Tjeerd D. Brenninkmeijer

There’s a classic ad campaign from the cat food company Whiskas. The point of the advertising slogan is that if your cat was able to choose – they would actually choose Whiskas.

As delivering better customer experiences across multiple channels becomes an increasingly important part of the marketers mandate – we can learn a lot from the Whiskas campaign. CMS vendors have spent the better part of the last decade focusing on the “parents of the cat” - focusing on how we make it “easier for non-technical people to edit, manage and publish web content”, the developer “to make it easy to build a website” or on the marketeer to "engage with the customer".

Now, of course these are important goals – and CMS vendors (including Hippo) have succeeded in varying degrees to make these processes easier. But with all of the features of Web experience management that are being tossed around by CMS vendors – we are running the risk of once again focusing on the “parent” and not the cat.

These days - truly – it’s the end consumer of content that these editors and content managers should be focusing on. These are our audiences – and they are the ones making the ultimate decision of whether to engage with the content or not.

At Hippo we try to empower your audience.

To empower the audience we focus on two steps:

• How does your audience finds your content (SEO is not just about writing better content)
• How can we empower your audience to get the best experience.

But the focus is always on the customer. And yes there's also love for the editor, developer, marketeer. But this is not the end goal. At least, not for us.

For example, I can see why A/B testing can be useful, but I believe this is not the last step in the process. Your audience should be empowered to interact with your company on their turf.
Companies like to be in control, A/B testing can give them this feeling, but often, the general goal is forgotten. Engage within the context of the user. Personalize.
To get a better brand experience, improve revenue, share knowledge, interact or get social.

Context Aware Content Management

In the end, we need to be striving to deliver a contextual experience to our audiences – so that THEY are empowered to consume your content through whatever interface that is most popular, or is suitable for their needs. This means that as publishers of Web content, we need to be focused on publishing a platform of content that can be accessed in as many ways as possible, and contextualizes itself based on the channel, the time, the personal preferences and as many other environmental contexts as possible.

It’s like what Hippo CTO Arje Cahn said – “MultiChannel Is Not Enough”. What we’re doing with the Dutch Libraries, for example, is a first step in this direction. Using Hippo, we are making their content available as a content service – so that it might ultimately be consumed by any service at any time.

That’s giving the organization the ability to empower the audience. And, it’s where we’re going as Hippo. Ultimately our goal is that if your audience could choose your CMS for you, they would choose Hippo.

Last year I wrote a post as one of our Tales From The Demo Chair Series called “web content management – the most dangerous race in the world”. In doing the research for that post – we found that the WCM race is actually more dangerous than the Dakar Rally. Basically, of the CMS systems between 2002 and 2011 there’s a 60% change that the product was acquired or decommissioned. As we get ready for a great 2012, it’s time to take a quick look back at 2011 and see how we finished this leg of the race. Here at Hippo we had an amazing year – and there’s no slowing us down now. But 2011, contrary to the predictions made by some, was not a year when acquisitions of commercial vendors slowed down. It was a year filled with spills and thrills of acquisitions.
We started the year quietly alright – but then Spring sprung and came with an acquisitions bang. In May, Limelight Networks acquired SaaS CMS player Clickability. In June, Oracle surprisingly swallowed Fatwire.
Then, in August, Hewlett Packard decided that Autonomy would be a good acquisition. In a weird turn of events this means that Interwoven, which had previously been acquired by Autonomy is now an HP produced piece of software. And, then finally – in December - Alterian got its Christmas wish answered when SDL/Tridion purchased the company.

The Race Continues
As I said in the previous post – it’s interesting that the highest percentage of those still in the race are Open Source solutions. Of course one of the key strengths of the Open Source model – and especially one like Hippo – is that you’re getting a solution that will grow and evolve with you. Because of our Open Development model (using the community) and our support for Open Standards in all aspects of our software – the customer has MUCH greater flexibility. And even when there's an open source acquisition (or bankruptcy) the customers stays in charge. And because of the openness & standards being used it's 'easier' to move to another solution if you need to.
Beyond acquisitions, 2011 was certainly an interesting year for WCMS solutions. There was a big move for vendors to stop differentiating on how they “manage web content” – and more towards how they handle “Web Engagement Management” and “Customer Experience Management”. Perhaps the 2012 leg of the WCMS rally will be marked with how many solutions will be acquired because they promise these capabilities. You have to think there are more than a few commercial WCMS vendors out there right now hoping and wishing this is true.
As for us in 2012 – our fuel tank is full – we have amazing new product releases – we are working with incredibly exciting new customers – and we are still focused on delivering the best content management and delivery experiences for our customers and their audiences.
Rally on!

Having content available over an API is the new “black”. If you haven’t noticed – almost every social network and content company these days is promoting their API – and the ability to get content that can be integrated into any interface as a service. From social networks like Twitter and Facebook – to content companies like Google, Zagat, and even the UK Government – integrating content as a service across multi-channel interfaces is a big trend.
And this is no surprise. As the Web has matured, businesses have been challenged with keeping up with adding content interfaces. From portals, to Web sites, mobile devices, social networks, back-office applications – it’s been a constant struggle to make sure that content is available in the right format, and at the right time. And so separating the concerns of the formatting of content – and making it available in a standardized format makes huge economical sense for these businesses that depend on their content being in as many places as possible.
Of course at Hippo we’ve seen that trend from our clients as well – and have been working on that front for some time. For example, we’ve been working for years with publishing giant Thomson Reuters on their Findlaw.com site – to provide multi-channel content, as well as integrating content with their legal classification engine.
Other WCMS Systems have begun to put a real focus on this “multi-channel” delivery as well calling it “web experience management” and delivering content to any device or interface you need.
But really – having the ability to deliver content through an API to multiple channels is only half the story of contextually aware content as a service. The true power of context aware content management – is in providing for optimized and contextually relevant ways to MANAGE this content.
True Context Aware Web Content Management
William Clark, analyst at Gartner has recently described “context aware computing” as:
“user experience. It’s looking at a lot of different disciplines across IT and figuring out how they can be leveraged to make applications more relevant and content more relevant and experiences more relevant.”
But interestingly most WCMS vendors in the market today are STILL only worried about how to publish pages of content for “web experiences” for the audience user. And as William Clark pointed out in that quote – it’s about user experience on both sides of the software application.
There is a growing need to not only deliver content through an open and standard set of API’s – but also to provide contextually relevant ways to manage this content as well. For example, Hippo has been working with the Dutch Libraries on just such a project.
The Dutch Libraries – Managing Content As a Platform
With The Dutch Libraries the centralized Hippo content repository platform gets its content directly from multiple sources. There are editors working through Hippo CMS of course – and there is also content that is aggregated and scraped from external sources in a normalized fashion. This is common with many WCMS systems today.
This is extraordinarily innovative. Branches of the Dutch Libraries were already comfortable in the CMS systems they were using – namely Drupal and Joomla. And they didn’t’ want to go to the expense of re-training their users on how to use these systems. So, because of the way that Hippo’s standardized architecture and the context aware content server works – they can utilize existing CMS systems to manage content in a centralized repository. This not only gives the Dutch Libraries the ability to deliver content to any channel, any interface at any time – but the ability to manage that content through any system they desire. And, because the repository uses a fully REST based architecture – any other content contribution tool can be utilized as well. This means that any type of content management solution that connects in this way can be plugged into it.

This is treating your content as a business platform – and architecting it in such a way that it can be managed, and delivered in extraordinarily flexible ways.
This is TRUE context aware content management; where not only the content is delivered in a contextually relevant way – but can also be managed in a contextually relevant way for authors and editors of Web content. Delivering BOTH is a business imperative – and one that organizations should start examing as Anne Lapkin VP Of Research at Gartner said: “If you don't start unraveling the problem now - and how your going to apply context to your organization and your customers - you're going to miss the boat.”
It’s time for us to remember that MANAGING web content is NOT solved. At Hippo, we are constantly focused on not only how to create better experiences for audiences. At Hippo we think that Context Aware Content Management: is the Most Important Pivot In CEM (customer Engagement Management). We know that customers now expect to be able to engage with a company at EVERY stage in their buying process. And, by making it easier and more contextually relevant on both sides – a WCMS can facilitate the conversation and empower the audience.