I am also not naive enough to know that my nice treatment is not down to my smile, but the commercial reality that I was getting on a British Airways plane five out of every six weeks last year.

However travelling last week, was a particularly fine week, I hopped over to the UK from New York, to Amsterdam, back to the UK and then home to New York.

Each and every BA touch point along the route was either splendid (yes, with an upgrade) or simply courteous, efficient or charming. The weather was kind, so to be fair they had no stress of significant delays, but each flight was full (a holiday week in UK and Netherlands).

So, coming to the end of my trip I tweeted “I love @British_Airways, that is all”.

It got a little ripple of reaction from my little sphere of “Twitfluence”, but to my surprise British Airways replied. Not much in that you may say, maybe they have a bot that auto replies like Pavlovís dog to the bell ringing of a mention of their Twitter handle.

But no.. They replied by saying:

@IanTruscott Thank you for your support Ian, it is appreciated!

Yes, ‘thanks your support Ian‘ not @iantruscott but they’d actually plucked my first name from my profile and made me feel like they were engaging with me.

It’s a small thing, I’m in this business so I know that maybe it could have happened programmatically and not by a real person.

Yet, it appealed to something inside me that doesn’t really want to know if it was a machine, it felt like British Airways had connected with me and I want to go along with that.

If you’ve ever got the “Dear {customername}” emails where something has gone wrong, and a placeholder appears where your name should be, you know what I mean. The indignation comes because the illusion of a company engaging with you is shattered.

Of course, like a lot of things social media, this is not new. For years remembering and using your name has been a standard technique of sales people, building rapport and trust whether you are buying a house, car or some enterprise software.

Personally, I try to apply this to Twitter – whilst it’s probably true that I am not in sales as I can’t remember anyone’s name – when I’m sharing a link through Twitter – I try to seek  out the authors twitter handle and name. Even if these aren’t immediately apparent. I do that to connect and to say that I liked what they wrote, not what some huge online publication that they write for churned out that day.

Also back to my BA experience, for organizations engaging with you – knowing your name and using it bestows a sense of individual quality in the service. When you sit nearer the front of the plane the flight attendant asks “What would you like for dinner tonight Mr Truscott?”, when you are nearer the back of course they can’t pay that same courtesy.

Of course, there is a flip-side, that over familiar sales guy that crosses that subtle line – there is a risk of turning people off. However, that’s not the focus of this post. If you want to engage with me on-line, it’s very simple; say my name

Why do I think he’s an online marketing genius? Is it that he sells a gazzillion DVDs or the iTunes equivalent? Maybe, but not what I was thinking.

I would like to nominate Rich Hall into the halls of genius marketers for a rant he did once did about US election polling – that I’ve thought about a lot as I get confronted with yet another website survey.

During this rant, he referred to dodging the people with clipboards and surveys. Hall said something like:

“You know where they take these polls? Shopping malls. That means that 67% of the people weren’t smart enough to get out of the way of someone with a clipboard bearing down on them!”

This “smart enough to get out of the way” is the phrase that resonated with me and has been like a little bit of grit irritating itself into this blog post. During the long gestation on this post, I observed two organizations surveying their customers in the real world.

The first British Airways who on a long hall flight handed surveys and pens to random, but very specific seats. The recipient had nothing better to do than to give it their full attention and they were addressed seriously and personally, as a favor to the airline and by virtue of the personal request a favor to that cabin crew member – I didn’t see anyone refuse.

My wife, an excellent litmus test of these things took it fairly seriously and as a city girl is incredibly adept at avoiding the high street clipboard – so not someone who seeks the opportunity to express her opinion.

The second example was a bored looking official with an armful of surveys wandering through a busy UK train, half heartedly asking if anyone would like to fill in a survey. Like BA, a fairly captive audience, I certainly had the time to my destination for a quick survey, I had a seat with table in front me – it wouldn’t have been that inconvenient.

Yet, I did not see anyone say yes. Who would want to put their hand up in front of their traveling peers and say “I am a survey filler”?.

I am not privy to the results of these surveys, but you can imagine the difference in the quality of the results.

You can therefore discern that the quality of survey results is down to the people completing the survey, their randomness and how they are engaged.

So, back to the world of digital customer engagement it follows that to understand the quality of a web survey, we then need to think about who fills in those things?

Is this the targeted BA experience or the bored train official limply asking for feedback?

How are you engaging me to give you this feedback? To use the old actor phrase “what’s my motivation?”

Knowing the motivation, is a good way to think about the ‘who’.

I am not going to be as harsh to suggest that (to use marketing guru and sometime comedian Rich Hall’s phrase) visitors that fill in a survey are ‘are not smart enough’ to avoid it but they are not a random sample of people coming to your website.

I suggest that the people that fill in surveys are either engaged enough with you already to be extra nice and indulge you with their time  – or they are dissatisfied sufficiently to be motivated to vent.

If you have been exposed to any sentiment analysis of brands, products or services the bulk of folks sit in the neutral middle, between these two love/hate motivations. Therefore in most audiences these survey filling folks make up the minority of visitors.

That is unless of course you are really, really bad or really, really good and the motivated antagonized and the adorers make up your mainstream. In which case you probably know that already and what was the point of the survey to you? Then, more crucially,  what purpose has that annoying survey pop-up served the silent mainstream visitor?

How has it helped them engage with you? Or achieve the task, reach the call to action or whatever is the purpose of your website. You’ve given most people a minor irritation – another click – in return for?

Imagine the BA survey takes place just before you land. That it delays you getting off the plane. It would completely change that experience, and therefore the results.

As you look at the dial marked ‘survey’ on your digital-engagement-o-meter. Is this really a good basis to make digital engagement decisions, without this context?

Having said all this, I do think surveys are a great way to build awareness about the audience – done right and the opinion of the engaged is important when taken in context. Even done wrong the fact that someone fills in a survey tells you something. It’s just that out of the context of the survey experience the results could be misleading.

Or to put it another way, back to my analogy, using Rich Hall’s monologue:

If you heard on the TV that 67% of Americans said that they will vote X – you would probably take this at face value and value the results.

If on the other hand you heard that 67% of Americans in malls, who weren’t smart enough to avoid a random stranger with a clipboard and then indulged them with their time will vote X. You may feel differently.

I give you Rich Hall, marketing genius.

Moving into a new house from the UK, we found ourselves needing a new kettle. Not much in that, I’m English, I drink tea, so I am bound to need a kettle. We had lots of choice, but we bought one that sits on the hob, looks old fashioned (like the Connecticut house we are renting) and it whistles when it’s boiling.

It doesn’t have a blue light or a ‘programmable reheat setting’, it doesn’t switch itself off, it doesn’t even have a plug.

When I pour the water out of it, I burn my lily office fingers getting the whistle thing off the spout and sometimes the lid will fall off mid-pour and scald my entire hand.

In fact sometimes it doesn’t whistle and I when return to the kitchen from my home office remembering I was making tea – I find I only have half a cup of water as the rest has boiled away.

Do I hate this kettle?

No.

I don’t hate this kettle because despite (or maybe because of these foibles) it has character, it looks nice, it feels nice, it is more than a kettle – it has personality.

To quote the character Jules in the film Pulp Fiction – “Personality goes a long way”.

In that movie the character is describing why he doesn’t eat pork. It’s not for any of the usual religious or animal welfare reasons – it’s just that he doesn’t “dig on swine”.

To put that into the words of the marketer, he’s not engaged with brand ‘pig’.

To him ‘pig’ means a filthy charmless animal, it does not mean bacon or pork chops. At which point the other character in this scene (Vince) suggests that if brand pig had more personality then he might like bacon and he kind of agrees.

The dialogue is far more eloquent (OK sweary and entertaining) than that and I am not sure John Travolta referred to “brand pig” – but you see what I mean. Beside me shoehorning in a quote from one of my favorite films and talking about my kettle, personality is a key element of the customer experience.

Studies show we anthropomorphize brands (here is a good example talking about cars and this on slideshare is worth a look). However, I am not a brand marketing guy, we can apply this to the more direct interactions we have, such as through the social web where our interactions with our audience are personal.

For example, have you ever heard someone describe a presentation as “too slick”?

This slick presenter has fine honed their message, ironed out the hiccups and missteps that normally interrupt a presentation.

Yet, when people say “too slick” they allude to mistrust, it doesn’t look honest. Along the way the presenter has washed out the passion, the personality and somehow their credibility (an essential element of the customer experience, which I talked about here).

I think there is a lesson here that folks need to learn for content marketing through social media. That it’s not about appearing slick, but of appearing to be like you.

In this post a couple of years ago for the Engaging Times blog I talked about “The Social Web – Be yourself… or find someone who is” – about the appropriate voice for your organization for each communication channel.

Which leads me to a question Scott Liewehr recently asked on Twitter.

Q to content marketers: is the use of a blog as a separate section of a corp website just an interim step to more fluent use of web content?

Which is the genesis of this post, as I thought about this, the difference between corporate website content, a corporate blog as part of a corporate website and a separate company blog.

I replied on twitter, but needed more than 140 chars – sadly noodling on a blog post for a week is not the best way to enter the fray with the conversation – but  during the conversation Scott replied with this:

But my thought is, who wants to go to the”Blog” section of P&G or AMEX anyway? If blogs are a way to be more engaging, tell stories, provide authentic expertise, etc.

Exactly! This is my point for this blog post.

Social media, blog posts specifically and Twitter give organizations a great opportunity to touch a wide audience with their personality. To scratch at the surface of the slick sales pitch, the gorgeous website and find out who you really are.

To discover that in fact they are “… ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Personality goes a long way.

If you don’t have my total recall of Pulp Fiction, quotes from the scene I refer to are here on IMDB  and if you don’t mind the language – here on YouTube.

This then got me thinking about the Forrester term – Customer Experience Management, their flavour of defining an engagement solution strategy.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll also know written about these various engagement flavours (WEM/CEM) before (for example here).

As you probably know I now work for an enterprise software vendor. Our customers are making a significant partnership decision. When you are dealing with someone’s future on the web, you might as well start messing with their plumbing, their email system or the power. It’s that important. A website down is a revenue-losing-CEO-calling-you-at-2am-to-fire-your-ass type of event.

Maybe I exaggerate  a WCM’s place in the world slightly, but you get my point. It’s a business relationship that requires trust.

To be trustworthy you need to be credible.

Yet, credibility is not a word I hear very often in the context of WEM, CEM or CXM.

We talk about a process of creating advocacy, engagement, measuring levels of engagement and words like that. But, what really leads us as consumers to engage with a brand, buy a product, to spend time reading a blog post or follow someone on Twitter?

It’s credibility.

An engagement strategy is therefore about enabling your audience to experience your credibility.

Your credibility to solve their problem.

Each touch point to your audience is adding (or possibly subtracting) from that credibility score.

How you manage and publish content is core to this.

The website down event I referred to earlier, is going to drain credibility.

A slow or poorly designed website is going to make you look untidy – not credible.

A spelling mistake, a simple error in governance will make you look sloppy – not credible.

An inconsistent message between channels.. not credible.. etc.

Credibility is also a good litmus test to be applied to how you engage with your audience. Some folks think they need a Facebook page – but will this add to their credibility? A CEO twitter account? Same.

Then after you have made these choices about channel, does what you post and how you respond to the social channel add to this credibility score? Does it pass that test?

How does everything, on every touch point with your audience add to your credibility?

I’m not seriously suggesting a new acronym – but is the C in CXM “Credibility”?

Picture of  ’C’ neon sign by M.V. Jantzen used under Creative Commons License.  

As I look down the list, my daughter’s fervent wish is that she is delivered a ‘Wappy Puppy’. Through sketchy knowledge of the world of my daughters and a little eavesdropping I believe it is a game for the Nintendo DS. Hence I find myself staring at a crumpled piece of paper in the Nintendo aisle of this vast electrical emporium.

As a fairly tech savvy chap, who enjoys a gadget and a video game – I think I know my way around an electrical store. Big as this one maybe, I can normally deftly navigate my way around and I scan the game shelves, here we go… W… Wappy…. Nope.

Ok, so it’s just before Christmas and the shelves are a little dishevelled, I excuse myself around an equally confused looking father and zero in on the P for Puppy.. nope… between the boy trying to negotiate his mother up from one game to two… ‘Latest Games’… nope… another quick swerve… ‘Most Popular’… Nada.

Take a step back, deep breath and circle again. Nope.

A text message from my wife confirms I am looking for W.A.P.P.Y puppy (as in dog).

At this point I would like to claim I took the desperate measure (for me anyway) and actually asked someone for direction – but the truth is that a kindly store assistant recognized a man down in the field of retail battle and above the pre-Holiday bedlam asked me if I needed some help.

Sadly, my rescuer also had not heard of the Wappy Puppy game and having attempted the same desperate search I had done moments earlier, came up empty handed. The problem here was that neither of us were 7 year old girls, or had been paying attention to the same commercials and the more I confirmed it was ‘Wappy’ the more ridiculous it sounded.

So I reached into my pocket for my smart phone.

I Googled this mythical Wappy Puppy beast.

I saw a picture of my prey.

And a moment of clarity appeared on the face of my hunting cohort, now locked into this mission.

It’s not a game. Well it is. But it comes with a robot puppy and because of its size it’s not where we were looking in the uniform racks of DS games.

Our thrashing around in this sea of shopping chaos was over, we went straight to the little critters, the last two in the store (I have two daughters) and Christmas was saved.

Why did I share this heart warming message of holiday retail and fatherly ineptitude?

Well the true hero of this piece is my smart phone and the content it gave me access to.

Mobile plays an increasingly critical role in our retail experience. In this case seeing a picture of the product and being reassured that the store sold them, clinched a little bit of revenue for this business.

I could have shared a number of personal stories where this has been true, where a quick look on my phone has confirmed an in-store sale. One day it was an exact laptop specification when my father was ready to make a purchase and just last week it was my sister-in-law buying a new camera lens.

What do you do?

Talk to a bored looking teenage store assistant, who’s inexperience will probably mean the response to your question will be a blank look, or a vague “I think so, I’ll.. umm ask..”

Or do you reach into your pocket for that shiny portal into a world of information and others experiences of exactly this product?

When we are making big decisions, we research, we Google. There is nothing new in that, data from Google notes that 71 percent of smartphone users use their mobile phones to search for more information on a product seen on TV or in magazines and newspapers.

But with mobile – we can all do it in-store at the point of sale.

Therefore, how a business or a product represents itself on-line on mobile devices is now a business imperative, how a business offers this information and how they use tools that recognize location (that you are in-store) is going to change the way we shop.

It certainly changed my daughters Christmas.

I say ‘old haunt’ as I was actually completely blindsided by the fact it was not at the Westin in Copley Place – which, by my reckoning, it had been there since before Vignette was founded (or when we were all children). Therefore my cunning plan to stay in my current favorite reasonably priced hotel in Boston (the Colonnade), positioned just outside the Copley place action was a bad one.

Anyway, besides my mistake, the venue was actually great and better than the half mall/half hotel that is Copley…

…..but this is not a travelogue, I am here to write about my presentation.

At Gilbane you always present with at least one other speaker, which can result in a fabulous lottery where you toss your speaking proposal hat in the ring and sometime later you find out who you got paired with and how the Gilbane programme will describe the performance that this new double act will perform.

On this occasion my new best friend for the afternoon was AJ Gerritson, founding partner at 451 Marketing -, the lovely folks at Gilbane billed our matinee debut as: Building an Integrated Marketing Campaign for the Digital World and my friend Scott Liewehr (who was running the track)  had already insisted I write some new material – so here was what I talked about:

All the cool web kids are social, is your CMS ready to hang with them?

· The ‘social web’ is now just ‘the web’, many websites today and all of our websites tomorrow will be social community spaces.

· Our platform for marketing, PR and engagement will not be limited to a fixed URL, but a broader social media, multi-channel experience.

· Today organizations are taking a tactical approach to these challenges, with niche tools and loose business practices to augment their tried and tested web content strategies.

· As the requirement to socialize becomes a mainstream business imperative, is it time to evolve from WCM to a Social CMS?

Now reading that last point you may be thinking “Bloody hell Ian ‘Social CMS’ you vendor guys inventing another category?” (or words to that effect) – but that is certainly not the case. My big finish was (*warning spoiler ahead*) how actually all these new channels need a mature content management strategy and systems.

That, as content management professionals – our time has come.

I was videoed and I am sure Gilbane will post a link (follow @GilbaneBoston ) – I’ve also posted my slides on Slideshare here.

My immediate reaction was obviously “OUCH!” as I zeroed in on the “used to”, completely ignoring the fact he said “great” – and then I thought about it and hey, here is someone that pays attention, he’s noticed that I haven’t blogged in two months and for that I am incredibly grateful! And dammit I better write something..

Well…. it is true that my social media engagement has slowed a little since joining SDL, I lost a little of my social media mojo. One thing – and I realize that social media lesson #1 is that putting yourself out there, you are going to have to handle some negativity – but I was tired of the few people that were constantly throwing stones at work I was passionate about.

But, new job, new role means a period of adjustment of my online voice. I’d moved from being an analyst free to tweet and re-tweet joyously about whatever and whoever I chose, back to the fun of the vendor politic. You may think that “a period of adjustment in my online voice” may seem like I’m some sort of sell-out – surely a new employer and change of industry role shouldn’t mean that my views and principals have changed.

A couple of years ago when I got on-board with Twitter I wrote a bit about this in a post – The Tweet Effect – Who am I?  – which seems naive and a bit embarrassing now as I figured out Twitter back then, but it’s still basically true. Facebook is me at home, Twitter and this blog is the “work me”. The “work me” has to be sensitive to litigation, buggering up a software deal and generally embarrassing myself and my employer.

Here I feel my voice should be slightly less formal than what I might say in a business meeting, probably nearer to being what I might discuss with someone else in this industry or a client over dinner. I’ll never be a PR mouth piece – that narcissistic desire to be respected and read sees to that! – plus, I’ve been in the industry too long and people that know me would see straight through it. It’s a balance and I needed to tune into my new surroundings.

Of course I’d hope my views are well aligned with those of my employer, or they wouldn’t have hired me. My views are my own as expressed here and a tiny slither of my value to SDL is in the work I do here and on Twitter.

Plus… I’ve been busy – in the last month I’ve moved to New York!

Anyway, enough with the excuses of why I haven’t written here for a couple of months. I have, however been writing!

In October an article I wrote about social media and content management was published in Media Post. With the title “If Your Message Isn’t Socialized, Is it heard?” I wrote about the importance of having your content curated by the social media crowd, which expanded on my previous post here. It’s something I also talked about at Gilbane this week and I am going to write about that here too.

I have also been recently published by the Cloud Computing Journal, in an article titled “The Cloud and the Perfect Marketing Storm” I wrote about  “being in the cloud” is not a business requirement, but that the business needs of the marketer are driving the adoption of software services that are offered ‘off premise’. You can read the full article here: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2076039 – (golly, it’s had over a thousand views!).

So, if like Robert you noticed I’d gone a bit quiet, thank you for following, I really appreciate it and I hope you like these other articles.

Image of cobwebs and bottles by Librarian In Black shared under creative commons license. 

Is it really? So what does this mean for content management professionals and content marketers?

I wonder what has all this Facebook time come at the expense of? One could ponder that the idea that the web is shrinking would need to be based on the assumption that the same amount of folks are spending the same amount of time online. The truth of course is that internet adoption, especially on mobile, is increasing.

When I refer to adoption I don’t just mean the number of people connected and have access, I mean that our engagement with the web is deeper and longer – it’s a more pervasive part of our lives

My guess is that the figures actually mean that the minutes that the US population are spending on Facebook is growing faster than the minutes spent on Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN (the next top visited sites according to the research).

This further underlines the impact of the mainstream adoption of social media, these are “new online minutes”, new people that were not especially active online, (although they were physically connected or able to connect) are now on Facebook, spending time there and this is the stepping stone to the rest of their online activity. It’s a must do daily task. It’s email.And the people doing it are my Mum.

In my opinion having helped my Mum rip her first CD to her MP3 player a few weeks ago, she’s a pretty good yardstick of digital mainstreamness.

There have always been these gateways to the web, from AOL onwards, that have now become just homepages that people click through – Facebook offers something that we’ve banged on about for years – stickiness. (or what some folks call engagement today). AOL and MSN provided this through email, but Facebook has that trumped.

I guess that if you sell high end gadgets – you could argue that your audience has always been there – on the ‘early adopters social web’ of bulletin boards, discussion groups, Twitter and seeking you out with Google.

But, lets not get sniffy about “the mainstream”, assuming its just my Mum, teenagers or a bored housewife – your early social media adopters are also there – avidly checking it everyday. These time poor professionals slotting in a slither of their day to share something with their friends.

All the while we we are increasingly becoming consumers of prepared, curated and recommended content through these channels, rather than the content hunter gatherers riding the plains of Google. So will we soon be saying that if your content is not recommended through likes and Tweets – does it even exist?

Is the path through the keyhole the socializing of your content, not the platform itself? Could be an important distinction, do you need a Facebook page or just to be liked?

As usual, I’ve probably digressed – I started out with some questions:

So… is the web effectively shrinking? 

Possibly, there are some of us that have reached a saturation point of internet minutes, that earning a living and maintaining our relationships with our loved ones means that no amount of furtive tweeting during a meal when your partner is in the rest room or a sneaky email check during their favorite soap is going to extend that. Maybe Facebook and Twitter time is eating into channels we might have enjoyed, like our RSS Reader or a bit of Googling.  But, for everyone else this is just the start.

What does this mean for content management professionals?

This stickiness is driving the social web; engagement with a community is shaping our future websites – and therefore how we view content management and publishing. In his paper “Systems for Engagement” for AIIM the writer and commentator Geoffrey Moore writes that our content systems will move from systems of record focused on process and governance to collaborative community tools.

Not quite sure that’s all true, I’ve worked with organizations where governance is a serious business, but we certainly need to make our content easy to like,  easy to share and facilitate that conversation – the recommendation and the curation – to be seen through this keyhole.

Yes, our CMS tools (and the beautiful web applications we build on them) must be open,  friendly and very social.

Picture of the keyhole courtesy of katerha shared under Creative Commons License.

So, as I took the kids for their first day back at school I resolved I too would return and whilst I was tempted to write a thrilling introspective of my social media writers block, I thought I’d kick off with a kick-off – Dreamforce.Seemingly the daddy of all customer day shindigs for the billions of happy Salesforce.com punters.

To be precise, I want to write about the  keynote, by Mark Benioff – CEO and Chairman.

Part of my writing angst has been to add something new to the excellent writing out there, so having picked this subject I probably need to warn you that I am unlikely new insights. While I am busy apologizing, I probably should point out that I wasn’t one of the fifteen thousand people who were in the room to witness it live.

Forgive me and get yourself over to the Salesforce YouTube channel, play it on your biggest monitor in full HD and hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Firstly as an occasional public speaker, to see Benioff wander the room (yes, sure, probably heavily rehearsed and scripted – but none the less impressive for that) was a billion miles away from someone standing reading the slides and anyone who presents anything ever should take a look (however good you think you are). The occasional “Hey Bob, good to see you” as he strode the aisles or his little banter with the Cocoa Cola CTO might seem cheesy, but he owned the room. A room of fifteen thousand people. Nice.

Maybe that’s what one expects of your modern day CEO, but I was impressed – and content wasn’t too bad either.

The theme of the opening keynote was ‘Welcome to the Social Enterprise’ and you may be thinking “ho hum, yes – who isn’t talking about social?” and as he continues to speak perhaps you might think “Ah huh.. a reference to the Arab spring.. so, who isn’t referencing the Arab spring when it comes to social?”.

But, Benioff concludes his reference to the Arab spring with “No one ever held up a sign and said ‘Thank you Microsoft’” – yet the protestors during the Arab spring did thank Facebook.

BTW – If you’d like a reference to the protestors thanking Facebook wander over to Social Times.

Good point – nicely encapsulating why social is different from our progress from mainframes (and a handful of vendors), to the Microsoft desktop, through mobile to this social revolution.

Benioff continued on the Arab spring theme, talking about a “Corporate Spring” or “Enterprise Spring” – in that, in the social media age how will CEO’s face the challenge of employees and customers rising up?

Benioff also referred to the “social divide” – I was expecting a reference to the exclusion of folks that don’t have access to the Internet, but in fact it was about whether our enterprises are social. He referred to knowing more about people in social networks than his customers or employees, about the easy collaboration over social networks – compared to enterprise systems.

All this was a pre-amble to a product launch, but none the less, all good points about how folks like me that bang the web engagement drum, of engaging your web audience that we should forget the folks closest to us, our colleagues and employees.

The power of the connected consumers has been much discussed – but it got me thinking more about employees and how underrepresented employee engagement is in our discussions. Yet, we see examples of the value and influence of the individual employee on social media and it’s potential to overtake their pay grade. As much as we bang on about customer engagement – the damage an unengaged employee can do is probably far greater with a swift blow below the waterline.

Anyway there is plenty more in Benioffs keynote worthy of note as plenty of folks have err…noted. Benioff moves on to outlining three steps to the social enterprise and what the cloud really means. I’d encourage to watch the full thing. (Also, you can find a good live blog of the session on Enterprise Irregulars blog).

It’s at this point, like any good blogger I should cleverly reference back to the title – from a public speaking perspective I’m back to school, inspired I’m off to practice wandering amongst the relative handful or so people that might come to my next speaking engagement (please go along with it if I call you Bob, I’m terrible with names) and maybe I might try learning and rehearsing the content of what I’m planning to rabble on about…. you never know.

Really? Well, maybe, OK, probably no. I just thought I’d get in there early. Plus, on the first day at blogging school they tell you to have a sexy title, so BAM here’s mine and what’s better than to claim that something is dead? So…

As a moniker WEM (Web Engagement Management) is widely recognised is flawed. Not just because it has been cynically abused to dress up any tatty old thing that publishes a web page, but it’s problem (as I’ve blogged about before in lots of posts) is the W.

In WEM the W should also mean e-mail, it means social channels, it means mobile apps, TV apps and maybe (gasp) personalised print. Plus of course whatever other IP based communication application that some college kid is beavering toward his first million on today. None of this is technically speaking the web, which to Wikipedia is:

A system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents. The documents are formatted in a markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) that supports links to other documents, as well as graphics, audio, and video files. This means you can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots

You knew that (has anyone ever pasted in something to a blog post that was so superfluous to their reader?) But, I pasted it in as ‘technically speaking’ really? Is that the best argument?

There’s lots of discussion around what WEM should be called, perhaps we should loosen our technical tie a little bit, worry less about the order of the pens in our trusty pocket protector and go with it.

We should worry more about how  we really engage across this pervasive web of IP linked devices – all of which  marketers need to recognize as part of their *EM strategy. As an industry we need to clearly identify why you can’t just search and replace “WCM” for “WEM” in our requirements or product brochures.

Let me share something I’ve observed here at SDL. When we sit around in rooms (that used to be described as ‘smoke filled’ when life was more dangerous)  where we plot our product course to providing tools for these new requirements – you will see scribbled on flip charts not ‘web’ – we say “the multi’s”.

The Multi’s are of course multi-channel, multi-language, multi-device, multi-visitor segments – basically managing multiple content variants  delivered dynamically across multiple channels.

Sooo… There we are, WEM isnt dead, but the future is The Multi’s.