Content and its Discontents

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Peter Buechler

Diagram of a content management systemCustomers read your collateral and visit your website, because you have something which interests them. Moreover, Google and other search engines find you because of relevant content on your site. Have paltry content or let it go stale and you’ll loose visitors, search rankings and customers. No surprises there, but curating and managing content can be awkward and time consuming. Who’s going to do it? More importantly, how do you make it easy for those on your team with something to contribute – be it Arthur in accounting, Sally in Sales, or Wally in the warehouse – when they have real jobs to do?

This may be a job for a content management system (CMS). A CMS is software for collaborative building and publishing be it of websites, internal information systems, blogs, or even physical documents such as books. It accomplishes two kinds of tasks:

1) It separates information from format, so that a contributor, who has some “content” may submit it; for example, by entering it into an online form.

2) It organizes contributors into a team, in which members have different roles such as reader, author, editor, designer, editor in chief.

The result can be surprisingly powerful. CMSs can accomplish these without programming or technical expertise from users. Their output is assembled like Lego blocks rather than programmed. Putting content originators in charge through a CMS offers the potential of much more rapid development and maintenance. IT is less involved if it is involved at all. This last is crucial for smaller businesses, which lack IT infrastructure.

Many CMSs are now available.  They range from free open source tools to proprietary enterprise systems with enterprise prices. As in other aspects of technology, open source no longer means home made or compromising on quality. They are built on scalable databases and mature programming languages like PHP.

I’ve been using a few of these open source CMSs for clients recently and on the whole, I’m impressed. This glass is half full. They do enable building a useful, content rich, collaborative site without having to be a programmer. Creating a professional website can be pretty easy, if what you do is built into the system. That said, figuring out how to make each of these CMSs do just what you want is not always obvious.

If you want your CMS to do something out of the ordinary, you’ll probably need to get some custom programming. Customization can be a strength of open source systems. Unlike proprietary technologies, open source CMSs are designed to be extended. All the underlying code is available and they depend on proven scalable Web standards. They are popular enough, so that an ecosystem of books, training, and implementation consultants has grown up around them.

Let’s consider some CMSs you can start using today.

WordPress:

Wordpress LogoWordPress has the image of a blogging system. Indeed WordPress powers millions of blogs, but the current version is much more than that. You can build a showcase, online store, portal, or corporate site (with or without a blog). Multiuser capabilities are built in. If you don’t care to host WordPress yourself, most hosting companies already support and maintain it.

This is the most straight forward of the three CMSs and easiest to launch something quickly, especially if you have to do it yourself. WordPress has a very large library of themes and “plugins.” Themes allow you to change the look and layout of a site. Plugins – essentially snap in modules of code – enable you to add functionality. For example, there are plugins to create image galleries, block SPAM, and create polls. Some industrial strength WordPress sites include Spotify, Tribune media Group, and Network Solutions.

Joomla:

Joomla.org states that it is “award winning,” “popular,” and “requires almost no technical skills to manage.” That may be a bit optimistic, but it’s certainly worth a look. Its mnemonically named modules are straight forward. It has an intuitive icon interface, which made it easy to get a simple site off the ground.

Joomla sites include Barnes and Noble’s Nook Developer , GE Transportation and Europe’s Orange Mobile.

Drupal:

Drupal’s elegant architecture was designed for content management. After a decade of development it appears robust and full featured. It’s very richness, however, makes it less clear what to do next. Even without programming, managing a Drupal site takes a learning commitment.

Examples of Drupal sites include Fastcompany, Popular Science, and Yahoo Research

Who Ya Gonna Call:

“Easy to use” is easy to say. Unless you or someone on your staff loves getting under the hood, you may encounter challenges. With a proprietary CMS you pay for and hopefully get support.

Support can be problematic with these as with other open source applications. The umbrella organizations, which oversee these CMSs are largely staffed by volunteers. They do have online documentation and forums, and you can submit questions. This is generally with no charge and no guarantee of results. If you want to be able to pick up the phone and say “fix it,” or have someone build the CMS for you, you’ll have to hire a third party such as Acquia (Drupal) or CloudAccess (Joomla) or one of numerous WordPress consultants.

Any of these tools are waiting to help you liberate your content and get it to a potentially interested audience. Why not go for it? The price, as they say, is right.

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Leadership Lessons
Of A Great Non-Businessman

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Peter Buechler

The Pope and the CEO, cover It is difficult to categorize this estimable book by social venture capitalist and former senior tech executive Andreas Widmer. It combines threads of principle-based leadership and work-life balance with mission, organizational and personal value definition. Readers of the business press will have encountered many of these concepts before. For example, that effective leaders are first of all servants. However, Widmer tells these in a fresh and innovative way.

The author has been profoundly influenced and inspired by the life and work of Pope John Paul II. In this he has the company of millions – Catholics and non-Catholics alike. However, in addition to having observed John Paul II’s public career,Swill Guards
he brings a rarefied inside perspective – that of a Swiss Guard. As a Guard, Widmer had a behind the scene vantage on how John Paul communicated, influenced, led by example and, in a holistic sense, taught.

The book is more than anecdotes and cases, but also a training manual with actionable exercises. These begin with personal and introspective tasks, but evolve into a social and communal sphere. As such they become relevant to managers and executives. Thus, in a chapter titles, Know Where You Are & Where You Are Going; we are enjoined to think about the goals and aspirations of our staff and our organization and what specifically we do to promote them.

The ideas are clearly informed by its author’s Catholic faith and experience, yet this is not a book only for Catholics or even those, who think of themselves as religious. It’s intriguing to speculate how business, politics and daily life might change if more people practiced the principles of The Pope and The CEO. You can find an excerpt at ThePopeAndTheCEO.com as well as a WSJ interview with the author and decide for yourself.

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The Message for Marketers

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Peter Buechler

At his recent death, Steve Jobs was widely lauded as a business, technology and marketing genius. The success of his company, Apple, and its iGadgets is indisputable. But genius, by its nature, is largely inimitable. What about the rest of us? (To borrow a phrase from an early Macintosh marketing campaign.) What lessons does Jobs offer marketers?

The conventional wisdom on Apples success includes:

 

  • The importance of design and product elegance
  • Controlling the whole product through vertical integration
  • Ensure a reputation for high quality
  • Building cool products

Like most conventional wisdom, these are of little help. You can do all of them and still not succeed. Let’s consider each of these chestnuts.

Many winners of design awards are not winners in the market place. Where are the Palm Pilots and Pet Rocks of a few years ago?

While Apple is more integrated than many companies, it has always borrowed, licensed or bought key parts of its products and has been willing to imitate what it thinks valuable. For example, though known for product design, Jobs hired agencies such Frog Design for the concept of the MacBook portables. Apple tried to develop its own processors, but prospered by abandoning this effort. Instead it became, like many other technology players, “Intel Inside.” Unlike say, IBM, Jobs could not be accused of suffering from a “not invented here” bias.

Quality – schmality. Quality was the cynosure of the IBM PC. Customers, however, became tired of paying for quality alone and stopped paying a premium. IBM took its quality and exited the PC business altogether.

“Cool” products are fine. Most of us would rather market cool than square, but this begs the question of where cool comes from. Most of the shopping list for homes or businesses contains a majority of decidedly uncool items. Some of the “coolest” aspects of products are ones we seldom notice, because they just work. The WiFi and Bluetooth networks, which pipes data to so many Apple products, come to mind.

Jobs did not always have the golden touch. Apples early products ranged from the moderately successful Apple II, to the failed Lisa (there was no market for a $10,000 dekstop), to the never achieved critical mass NeXT “scholars workstation,” to mobileMe, an online service which never gained traction and has been retired in favor of the new free iCloud.

Even the vaunted early Macintosh – “the computer for the rest of us” – was problematic. Despite advantages such as graphics, fonts, mouse, and transportability, it could never achieve more than single digit market share against the clunky PC. At the time, the PC was desk bound with a hard to read 80 column monochrome screen. It could run but one program at a time and print on a grainy dot-matrix printer.

The Mac failed to penetrate its initial target of the general corporate business market, so many early software developers chose not to write programs for it. Apple slogged on, when other companies would have cut their losses. Eventually a market – that of desktop publishing – found it.

From its inception, Apple under Jobs persevered, experimented and improvised as it rapidly evolved. Steve Jobs may be a modern version of the legendary hero Odysseus. Like Odysseus, who struggled against a seemingly limitless series of challenges, Jobs kept at it. Persisting, not by doing the same product, message or campaign but by continually improving and where necessary abandoning. Like Odysseus, he resisted the siren song of “me too,” while striving to define the brand which is his legacy. How much persistence does your marketing have?

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Think Inside The Box

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Peter Buechler

Our documents and dog and pony shows move from laptops to DVDs  to thumb drives and back, changing to new revisions as they go. So how do we share and collaborate on multi-megabyte presentations and how do we get our stuff back, when something happens to our previously trusty gadget? A still common practice is carpet bomb email. Send attachments of everything to everyone and repeat whenever someone modifies on comments on anything. To the extent such an approach works, it does so by ignoring many of the comments and modifications as the project deadline approaches.

There are far better ways and a range of solutions for collaboration and back up. We might even used one, if it is convenient and easy enough.

To forestall disaster, as well as enhance collaboration, I’ve been looking for a better way. There are a plethora of them – as if you had time to learn a new system, when the presentation is this afternoon. In fact, there are some light weight useful tools. Here’s my take on some of the leading options.

Services such as Live Mesh, Sugar Sync, and Mozy require you to install local software. My tests of these found them with more features than needed and therefore more complex, less intuitive, and slower performing. Their costs include a learning curve.

I found three utilities, which were elegant, simple and sufficient for storing, sharing and collaborating on documents. Like Google Docs and SalesForce.com, my preferred systems are “No Software” software. That is, there is nothing for you to install or maintain. In the current buzzphrase, they are in the Cloud. They work through the web browser. This means that they work with PC, Mac, Linux, smartphone and tablet. I list them order of my preference.

Box.net

Box is simple, fast, and elegant. Everything you need to know is on one clean screen. Create an account, upload and share files, collaborate and comment. A 5 GB personal account is free, while a 3 user account with 500 GB of working storage is $15 per month. The site was quite usable on a web-enables smart phone through its standard browser, but a bit easier through the free app.

Amazon

Amazon’s Cloud Drive, looks and works like the file management system on a computer. If you can find and save a file on your computer, you more or less know how to use Cloud Drive. The free version includes 5 GB of storage. If you buy music from Amazon, it is automatically stored on your Cloud Drive for free in addition to the 5 GB. Additional storage costs $1 per GB per year. It’s a breeze to use on a computer, but awkward to use on the very small screen of a smartphone. Cloud Drive is not currently accessible through any of Amazon’s apps.

OpenDrive

OpenDrive is a hybrid service. Online storage and file sharing are available over the web, but advanced collaboration and backup features require downloading  software to your own computer. A 5 GB account is free and multi-user paid accounts with 100 GB start at $50 per year. The interface is clean and intuitive. In my tests, uploading PDF and Word files took longer than with Cloud Drive or Box.net.

Any of these services are handy for storing and sharing content. Now your thumb drive can have a thumb drive.

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Happiness in a Box

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Peter Buechler

What business are you in? Phrased another way, what do your customers buy – really?

One of my vacation reads was Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness. The book is a widely ranging narrative of how a young programmer and frequent quaffer of Red Bull made an early bonanza, became an angel investor and gradually developed a notion of management. He distilled all of these through the school of hard knocks to transform his company, Zappos, into a leading direct apparel merchant and a brand which delivers more than the shoes and clothing it sells.

Hsieh and his team did not do this by running a lean, mean profit maximizing machine. They experimented continuously, paid well, staffed fully, rejected outsourcing, invested in a large domestic call center and abandoned a cost efficient out sourced drop-shipping model to take on the risk and expense of carrying a vast inventory.

Rather than use brute force marketing such as offering large discounts or spending heavily on advertising, SEO and promotion, Hsieh transformed Zappos into a customer service powerhouse. He marketed better by marketing less. The result in many cases is to deliver an experience, which not only satisfies but “Wows” the customer. Thus Zappos can claim to deliver “happiness” while also delivering profits. How does he do it?

Zappos has an excellent ecommerce website, but its core channel is, surprisingly for this day and age, the telephone. Zappos achieves customer intimacy through highly trained and carefully selected phone representatives and embedding them in a culture which honors their role. No minimum wage remote call centers in a low wage country here.

The phone experience is paramount for Zappos, such that every employee regardless of job goes through call center training. Unlike so many firms, the call center is not treated as just an expense to be minimized. Reps do not have a quota and can spend as much time as they wish on a call. They are empowered to deal with customer issues as they think appropriate and may dispense additional benefits such as upgrades to free overnight shipping. They can learn a great deal about customers and use this knowledge in growing their business. Their customers feel as if they’re being wooed. That’s delivering happiness.

The concepts which built Zappos are simple, so why don’t more organizations apply them to deliver happiness to their customers and profits to their stockholders? In essence, Zappos has a different business model: Dote on the customer, engage her in conversation and capture what you learn from these conversations. She will pay full price and tell her friends about it.

This approach requires the courage and commitment of making continuous long term risky investments and deferring short term profitability. It also requires dedicated leadership to build and maintain a culture of customer focus and continuous innovation.

Many firms, including some I’ve worked for and consulted to, have flirted with Zappos’ approach with clichés about how they value customers and staff. They abandon it with the first dip in quarterly earnings or the next article they read in a business magazine. It’s too hard and too disciplined for most companies.

If it can’t be like Zappos, what does your organization do to foster customer intimacy?

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