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Choosing the content management system (CMS) for your company can make you a star player if implemented correctly or banished to the basement for making an expensive mistake.

Photo courtesy of advance to prosper

Our CMS experts have been implementing content management systems since 1999 and we would like to share our knowledge with you. In this webinar, the Wakefly team will guide you through our five step process to a successful implementation as well as show you some common pitfalls.

Mistakes in the CMS selection process can cost thousands of dollars, shorten the website’s life- cycle and greatly increase the cost of ownership for any website. By following Wakefly’s five step CMS selection process, you can ensure that you have chosen the right platform in the correct online environment to meet all of your web development and marketing goals.

If you’re planning on launching, redesigning or developing a B2B website, our webinar will guide you through the process of choosing an appropriate content management system (CMS) and avoiding common selection, design and development pitfalls.

Who should attend: Anyone planning to launch, redesign or develop a B2B website.

Join us on Thursday, July 22nd at 1 p.m. Eastern to learn about Star Player or Banished to the Basement: Choosing a B2B Enterprise Content Management System
Duration: 45 minutes

I hope to see you there.

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Product Description

Framework for Marketing Management is a concise adaptation of the gold standard marketing management textbook for professors who want authoritative coverage of current marketing management practice and theory, but the want the flexibility to add outside cases, simulations, or projects.

Development of marketing strategies, market demand and environments, creating customer value, analysis of consumer markets, market segmentation, brand loyalty, the Product Life Cycle, managing mass communication, and marketing management in the global economy.

This text is for companies, groups, and individuals who want to adapt their marketing strategies and management to the marketplace of the twenty-first century.

Framework for Marketing Management, A

What is Comment Management?  Virtually all blog software offers commenting functionality, so why would you need a 3rd party comment management service?  Many of the comments and “reactions” to content posted on a blog never make it to the blog itself – the source of the conversation.

Comment Management tools provide all the expected features and also pull in mentions & citations of the post as well. That way when someone reads a post on your blog, they can see comments made directly on the post as well as mentions made of of the post on other sites like Twitter.

Should you add a comment manager tool to your blog? It depends how much of your social engagement is happening off your blog and also whether you feel it will add to the user experience to see a collected list of on and off site interactions. For many blogs, citing comment and reaction counts is simply a matter of social proofing and popularity. For others, it’s an attempt to harvest all the conversation about a post at the source.

To help you decide, here are the three main comment management tools to consider:

ECHO from JS-Kit offers a wide array of features. It can be embedded on a blog or static web site and pull in comments from Twitter, Digg, comments from other blogs, FriendFeed and several others. Commenters can choose to promote their comments simultaneously to Twitter, Facebook or Google Friends. Sites like Technorati and Guy Kawasaki use ECHO.  We tried JS-Kit but didn’t like not being able to show comments on top of the off site citations under each post.  JS-Kit ECHO Live is $12/year and ECHO Live white label is $48/year. There is also a PRO version with many other controls and features with costs according to page views ranging from $195 to $1995 per year.

Disqus, as you may have noticed, is the commenting system we are currently using on Online Marketing Blog. Disqus lets readers choose their identity, via: Facebook Connect, OpenID, or Twitter Sign-in, when they leave a comment. Comments can be threaded and the moderation dashboard is easy to use. Off site references to your content on Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and YouTube are pulled in as “Reactions”. You can sort comments as we do, on top, then show the reactions below. Readers can choose to cross post their comment to other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.   You can edit comment content but not the names of commenters, which is frustrating because some spammers write really useful comment content but spam them hell out of their names and links. The base version of Disqus is free. Disqus VIP offers much hand holding support and analytics. Cost is not disclosed on the site so it must be very expensive.

IntenseDebate was acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress and therefore, can be easily added to WordPress blogs as well as TypePad, Tumblr or Blogger blogs. There’s comment threading, notification by email, commenter profiles and points, moderation, cross posting to Twitter and several other features.  IntenseDebate is free.

Which comment management tool is right for you? It depends on your use. If you have a static web site and you’d like to add comment features, then ECHO might be a fit. If you want something that offers all the basics and works natively with WordPress then maybe IntenseDebate is your pick. If you want more features and also don’t want to pay anything, then it’s possible Disqus is the choice for you.

The great thing about these tools is that they are easy to install and test out.

Here are other reviews you might find useful on these comment management systems.

• Blog Comment System Shootout: Disqus vs. Intense Debate vs. JS-Kit Echo – 40 Tech
• 3rd Party Comment System Roundup – Dave Mosher’s Blog

Although I pinged Facebook and Twitter connections for examples of other 3rd party comment management tools that pull in off-site citations, I didn’t hear about any. I didn’t find much on Google either. There are other comment management services, tools and plug-ins, just not any (that I’ve found) that automatically pull in 3rd party mentions of your content.

If you know of other comment management systems that pull in comments from other social media sites, please share in the comments. Do you use any of the the tools mentioned above? What has your experience been? What features would you like to see added?

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Comment Management Tools You Should Know |
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• ISBN13: 9780743270571
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Product Description
Strategy making is considered the high point of managerial activity. But bombarded by fads and fixes, most managers have been groping blindly to get their arms around the proverbial elephant. Now Henry Mintzberg, author of the award-winning The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, has teamed up with Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel to create a powerful antidote: a comprehensive and illuminating — as well as colorful — tour through the fields of strategic management. Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel have shaped each of ten different approaches into a coherent school of strategy formation. In the process, the authors clarify the enormous amount of confusion that exists.

The result is a tour de force: a brilliant, penetrating primer on business strategy that is, at the same time, immensely readable and fun. The authors provide a thorough critique of the contributions and limitations of each school — from the design, planning, positioning, entrepreneurial, and cognitive schools to the learning, power, cultural, environmental, and configurational schools — culminating in how they might combine to reveal that elephant.

Unique, insightful, and essential, Strategy Safari is the indispensable guide for the creative manager.

Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through The Wilds of Strategic Management

Yesterday Twitter unveiled a major milestone in its monetization strategy: Promoted Tweets.  Smart folks like Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang, John Battelle and Steve Rubel are already on record with some initial, smart reactions.

While TechCrunch reports that initial response among users is pretty negative, I am inclined to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt: in fact, I think they approached this advertising platform with unusual degrees of thoughtfulness: the Resonance factor in particular is well-considered and intriguing; it could become a model for relevance scoring as the real-time Web grows. See this AllThingsD liveblog of the announcement by Peter Kafka for a nice round-up.

What will Promoted Tweets mean for Marketing?

I believe this will mark yet another mile marker for marketing via Social Media. Maybe it’s too early to be thinking like this, and maybe I am just groggy from x-country travel and too-little sleep, but I think Twitter’s Promoted Tweets platform conceivably offers TWO COMPELLING BREAKTHROUGHS.

BREAKTHROUGH #1:  “REAL-TIME” MARKETING.

Obviously it will be cool, reasonable, and effective for a brand like Starbucks or Quiznos (client) to ensure that anyone who searches for “coffee” or “lunch” sees a Promoted Tweet, especially if it’s tied to a promotion.  “Click here for a coupon you can bring to the store for $1 off your purchase.”

The fact that such an offer can now “float atop the stream” – as in, not get lost in it! – is compelling.  It will be even more impactful if those Promoted Tweets can be based on time-of-day: if that Quiznos tweet is only viewable within a 3 hour window, and/or the coupon is only usable til 4pm, it might get re-tweeted more hurriedly (achieving more Resonance) and cashed-in more frenziedly: We are talking about REAL-TIME MARKETING here, people.

While obviously these tweets should not be too spammy, overwrought nor cheesey, rest assured that this approach will be a big part of the grand experiment.

BREAKTHROUGH #2: REPUTATION MANAGEMENT.

This is where I believe Promoted Tweets will shine, more so than anticipated.  Think back to the Dominos Crisis of last year (it was actually a year ago this week!) … If Promoted Tweets had existed at that point, the company’s official reactions and mea-culpas in the following days could have been promoted, and would have achieved a permanent “above the stream” status during those challenging days.

One of the tough things about using Twitter, when you’re a brand in a crisis, is the frenzied responsiveness required. The official corporate stream can become a mishmash of responses to thousands of users, which are incomprehensible (and frankly boring) to everyone else following the handle.

How often can we see a brand say something to the effect of, “Thanks for the feedback, @username, we’re working on it!” before we tire of the Reputation Management Madness?

But Promoted Tweets allows a brand some BREATHING ROOM.  The Twitter wranglers can rest assured that while they are frantically monitoring and dealing with individual users, their OFFICIAL RESPONSE will continue to float above the stream for anyone who happens to search for their brand due to the crisis.  And brand supporters can re-tweet that official response much more easily and readily, which serves to keep it “resonating” and alive.

Once the crisis settles, a brand might elect to spend its “Promoted Tweeting” budget in boosting the tweets of its supporters.  I can readily see some brand enthusiasts vying for the “badge” of having had one of their tweets officially promoted by their favorite brands.  “Look, Ma, Starbucks promoted my tweet!  I am practically famous!”

Compelling stuff.  Tread carefully into this garden for now — it is still very early and there could be some points that I am fuzzy on.  For example, if you endeavor to use promotions for real-time marketing, you might need to worry about what happens when that “short-term” tweet is indexed in perpetuity by Google!

But take it seriously.  Experiment.

View full post on PR-Squared – Social Media Marketing and Public Relations

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18 Use Cases That Show Business How To Finally Put Customers First

Social and CRM: How Companies Will Manage Their Social Relationships
Over the last six months, I’ve been working closely with Ray Wang who is well known in the CRM space as an expert.  Coupled with my focus on social technologies we did a deep dive on how our worlds are colliding into the trend to Social CRM.  In our opening webinar when we announced our joining of the firm, we made it clear we’re looking at the holistic business, across multiple business departments –not silos or roles.

Companies are unable to scale to keep up with the social phenomenon
We know that customers are using these social technologies to share their voices, and companies are having a very difficult time to keep up.

• For companies, real time is not fast enough. Companies need to be able to anticipate what customers are doing to say and do, in order to keep up. Although Motrin responded to angry mom’s within 24 hours –it was too slow.
• Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social. No matter how many community managers Dell and ComcastCares hires to support, they’ll never be able to match the number of customers happening.  They need tools, and they need them now.
• Customers don’t care what department you’re in they just want their problem fixed. Dooce’s support problem with Maytag quickly became a PR nightmare –had the support group known she was an influencer (and what it means), they could have serviced her better.

Above: Framework of the 18 Use Cases of Social CRM

How To Use This Report: A Pragmatic Roadmap
Regardless if you’re in IT or in a business unit, we wrote this to meet the needs of both groups.  This architecture lays out all the possibilities (18 use cases) defines the problem and goal for each, and suggests some vendors who to watch.  It’s also pragmatic, as it lays out a process on how to get started, baseline needs (listening) and what to do next.

Action Items

1. Sign up for the webinar series. This is a deep topic, and the report is only the tip of the iceberg.  As we’ve done in the past, we’re going to offer a series of free webinars on this topic to explore each of the use cases in gritty details.  Sign up for the webinar now, as we can only have 1000 attendees per webinar, as our last webinar had over 1100 registrants.
2. Read then spread this report. Like open source, the Altimeter Group believes in open research, we want our ideas to grow, and others to take advantage of it.  So if you found the report helpful, please forward the report to internal constituents, partners, vendors, clients, and blog it.  Use it in your presentations, business plans, and roadmaps.  I’ve embedded it below, and there are download features for your own use.
3. Have an internal discussion. Evaluate your current situation at your company, then draw up which business needs need to be tackled first, use the use cases as a roadmap by mapping out which phase comes first, and which phase comes second.
4. Learn more and join the community of pioneers. This is new territory, we don’t have all the answers, so we’ve created at group in which pioneers can learn from each other.  It’s free, and the conversation has started already, jump into the group, and learn together.

The Altimeter Approach
Standing behind our belief in open research, the Altimeter Group wants to be part of the community, we:

Involve the expert community in the research process
Altimeter is unique as our partners can tightly co mingle our topic areas and see how they converge, we highlighted our vision when we joined. We seek to be stewards of community and during our six months of research we talked to way over 40 thought leaders, vendors, and companies that are approaching this space. We blogged ideas, engaged in conversations with the #scrm hash tag, and had working sessions with thought leaders like Paul Greenberg and Esteban Kolsky.   We approached research in an open way, and allowed for vendors to review the report and submit back their ideas, some of which we incorporated. This effort was a group effort and included a lot of heavy lifting from Christine Tran, operations who helped to schedule countless meetings, and guidance from Charlene Li, our founder.

Provide a holistic view through deep collaboration
We see that worlds are converging, and we model our research the same way, through really analyzing the mixtures of our different topic areas. For example, what was interesting is that my ‘marketing-speak’ and Ray’s ‘IT Speak’ often resulted in the tower of babel. Although we were talking about the same topic, he had to translate IT and marketing speak both ways.  After many puzzled looks, we embracing this, and realized that this isn’t unique to us but a sign of companies converging as a result of mass adoption of easy to share social tools.  Thus, we realized this framework that could meet the needs of the various camps would be helpful, companies need to move quickly, as customers have adopted social in rapid fashion.

Use open research to grow ideas
We want ideas to spread, and have made the entire report available at no cost on slideshare, and put up images on flickr, we hope you use them, under creative commons licensing of Attribution -Noncommercial – Share Alike Status, we believe in open –not closed research.  We’re trying a different business model, we want to involve the community of experts and publish our findings out there for everyone to benefit from, please support us by sharing it as much as possible, while we trial a new way of doing research.

Update: I forgot to mention, this report was entirely funded by the Altimeter Group there were no sponsors. Also, we are open about disclosing who are clients are (providing they approve), as a result, we hope you’ll trust as more.

Related links: I’ll roundup interesting links that discuss this report

• Ray Wang, my co-author on this report has his take
• I cross posted on the Altimeter Blog, see comments
• Dave McClure, VC blogged his take
• Ray also cross posted on Enterprise Irregulars
• Marketing Profs Daily Fix, and it ended up on the homepage
• Brian Solis, speaker, thought leader reviews the report and extends the conversation about customers
• All Things Digital cross posts Brian’s piece
• David Berkowitz posts on Marketer’s Studio, we await his detailed review later
• Gauravonomics builds off of our use cases and creates a matrix, well done.
• Clo takes a sales focus, and extends the thinking and rallies for action
• Jacob Morgan has an excellent review, because he critiques the many vendors needed for 5Ms (see my comments on his blog) and discusses the need to separate automation vs manual processes. He cross posted on Cloud Ave
• Prem, one of the thinkers in this space says the report helped to crystalize thinking, read his review.
• More thinking about gurus and vendor control in this post and comments.
• Tac Anderson, a practitioner and thinker on social business compares to his existing frameworks when it comes to sales
• Stefano takes the use cases and aligns them with the Groundswell objectives, interesting.
• Get Satisfaction blogs about the report
• Our friends over at Web Analytics Demystified, also a research and consulting boutique, notice our pragmatic approach. I’m working on a report with them, stay tuned.
• Marshall Sponder hopes we take the report further –and notices what we did, a gap in implementation partners
• VC Cafe says this is a must read report
• Connie Bensen of Techrigy, Alterian points out it all starts with listening
• Greg Moyer wants to see more research on this topic, including the final impacts
• Also in Italian, look for the small icons at top to translate into English
• Customer think publishes Ray’s points
• Mike Boysen does a detailed review of the paper, adding additional points, really extends the conversation
• Gerald Hensel did not find it boring
• Adam “The Metz” suggests sales 2.0 folks read the paper
• Mitch expands on use case rapid social sales response (S2)
• Ogilvy’s John Bell, calls for a definition, discusses influencer relationship management, and questions the difference
• John Batelle, CEO of Federated Media shouts out about the report
• Paul Greenberg discusses the changes the report has caused, and makes some suggestions, thanks Paul. He also reviews the use cases, and points out other reports.
• Dennis Howlett gives a critical review, requesting more use cases that have direct impacts to the bottom line. Fair enough feedback.
• Filiberto reviews the report, and gives some strong cursory reviews.
• Well respected analyst Rachel Happe covers the report and seeks definitions around SCRM in relation to collaboration. Short answer? A company must first love itself before it can really love their customers.
• Perkett PR listed this as a key weekly read
• InsideView takes a look at this from a sales perspective.
• Ross Dawson, looks at this from both an industry analyst perspective.
• Andy Sernovitz, who runs the social business council says this was the most viral B2B report ever, and details out the tactics we used.

Translations

• Spanish: A Latin American version from Jesus
• Portuguese: Our friends over at Foreplay in Brazil have translated the 5Ms
• German: Sebastian has created a version in German

Update: March 10th, From behind the scenes, we’re hearing of SCRM vendors and brands that are interested in deploying are using the framework as a roadmap, market requirements doc, and as a plan of what to do. Excellent.

View full post on Web Strategy by Jeremiah

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Pain: Social Media Teams Are Challenged To Respond To the Distributed Conversations
I’m starting to get a few briefings and client requests about new technologies that enable social marketers to quickly manage, maintain, and conduct reporting on multiple channels. The issue of lack of scale is resonating with social strategists –as a result, the market is developing new tools that will help them manage them. This is one component of Social CRM, which if you haven’t heard about, please read the report on the 18 use cases of Social CRM.

Solution: As a Result, Social Media Management Systems are Emerging
Like CMS and WMS for centralized website management, Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) empower social media teams to manage multiple distributed social channels from one location –enabling the opportunity to build deeper relationships by being in more places at once.

Definition: Social Media Management Systems are collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage, multiple social media channels from one tool.

How it works: Three simple features In the most basic sense, these management tools do the following: 1) connect with social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. 2) Allow the manager to quickly publish from one location to each of those channels, some provide ability to customize to each channel 3) Aggregate and Manage. The system allows the manager to see an aggregated view of what’s happening (from views to comments) and may offer some form of analytics and conversion metrics.

• Awareness Networks, an enterprise class community platform has launched their own tool called Social Marketing Hub has Facebook, youtube, flickr, Twitter, and of course connect with their own community features. In particular, this is an existing enterprise class vendor (previously I’ve published thorough research report on them) which bodes well to their level of potential levels of service, support, and market viability. (they’ve briefed me)
• MediaFunnel offers integration with Facebook and Twitter. They have several permission based workflows that include a variety of roles such as a contributor, administrators, publishers.  This is not unlike traditional editorial processes used in CMS systems.
• SpredFast is an up and comer who recently briefed me, this Austin based company offers the core features and claims to have a 40% enterprise customer base. They have partners with Convio, Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Sysomos, Trackkr, IBM, Porter Novelli, Sierra Club, HomeAway. They position their product as collaborative campaign management and offer features such as scheduling content, features that integrate with events and social stream like features similar to Friendfeed. (they’ve briefed me)
• Sprinklr offers social media management tools, it’s interesting their website has a strong focus on listening first, before the publication.
• Vitrue: Offers social media management systems, that has integration with Facebook and Twitter, they offer scheduling features, and the ability to link multiple Facebook pages together.

• Social media spewing: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Spewing corporate content to every known social channel may make your life easier as a marketer, but could cause serious ramifications to the trust of your community. Remember that like fraternity row, each frat and sorority house has a different set of relationships, language, and interests –don’t think one type of content will fit all.
• It’s the people stupid, not carpet bombing: One of the promises of social is to build meaningful relationships with customers –not apply traditional spray and pray marketing tactics. By using these tools, you could be missing out on true relationships that could be deeper, with more loyalty, and the benefits of advocacy.
• Peanut butter deficit means spread too thin: Being in all places at all times can mean you’re nowhere all the time. Pick your battles and remember that the needs of the LinkedIn community are far different than those of MySpace, be selective by first knowing your socialgraphics of your customer base.

Industry Insights: A Commodity Feature, With Bandwagon Appeal
Expect nearly every community platform (there are over 100) to launch these types of features, quickly followed by host of startups that specialize in this, then also the CoTweets of the world and other Twitter platforms like Seesmic to quickly get into the enterprise game. In a few quarters, expect the traditional CMS and WMS players to finally wake up and get relevant, followed by app developers in Salesforce appexchange to launch their own iterations. In the long run, this will be commodity set of features, just a check off in the overall suite of social business software but an important component of Social CRM.

If you know a vendor that offers these features, please leave a comment, I’ll take a closer look, and plan to take some briefings with some of these vendors.

View full post on Web Strategy by Jeremiah

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Product Description
The concentration on strategic decision making sets this book apart from other texts that place greater emphasis on the description of marketing phenomena than on the strategic and tactical marketing decisions that managers and entrepreneurs must make each and every day. This edition continues to be the most current and Internet-savvy book available, injecting the latest developments in Internet-based communication and distribution technology into every chapter. The author team’s rich entrepreneurial, marketing management, and consulting experience spans a broad variety of manufacturing, service, software, and distribution industries, providing an abundance of real-world, global perspectives.

Marketing Management: A Strategic Decision-Making Approach

Product Description
Kotler/Keller is the gold standard in the marketing management discipline because it continues to reflect the latest changes in marketing theory and practice. Topics covered include brand equity, customer value analysis, database marketing, e-commerce, value networks, hybrid channels, supply chain management, segmentation, targeting, positioning, and integrated marketing communications. For marketing professionals who place special emphasis… More >>

Marketing Management

Image from Flickr – Controller books at Barnes and Noble

Building a business website involves making several decisions, not least among them is choosing a content management system, or CMS, that works for your specific needs. Today, online marketing is one of the most important keys to the success of a business, and good search engine optimization, or SEO, is the key to online marketing. That’s why when, looking for a CMS, a website hoping to optimize should be careful to pick one that works well with SEO.

SEO Guidelines for CMSs

Here are some important points to take into account when selecting a content management system to make sure that it’s SEO compatible.

Pick a CMS that lets you edit title and description tags, separately from article titles and descriptions Make sure the CMS makes it easy to edit heading tags on any page The CMS should let you easily move pages and sections of content around It should support RSS feeds and analytics It should have the tools needed to creating standard-compliant code It should allow you to easily create your own directory and filename structures And finally, it should give search engines easily accessible sitemaps

The following five CMSs are among the most SEO friendly you’ll find, and they have all if not most of the qualifications listed above. Here they are in no particular order.

Elxis
Elxis has a built-in SEO management program called SEO Pro, which does a fairly thorough job of helping you optimize your site for the purposes of search engine marketing.

Drupal
This is one of the most well known and used CMSs out there. It has clean URLs and a wide selection of SEO friendly plug-ins; plus it’s one of the most easy-to-use, SEO friendly CMSs. It also has a great module called SEO Checklist, which guides you through the process of improving your SEO on each page and makes it easy for everyone in your company to keep track of the changes made.

Typo3
Typo3 is a very search engine friendly CMS that contains a lot of options for organizing and creating metadata, tags and search engine friendly URLs.

CMS Made Simple
So long as you can modify htaccess files, this simple CMSs can generate very good search engine friendly URLs. Meta tags and page titles are built automatically and can later be modified and updated for individual pages.

MODx
MODx is one of the best choices for SEO friendly CMS. It lets you easily create SEO friendly URLs and it gives you the ability to adjust meta content on a per-page basis.

To learn more about San Diego web design firm or Internet marketing services please visit http://www.bestrank.com.