registration is not entirely dissimilar from working at the air traffic control tower at O’Hare – it feels like that kind of high-pressure, high-intensity experience.”

I’d say that wiki updates give more immediate answers to questions than emailing and waiting for a reply. Wikis make all decisions known to all who monitor the pages. Wikis let you display mission-critical information in a heads-up display or you can print if you happen to like your clipboard or three-ring binder. Wiki’s history pages give you the path to the decision made, and wiki discussion pages can contain lively back and forth while the main page maintains the “truth” decision for the time being.

Let’s hear some war stories - how are you using internal wikis as your strategic project war room?

When we think about the usability of the products that we sell, it’s because we have come to recognize that usability affects user perception of our products and, ultimately, sales. When consumers don’t find a product usable, they have unfavorable reactions that range from not using the product to returning it, to blogging about their complaints to steer others away from buying it. We’ve learned to take usability seriously, and put a certain amount of effort into making sure our designs are well thought out. When it comes to bringing products into the organization, can we make that same claim?

The implications of implementing a content management system (CMS) not vetted for its usability can make it a disruptive and costly endeavor. The idea that users will simply adopt a technology implementation is idealistic, but often does not bear out. Human nature is to take the path of least resistance, and when an application puts barriers in the way of accomplishing a task, a user is likely to fall back on tried-and-true ways as the means to a speedy end. When a naturalistic system is presented, i.e., the system is made to work in a way more natural to humans, users are far more likely to adopt the system. I’ve watched users, particularly when under pressure to get something done “right now,” or by quitting time on Friday, to bypass technology with system-based processes, in the interest of expediency. They may even intend to redo their little shortcuts “the right way” when they return Monday morning, but of course, by the time Monday rolls around, they’ve either forgotten or gotten caught up in work-a-day pressures that deprioritize the correction of a process they see as inherently broken.

Ultimately, system non-adoption or non-adherence costs the organization in several ways: loss of time, loss of content accuracy, and ultimately loss of the very efficiency that the system was put in place to address. That can translate into lost hours, lost productivity, and, in organizations sensitive to the possibility of potential lawsuits arising from content irregularities, an increased risk factor.

Testing a content management system for usability before its implementation is not unusual, and should be part of the standard due diligence undertaken by any organization considering a move to content management. System usability can be tested at several steps during the presale phase.

The first usability test can be done as early as during the demo, where you can watch for obvious usability problems, such as illogical sequencing of steps in a process, or interface buttons or commands that require jumping around or opening multiple windows at odd times during a process. The next test can be done once you’ve developed your use cases to present to the shortlisted vendors. In the ensuing discussions, the vendor should be able to demonstrate how you would accomplish specific tasks, based on your use cases. Because a CMS may have significant customizations for your organization, a coherent, end-to-end test is not likely, but the vendor should be able to isolate common tasks for testing. The last, and most extensive, test should be during the proof-of-concept, when the system you’ve chosen has been customized and installed for testing. This is the last chance to get any usability kinks worked out of the system. At this point, you shouldn’t be testing for the obvious - that should have been done before signing on - but you should still have the option to put the application through its paces to ensure that internal users can get their work done with ease.

Putting effort into getting a usable CMS goes beyond the obvious need for driving efficiency and accuracy. It says that you value your internal users enough to ensure that they have a toolset that works for them. Usability in a CMS creates a win-win situation, and that goes a long way in the workplace toward system adoption.

According to this AmLaw Daily article, Still Loading: Law Firms lag behind the Rest of Corporate America on the Web, “there are still law firms of substantial size that have relatively poor Web site offerings, surprisingly poor Web sites.”

Yet as Sonny Cohen pointed out in his previous blog post, Award Winning Websites Announced By Web Marketing Association, legal websites that get their web design right are recognized and rewarded.

So what’s the real story here? Are law firms’ web designs lagging or worthy of lauding?

If you’re comparing American law firms to corporate America, apparently you’ll find lag in the area of website usability, interactivity, and innovation in design. But many law firms are going beyond “brochure-like” content towards client-centric and service-oriented site designs.

I appreciated Sonny Cohen’s comments on the AmLaw article, saying “the targeted personas for law firms are clients, prospects, potential lateral transfers and first year lawyers” and basically pointing out to other commenters that matching the needs of the users of the law firm’s website is more important than criticizing it based on their own personally-formed beliefs. Plus you need to tie the design into the firms business objectives - and being bookmarked isn’t a business objective. A persona-based approach to website design makes a lot of sense to me, and metrics for judging the effectiveness are a must.

The AmLaw article ends with a ranking list of the Top 100 AmLaw firms web sites. One note it does give you as a takeaway is that you can’t correlate web site design with revenue per partner. Yet without metrics there’s no way to prove this takeaway one way or another.

I found the AmLaw article informative but the comments were just as important - when analyzing effectiveness of a design or handing out rewards, make sure the criteria for judging the content and design matches that of the users of the site. Nicely done.

I am currently at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Hell must be freezing over because the temperature at the convention center is currently 58 degrees. The workshops I attended today were both terrific and the speakers shared a wealth of information. The talks both topped out at just over 3 hours each. Perhaps this explains the temperature.

This morning I attended Dion Hinchcliffe’s talk Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications. While not exactly a workshop, it was a great survey of the path that got us to Web 2.0 (Hinchcliffe favors Tim O’Reilly’s definition: “Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects”) and where it may be going. Though I had read about most of the topics covered in this talk over the past couple of years it was really quite something to get it all at once. Though not exhaustive, here are some gems that I took away from his talk:

• The true value of Web 2.0 applications reside in the data. The most successful Web 2.0 applications are fundamentally powered by data.
• Data portability is a huge issue! See www.dataportability.org
• The race is on to “own” certain classes of data. Watch the real estate market especially.
• Web 2.0 applications are extremely sophisticated, highly distributed and federated.
• End user expectations are extremely high. Plan for 24/7 x 365 support and as many 9’s as possible.
• INNOVATION IS IN THE ASSEMBLY
• The 3 tier model is dead
• A key strategy is to turn applications into platforms. Go to where the users are vs. trying to lure them to a fixed point (website).
• Follow the Home Depot model: assemble as much as possible from off the shelf parts.
• Dion identified 3 classes of users: Developers (leverage API’s and everything else), Expert Users/Prosumers (widgets and embedding code snippets) and General Consumers (maybe widgets, gadgets). It is essential to address the needs of these distinct groups when designing a platform.
• Creating a community and providing good developer support are essential to success.
• Check Terms of Service carefully before integrating.
• Provide robust error handling; a composite application is only as good as its’ weakest link.

We are often asked two variations of the question, “How long is my website relevant.” Both have the same answer.

The first variant is, “Our site is x years old, is it time to redesign it?” The other variant is, “How long should we expect our new site to last.” The answer is “it depends.” But let me try to offer a better response.

First, we identify an economic life of a website. This is a balance sheet issue. Few actually record the website as an asset, but it is not unreasonable to assume it to be fully depreciated after 5 years. Some choose 3 years. Whatever you choose for business reasons does not necessarily translate to the useful life of the resource and it certainly doesn’t answer the question as to whether the site is still relevant or if the technology still works just fine. But it is the best way to establish a life of your site while also managing its replacement cost.

We believe the non-economic variables that determine the life of your old website or newly launched one are strategy, message, technology and look & feel.

Strategy is simply the manner in which you satisfy your business objectives online. The brief historic nickel tour of website strategy migration starts with a) establishing an online presence (the brochure-ware model) (1993 - 1999), b) becoming interactive (2000 - 2004), c) Web 2.0, social media and syndicated content (2005 - ?), d) semantic web (200X - ?).

Message is the way you tell your story. In its simplest form, the message is something as simple as “recently merged/acquired/out of business” which tends to shorten a website life considerably :).  More commonly, the message is the outcome of an internal business review which re-prioritizes your services, service delivery and restates your unique value proposition. When the website is sufficiently out of line with the message, continual patching of the site may not produce a desirable outcome and re-imagining the site is called for.

Technology is merely an enabler of strategy. So technology is rarely the game ending culprit. Unlike our analog TV’s which the government is forcing us to abandon for new technology, websites built a decade ago will operate just as well (or poorly) as they did when launched. It’s when your strategy puts demands on your website technology that something’s got to give. Although it may look like the technology failed, in truth, look to your migrating strategy to determine the life of your technology.

And finally there’s the look and feel. Sometimes merely updating the accessories can do as much for a website as it does for the look of an old suit. While it is often the excuse for a new website, it is rarely the real driver.

Free Libre Open Source Software makes the acronym FLOSS and it’s not the dental kind of floss that we’re talking about. Free also doesn’t mean no cost in this context - it means free as in freedom, which is how you get “Libre” for liberty - FOSS is known as FLOSS in Europe. With FLOSS and FOSS, you have the freedom to reuse the goods, knowledge, and content, share it in other places, or remix it as you see fit for your own purposes.

You may have heard the argument that open source doesn’t cost more in money but it can cost more in time because of the lack of support and documentation that often plagues open source software projects. Enter FLOSS Manuals, where the goal is to provide free manuals for free software. The documents produced in the FLOSS tool chain are written and read on a wiki web site, but also can be output as PDF files or as printed books.

FLOSS Manuals has created many inventive solutions for using wikis for documentation - not only can you get good print output from the system, but you can also use a Javascript-based API to embed chapters from a FLOSS Manuals book into any web page. A good example of this is the  NGO (non-governmental organization) in a box website http://openpublishing.ngoinabox.org. FLOSS Manuals content is licensed under the Gnu Public License (GPL), so anyone can reuse the content.

The way in which FLOSS Manuals are written mirrors the way in which free open source software - itself is written: by a community who contribute to and maintain the content.

There are three main sections for the site:

Read - You can read all of the currently live and up to date manuals online or in PDF files. The manuals are organized on the page based on what you want to do with the open source software the manual documents.

Write - With a free login, you can click an Edit link at the top of any page of a manual in progress - and all the manuals are in progress at any given moment.

Remix - With only your login and your imagination, you can drag and drop chapters from any book on the FLOSS Manuals site to create another book of your own remixed design. Then, you can either create a PDF of the remix, with your own CSS 3.0 stylings, or create a set of code that you can copy and paste to embed it into another website. With the remix option, you can harness the power of participant- or community-created content on any other website.

I’ve used FLOSS Manuals extensively for One Laptop per Child documentation for kids, parents, and teachers using the XO laptop and Sugar operating system. We recently held a BookSprint in Austin, Texas, to create even more content to improve adoption rates and make the goal of the $100 laptop for children in developing nations supportable and attainable. Adam Hyde of FLOSS Manuals is constantly expanding and improving the usabilty of the system. At the BookSprint, It was as if we had the content management system vendor in the room with us, writing right along with us, and doing bug fixes and enhancement requests as we wrote!

FLOSS Manuals About page says, “By supporting quality, user-friendly documentation of Free, Libre, Open Source Software, FLOSS Manuals aims to encourage the use of this software, to support the technical and social revolution it enables.” I’m seeing a content change for the better.

I am fascinated by a story that has played out this week between United Airlines and Google.  If you haven’t heard, late last Saturday night the Tribune-owned Florida newspaper Sun-Sentinel inadvertently posted a 6-year old article (with no dateline) on it’s website with the headline “UAL Files For Bankruptcy.” 

Who knows why this happened - but it does demonstrate the importance of a well thought out and executed web content management system.  To continue the story and I quote from the Tribune, “Tribune Co. said the story had received a single visit about 1 a.m. Eastern time Sunday but because traffic was so light to the states business section at that hour, one click constituted “most viewed” status.  Consequently, a new link was placed in the list of “most viewed” stories on the business page and the Google search crawler picked it up.”  The next day a sloppy securities analyst from Bloomberg summarized the article and UAL stock dropped 75%, losing over one Billion dollars before trading was halted.

The article should have had a dateline.  A simple rule enforcing a dateline in their web content management system would have alleviated the problem, even if the old article was inadvertently published.  New tools to manage web content are available for a fraction of the cost five years ago. Don’t make a billion dollar mistake, consider your own web content management vulnerabilities, and engage a professional to manage your risks.

Update: The New York Times wrote a great analysis of this in, “How a Series of Mistakes Hurt Shares of United” September 15.

Should you put a link to LinkedIn on a biography page of a law firm website? That was the question posed recently on the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) listserv by Gail Lamarche Director of Marketing at Henderson, Franklin, Starnes & Holt.

I opined that, for professional services firms such as this law firm, the attorney biography page is the best thing we have as a “money page” on the website. Therefore, driving visitors away from the money page was, strategically, a bad idea. Moreover, it seemed if there were really content on LinkedIn that was valuable to the site visitor, then that information should be on the bio page. And if it wasn’t there, the bio page was somehow deficient.

Smug I was in the righteousness of my response. But I got an earful of dissent from LMA listserv contributors. The arguments are worthy of consideration:

Jayne Navarre, LawGravity, presented these points persuasively:

• Branding – The LinkeIn link is like a hip badge of Web 2.0 awareness
• Connections – LinkedIn provides a transparent view to an attorney’s connections, arguably a value to any prospective client
• Authoritative - Access to the LinkedIn Questions & Answers provides additional proof of the attorney’s authority

Heather Milligan, Director of Marketing at Barger Wolen emphasized that LinkedIn:

• Human - helps make the attorney “dynamic, human, liked”( in case we have any residual concerns about their humanity) and helps the attorney pass the “known, liked & trusted” test of prospective clients.
• Dimensional - And in rebuttal to my “bio is deficient” comment, Heather notes that to maintain a certain appearance consistent with other bios and the overall website, “the firm bio is controlled for content, style, etc….(while) LinkedIn is the perfect place where an attorney can bring together their outside interests and professional careers, making them more human and likeable.
• Connections - Perhaps the most valuable feature, LinkedIn is fundamentally a connecting tool that might serendipitously reveal a third party connection to the site visitor which presents all kinds of opportunity for real introduction.

It’s not a slam dunk either way. The answer to Gail’s original question seems to be, “It depends.” The circumstances dictate the strategy. I’ll give it a nod of possibility and something worth trying.  Yes, I know, “first I was against it, now I’m for it.” Thanks to the enlightenment of my marketing peers.

But I’ll have this last (never!) word.  Think doubly hard about sending your site visitor from the most valuable conversion page of  your site to an information wasteland. Don’t do it unless the LinkedIn profile to which you are sending visitors:

• provides a rich set of business connections
• demonstrates some effort to contribute authoritatively to the online Q&A discourse
• otherwise expands on the website attorney bio page
• (if possible) provides a path back

And whatever you do, measure the results. Professionals keep score.

Now you can link away to my LinkedIn profile.

The Internet always has been and is becoming even more of a scary place. With all those unwashed masses contributing content, heck, even CNN has implemented “iReport.com: Your stories, unfiltered” Almost every CNN article invites reader contribution which often exceeds the original story in depth and thoughtfulness. But it also affords the opportunity for shallow, callow observations and attempts to advance personal agendas. Scary. And disruptive.

Remember the good ol’ days when only those with money and access could spin their messages to their hearts’ contentment?  When you could purchase a listing in a business directory and the biggest challenge was which one’s? They’re fading fast. The rules we learned to follow just don’t work as well as they used to. Time to learn the new rules.

Recently I was following an online discussion regarding Wikipedia. The issue was whether businesses, in this case, law firms that often have a broad public presence and handle newsworthy cases, should seek to gain a listing. The challenge or perhaps more accurately, risk, is that once the listing is successfully obtained in Wikipedia anyone might comment, add to or modify the original carefully vetted explanatory copy.

I believe that what it comes down to is not trying to control the top-down message. Rather, the task is to monitor and participate in the egalitarian conversation. It’s all about reputation management, not control.

It’s been 15 years (!!!) since Peter Steiner published his cartoon in the New Yorker, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”  It’s taken some time for all of us to figure out what his prescient remark was about. Welcome to the age of transparency. You’re on display and anybody can sharp shoot you.  And will.  Even if they’re a dog – or a disgruntled client, a competitor or the random crank.

So what does this mean for us little folks marketing our companies?  First, acknowledge that even the best companies with the finest reputations have their dark corners waiting to be revealed. Second, so what? The internet is ubiquitous, so it is time to come out of hiding; we see you anyway.

Wikipedia? Absolutely contribute your objective knowledge. But maybe your approach should be more about participating in existing subjects that are already published rather than treating the medium like it is another directory inviting your carefully-scripted-&-reviewed-3-levels-up position statement. It is no longer about you; it’s about us and what we want to know. Not what you want to tell us. And besides, if I don’t like what you say, I’m going to change it or respond. Like I said, scary.

It’s time we go back to our job descriptions and add “reputation management” to our public relations responsibilities. The great news is that there are lots of tools and tactics for managing reputation online. But it’s going to take some of our precious time to learn some new skills.