This post originally appeard on CMSWire last week.  I’m reposting here in case you didn’t see it there.    So, Okay, first of all let’s cut to the chase. We marketers can get ourselves in a big frothy tizzy over new terms. And, Web Engagement Management is no exception. On the marketing hype cycle, WEM is the Ducati Multistrada 1200 (look it up, kids).

We’ve also convinced ourselves (and our management teams) that Web Engagement Management is about being more relevant, providing better customer experiences and generally being a more enchanting conversationalist. But let’s be honest. The real reason we want to manage the Web Experience is so our consumers will do more stuff. It might be click more, respond more, download more, register more or buy more. But in the end, more is what makes the graph go up and to the right, and justifies spending our time and dollars on it. And, don’t kid yourself — “more” is the reason that software vendors want us to think their tool can provide it.

But we’re still just beginning to think about it. About half of the users polled in the CMSWire Web Engagement questionnaire said that they were “basic” or “beginner” level in terms of Web Engagement Management. Further, try a Google search for “content optimization” or “optimize content” and you’ll be inundated with hundreds of thousands of results that discuss how to better manage content to achieve higher organic search results.

This is the irony. Marketers have, for years, spent more time working on ways to optimize their content to appear higher in search rankings than on figuring out ways to engage that traffic once it finally arrives. In short, we’re wearing our plaid jackets and walking up to customers and saying, “What do I have to do to get you into my content today?”

But those who actually put the time into optimizing content for engagement see tremendous benefits. Some studies have shown that marketers can experience up to a 40% lift in conversion rates just by beginning to take steps in optimizing content to be targeted to relevant personas.

So, What’s the Challenge?

Much to the dismay of the case study writers for software vendors, the sheer act of deploying a fancy new Web Engagement Management System (the artist formerly known as WCMS) and installing their tags into our pages doesn’t immediately provide any benefit. In fact, you have to wonder whether “engagement” can ever be “managed.” As a marketer, can I ever manage your happiness or satisfaction? Maybe the best we can ever hope for is that we manage FOR a better experience. In other words, the tools we acquire should be used to continually facilitate our limited and distorted view, and help us to continually optimize the always-imperfect Web engagement experience.

Three Keys to Manage FOR an Optimal Experience

The overall key to a successful program of content optimization to manage FOR Web Engagement is integrating optimization practices into our already-successful Web content management process. And, of course, good tools help to facilitate this more effectively. This is why, in 2011, we find CMS vendors incorporating these features into their tools.

So let’s look at three important keys to integrating content optimization into our Web Content Management process, and how today’s WCMS tools can help to facilitate that integration.

1. Make Sure the WCMS Isn’t in Our Way: Most businesses still look at WCM as a more efficient way to facilitate the process of moving content from the desktop to the Web site. I can’t tell you how many WCMS strategy meetings I’ve been in where the marketers say “oh, targeting our content to users? That’s Phase II.” The thing is, many times “Phase 2” is impeded by the initial CMS choice — and becomes “Phase Never.” So, to start this process, marketers should consider a WCMS that not only makes it easy to MANAGE content — but also, at least, doesn’t impede the ability to later add tools to manage how content is PRESENTED in a targeted way to consumers.
2. Establish Processes to Manage the Content Beyond Our Web Site: Microsites controlled by divisions, third-party Web sites, mobile apps, social media tools, email campaign management systems, directories and banner ads are all part of the Web experience and are all being driven by the online marketer. The content that resides beyond the bounds of the Web site is often outdated, inaccurate — or, at worst, being changed outside our content management process. To establish a baseline for us to optimize our engagement, Marketers should consider Web content management solutions that make it easier for them to manage this external content.
3. Establish Processes to Capture and Measure Data from Our Web Content: A Genius.com study conducted in 2010 indicated that 66% of buyers indicated that “consistent and relevant communication provided by both sales and marketing organizations” is a key influence in their purchase decision.Following the first key above, establishing a process within your WCM tool that facilitates the ability to increase relevance to your target personas over time is key. And, the only way to determine relevance is to have the ability to both collect data about the content usage AND the people using it.In other words, marketers should consider tools that can both capture and use both explicit data generated from users (Registration Forms, Email Subscription Forms, etc.) as well as implicit ambient data (Organic vs. Paid Search referral). This will be the data that drives our process to optimize the content against those attributes.

Putting These Keys Together: The New Content Optimization

The ultimate irony of Web content management technology is that the same tools that have made it easier for us as marketers to publish anything and everything have made it more difficult for the consumer to find what’s most relevant to their needs.

We watch as Google changes its search algorithm to meet the frustration of “relevance” demand. We adapt as consumers increasingly use their social graph to filter content. And, ultimately, we look to learn to identify which calls to action — which content — will compel a prospect, customer or partner to act.

At their core, Web content management tools really are just a simpler and more efficient way of managing content. Analytics tools are just an efficient way of aggregating traffic data and seeing how many people have viewed that content. And optimization tools just enable more efficient methods to display the content based on rules we devise.

The fact that some WCMS vendors are bringing this together like chocolate and peanut butter doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the only way to do it. Like all processes, yours may be better served with different kinds of tools.

Whether you use one tool to accomplish all of this — or many tools to accomplish some of this — the most important function of any WEM process should be to fuel insight and creativity. Insight is more than just data. It’s the interpretation and application of analytics into a process that continually feeds upon itself — transforming the online marketer over time into a finely sharpened success-generating machine.

Historically, this insight has come from a number of sources – whether it is the internal marketing team, an outsourced agency or even a team providing the technology platform. But as Web Content Management tools are now changing to centrally deliver on this promise — the ability to create, manage AND optimize your content using both automatic and manual processes — the time is now to start integrating this into your content management process.

But let’s be clear: Tools don’t make content more engaging — YOU do. The key is YOU in the process. It doesn’t matter what any vendor says —if YOU don’t create a process that integrates optimization that enables you to creatively re-write the content based on the insight, then it’s not Web Engagement Management. It’s just a WCM system with a lot of fancy features that never get used.

This week, as it seems while everyone is preparing to jet off to Austin for South by Southwest (I’m jealous), the SEO buzz that started with Google’s Panda Update still has everyone in a tizzy.

Last Saturday, Entrepreneur and Angel Investor Paul Dixon posted that “SEO Is No Longer a Viable Option for Startups” and stated that it’s just almost impossible for new companies to get leverage in marketing using SEO.   This, was then followed by Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand claiming that SEO Remains A Viable Marketing Strategy For Anyone – which is a post he seems to have to re-write about once every six months when someone proclaims SEO is dead.

I too posted within the last week or so that marketers have grown “out of love” with Search – which touched on both the recent Google update to their algorithm and how search itself has become less useful to the marketer.

And now this Week Google has responded, yet again, and announced that users can now block entire domains from their search results.  If people actually take the time to start doing this – it means that soon Google Search results won’t be the same for any two people.

As I visited with a number of clients and prospective clients this week – a few of them asked me about all these changes and whether or not their SEO strategy was still viable.   Here, I definitely paraphrased Danny and said – “Search is a primary way that people look for your content – but it’s not the ONLY way.”

Spiders Are Not People

So, let me be clear – I’m not an SEO guy.  I’ve hired them and I’ve fired them.  I’ve worked alongside them on client engagements – and I’ve certainly gotten to know my fare share.

But, I’ve also been in this industry long enough to have watched the practice of SEO turn into an obsession.  What started as a  set of “best practices” of making Web pages “friendly” for the spiders (the indexing technology) of  major search engines has now transformed into a compulsive exercise of tweaking and molding content into unreadable,  algorithmically perfected text that tries to game an ever-more broken system.

Over the course of the last 10 years, anyone who has ever asked me my thought on SEO has gotten the same basic answer.  My number one and really only SEO tip that I’ve ever given clients is this:

“Write compelling, readable, informative and valuable content – and do so with a reasonable velocity.  If you do that, and don’t “break” the fundamental rules of spiders (in other words don’t make it hard for spiders to crawl your site) most of the rest will take care of itself.”

And, I’m happy to say that this advice just got a whole lot better.

Google actually came out yesterday and said:

“Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful.”

Basically, what Google is saying is that they will start devaluing repetitive, shallow and useless content.

Now, at the end of the day – an algorithm is just a math problem.  And I have no doubt that some SEO firms will start prescribing just what *exactly* “shallow” or “poorly written” content means to the Google Spider.  But here’s the thing:

We just simply must stop writing our content for spiders.

I was working recently with a client – and their SEO firm re-wrote one of their main About Us Pages.  To protect their identity, I’ve replaced what they do with the topic of “Pizza” (I’m hungry).     Here’s what the SEO Firm sent as the rewritten About Us:

Pizza expert, Company Name, is the leading pizza-making and pizza-eating company.  Their Pizza solution is the leading and most popular Italian food on the market and focuses on providing excellent return for those who are hungry for pizza.

Okay. you get the idea… It went on from there…  It’s extreme I know… But there are more subtle versions of this getting passed around agencies as we speak.   We’ve got to “please” the SEO Gods lest we lose some ground in our ongoing battle against the machine.  And that brings us to….

SEO Is Not A Tactic

In general, as marketers we’ve got to rid ourselves of the belief that SEO is a tactic we must master.     If we continue to look at SEO as a game that we have to try and play – we will ALWAYS come out on the losing side.  And when the game is as big as Google and Web Search – trying to win that game is both tiresome and pointless.

People FIND us through Search.  If what they find isn’t valuable to them – then they will leave just as quickly.  Weighting our content for spiders as opposed to people to the point that our audience starts to devalue it not only invalidates the effort we put into SEO, but now (as Google changes) may even start to devalue our rankings even further.

Most of us (and maybe more importantly our CEO’s) need to come to terms with the fact that we will NEVER be on the front page for the generic keywords that are the most popular in our industry.

Does that mean we should stop focusing on optimizing our content for search?  Absolutely not.  Of course we should be producing good content that’s relevant to our business, relevant to the topics we’re passionate about – and relevant and informative to our audiences.   If we focus on that, the content will be linked to, it will be referenced, and it will be viewed.  That helps our SEO effort.  More importantly – it captures and engages the few (or many) that actually arrive there.   In short, I’d rather be on page 2 or 3 or 15 for a key phrase that delivers me 100 prospects that are engaged – than a front page that delivers me 1000 bounces.

In other words give me quality not quantity. Or, in the latin Multun, non multa.  Which is “Much Not Many”.   And, by the way, I found that latin phrase after searching for “give me quality not quantity” on the second page of Google Results…

Okay, I have to admit that I originally considered  “Organic Search Is Dead” – or “Search Marketing Is Dead” – for titles of this post.  But I just can’t.   First, I don’t actually believe it IS dead – but is definitely going through a fundamental change.   Although, candidly, I do have echoes of Billy Crystal from The Princess Bride in my head as I say that – “woo hoo – look who knows so much – there’s a big difference between all dead and mostly dead”.

Secondly, I don’t think it actually ever will die.  While search engines, and the strategy for optimizing your content in general, may be changing (more on that in a moment) I definitely feel that making an effort toward making your Web content friendly for indexed search is generally a good thing.   It’s a little like eating your vegetables.  There’s no way it ever goes away – because it’s just always a good idea.

Having said that – this Valentine’s day – the digital marketer’s love affair with Search Engine Marketing may have reached a tipping point.   Over the first two and a half months of this year – three things are leading me to believe that our love affair may be really waning.  In the immortal words of the J. Geils band:

You just can’t win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It’s gonna make you cry
Love Stinks… Yeah Yeah!

Trend Number 1: Organic Search IS Becoming Less Useful To Marketers

It seems like the entire Internet is abuzz with how search engines are becoming less and less useful to users.  This is less about the whole Bing Vs. Google thing (although that certainly has its own flair) but more specifically how SEO and Content Spam are the little kids that are tearing down the scenery and ruining the whole play.

• Paul Kedrosky wrote late last year how  Google is “eating it’s own tail” and how “pages and pages of Google results are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles”.
• SEOMoz published an incredibly interesting blog post about how SPAM has just taken over Google search results.
• The New York Times published an article late last week on the JC Penny search controversy
• Which, in part, prompted Michael Arrington to post this blog just two days ago on how Search Still Sucks

The crux of all these articles is the same: SEO – which at its heart is the production (or in some cases stealing) of content – and the constant attempts to game the Google algorithm has rendered search results much less useful than ever before.

Now there are plenty of debates on whether that’s true or not – and one need just read the comments on all of the above articles to see that people are passionate about it.

But here’s the thing:  whether it’s true or not doesn’t really matter.   What I know IS unequivocally true is that from a marketer’s perspective it’s much HARDER than ever before to rank well for a targeted search term.   Make no bones about it – what we marketers used to know as the benefits of Search Engine Optimization have become ever-more difficult to achieve.   And, the benefits vs. the level of effort may have just crossed the tipping point.

That leads to the second trend…

Trend Two: Social IS Changing Search

There are plenty of data that show how the Social Web is changing search marketing strategies.   Some point to marketers’ shifting priorities – and others show how Social is just an incremental layer to the already robust search marketing budget.    In fact, search marketing firm Covario posted the results of a very interesting survey they conducted where they found that, yes, Social is indeed more of a priority to Search Marketers.   And, they also found that budgets for social media (such as Facebook) were coming out of print and display – as opposed to cannibalizing the search marketing budget.

But I’ve also started to notice a very real change in perceptions.  I did my own informal survey recently – asking clients, partners, vendors and friends a simple question: “What do you use to search for something on the Internet?”   Even as recently as two years ago, the answer (without hesitation) would be unanimously “Google”.  Okay, there was the occasional “Yahoo” but.. I mean really… Come on, it was Google.

But now – about 40% to 50% of the people I ask that same question to these days answer “Well, it depends on what I’m searching for.”   They’ve started to alter their behavior to either use their Social Graph (e.g. search Twitter or Facebook) or use niche oriented tools (e.g. Yelp, TripAdvisor etc..) because they’re getting faster, more relevant results to what they’re looking for.

This is something that’s not lost on Marketers – and where we put our money.   Marketers are starting to ask themselves – should I put more money into getting from page 30 to page 15 on Google?  Or, does it make more sense to put that money into a social media strategy?

Trend Three:  The Stink Is On – And It’s Hard To Rub Off

So, according to many, none of this “it’s getting worse” stuff is actually true.  In fact, Google actually posted an article saying that “Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.”

And interestingly, SearchEngineWatch then actually referred to that post when it posited that – “yeah this is a problem that Google has had from day one and it’s not likely to go away anytime soon.”

But the challenge here is, ironically, how Google tends to look at many things – which is: life is an algorithm.  Google may be correct.  They may now technically be returning more “relevant”, “fresh” and “comprehensive content”.     But if this more relevant, machine-washed, overproduced SEO optimized content is less useful to us as humans then really who cares if they’re right.

But even that isn’t as important as the fact that if this continues – and the complaints keep coming – it won’t matter.   As soon as (or admittedly “if”) search has enough “stink” on it to warrant marketers having the perception that it isn’t worth the effort – you’ll see budgets for things like PPC and SEO start to fade (or at least change) quickly.

So – yeah, Search isn’t dead – but loving it this Valentines day seems to be a lot harder than it ever has been before.

What do you think?  Still as active in SEO and PPC than ever before?

I just returned from the Gilbane Conference on Content Management – and wanted to share some of the wonderful things that I heard, people I met and things I learned.  In the spirit of an Eat, Pray Love – it seemed like the conference was a focused one for me that really spanned  Meet, Say, Flood.

Meet

Of course, one of the biggest benefits of the conference is catching up with people I’ve known for years.  But I always meet amazing new people at the Gilbane Conference – and this year was no exception.  One of the coolest things was to meet people that I’d only met through Twitter previously, and speak with them in person:

There was Cheryl Lesser, one of the winners of my Gilbane Scholarship – who shined at the conference and blogged many of the sessions.

Then, there was Arje and Stefan from the open source CMS company Hippo – whom I’d known by reputation for years but finally got to meet and understand their business much better.

There was also Simon Lande – who is heading up, Magus, definitely one of the more interesting technology companies I’ve seen in some time.

And, finally, there was Andrew Bredenkamp and Tony Ehrens from Acrolinx.  I’d known of Tony before from his days at RedDot – but it was my first time to meet both of them.  Acrolinx is a very interesting company – doing some very interesting things in semantic  analysis.  We had a fascinating discussion about marketing and governance – and it’s sure to lead to interesting things.

Say

The sessions were really interesting this year.  The session started with a panel keynote from practitioners.  There was Marie Williams, the Director of Web Innovation from Hilton, Aaron Hill a Senior Director from software company SAS and Keith Cook the VP of E-Business from the Ace Group of Insurance Companies.

The topics of the conversation ranged from what’s “top of their mind” to what are they doing about “social media” and how they are “dealing with the cloud”.

The common throughline seemed to be that “there are no easy answers” with any of these and that right now is a time “of change”.  Everyone seemed to be focused on looking at cloud solutions, and maybe most interesting of all was that “content strategy” was moving to a MUCH more important role in all of the organizations.

The Analyst Panel that followed featured Tony Byrne of  The Realstory Group, Scott Liewehr from Gilbane, Ned May from Outsell, Kathleen Reidy from 451 Group and Hadley Reynolds from IDC.   I was fascinated by the breadth of the subjects covered – and it reminded me that 2010 was actually a pretty big year.   The panel was asked about the “themes of 2010”.  Tony Byrne offered Sharepoint and its spread as the big theme.   Hadley Reynolds offered up the increased pace of innovation of search.   Kathleen seconded Tony’s offering of Sharepoint and also offered up cloud offerings as a big theme.   Ned May held up an iPad and a Smart Pen – and offered up embedded computing within devices.  And, finally  Scott offered up Web Engagement as a framework.

Finally, I offer up my own humble offering as I was lucky enough to KeyNote the Customers and Engagement track.  My talk was called Web Content Management is Dead, Long Live Web Content Management.  The presentation is here:

And you can see a writeup of the discussion from CMSWire.

Flood

Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate with my desire to do my usual walk around a wintery Boston.  I love walking around Boston during the Holidays.  It rained pretty darn hard the first day of the conference and into the evening.

And then there was the flood of information.   The conference was certainly content rich – and I certainly learned a ton about Content Governance from Lisa Welchman (write-up of her session) and I loved the Content Strategy session put on by Margot Bloomstein and Colleen Jones (slides here).

All in all a great conference – and I’m looking forward to Spring in San Francisco!