Ektron believes that “You” still matters most in today’s digital age. But let’s look at it with a different angle. You were the Person of the Year in 2006 because you controlled the Information Age – you created user-generated content, you contributed to Wikipedia, you created your own MySpace or Facebook profile and/or blog, and you were involved in Web 2.0.

What’s that look like now for 2010? Well you can still contribute content, join social networks, and let your voice be heard – especially with the popularity of Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. But now, companies, brands, and even non-profits are looking at how they can reach their consumers and audiences in a better way. What do they have to do? Businesses now are expected to deliver personal web experiences to their site visitors. 

Now, rather than you doing everything, you are the individual who matters most to companies. And they’re no longer necessarily looking at you as a huge group, but as a unique individual. Yahoo! has a background when you login to your Yahoo! mail saying: “The Web, myself and I.” Why? Because now the web is personal. It looks at who you are and your web experience is based on this.

Based on what? Based on: whether you’re male or female, your age, your location, where you came from (referring site), where you are in the buying process, whether you’re viewing the company’s website via a laptop or mobile device, and more recently: your likes and interests – these are what matter to companies because this is valuable information they can use to deliver the right experience to you.

Context is now driving content. 

Think of watching a movie at home versus watching it in 3D at an IMAX theater. Your web experience has been elevated to a whole new level. Websites will now take your digital footprint and deliver you content to your liking. But how?

With Ektron’s content targeting.

Companies can now target the right content to individual visitors. Target content using:

• Demographic: age range, gender, or any other data explicitly provided by the site member
• Daypart: content delivered at different times of the day, month, and year
• Site behavior: click paths, time spent on pages
• Location: targeting can easily be integrated with a GeoIP database provider
• Traffic source: search engine keywords, paid versus organic traffic and direct traffic versus referrals
• Social Targeting: Support both Facebook Connect and the new Facebook Open Graph API and Facebook new check-in location

Wow! How powerful is that? Especially the social targeting part. With 400 million users, Facebook has a lot of information about you. And companies want to use this information for your (and obviously their) benefit. They can bring you the most relevant web experience by understanding you a bit more. But let’s be honest: personalizing your web experience is only as good as the information you provide these companies with. Can you say “transparency?” But, hey – it’s for your own gain!

We all know that Facebook and Amazon have paired up to bring a more relevant shopper experience to Amazon shoppers. Users can easily connect their accounts and then be presented with purchase recommendations based on their Facebook likes and interests. Users can also view product recommendations for a friend’s birthday.

Want to be like Amazon – delivering personal web experiences to your site visitors? Well, the same can be done for your company. Now allow your visitors to connect their Facebook account to your corporate website. By doing so, you’ll have access to their Facebook “Likes” and other social activity, even their friends “Likes,” interests and preferences. With Ektron you can deliver content to them that matches their Facebook profile, providing them with more relevant product recommendations, targeted offerings, or specific promotions.

Example:

1. Let’s say a user “Likes” U.S. Soccer on the U.S. Soccer website – this becomes a part of their Facebook profile.
   
    
2. On your website, set the Targeted Content Condition.
   
    
3. So if a user likes Soccer, then you can make the targeted content be a soccer picture.
    
    

Now talk about engaging your site visitor. The best web experience is not only personal, it’s also social, mobile and interactive. Companies’ websites can be more “social” by easily creating a customer community, giving your users the chance to talk to not only your company but also each other (NASDAQ and AMC Theaters are great examples of this), writing reviews, leaving comments, ranking products, allowing members to have their own personal profile, and more. Ektron does mobile engagement too, which could be a mobile browser experience, an iPhone / Blackberry mobile application experience or email mobile enablement. Even deliver more interactive web experiences to your site visitors. Websites today are becoming Mashups – bring in YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and other content that does not come from your server into your website.

Web experiences today need to be contextual: personal, social, mobile and interactive. And the best web experiences keep you in the forefront of businesses’ minds. You benefit because the web experience is becoming more personalizeable and customizable to fit who you are. Companies benefit because you’re becoming more engaged with their brand. You matter most to companies, and your interests, likes, preferences, and even brands matter to you. You drive their business and you want the best web experience from them. So who is the person of the year for 2010? Ektron says it’s still YOU.

The deaths of famous celebrities, like The Beatles’ Paul McCartney, have long been fodder for the rumor mill. So persistent was the “Paul is Dead” rumor that in 1969 LIFE magazine wrote a cover story addressing the claim. Nearly 50 years later, McCartney is still playing to packed stadiums and receiving rave reviews. 

I was reminded of this story when considering some of the recent pronouncements of the “end of email” in the popular press and by industry analysts. Paraphrasing Mark Twain, I believe “the report of the death of email is an exaggeration.” Let me explain why.

Social collaboration is essential to the future of business but the key is that social is not enough. For example, how do you enable mobile business collaboration using only social tools—without email? Email remains the lowest common denominator for mobile communications. It is not dependent on platform, can receive and send attachments and, perhaps most importantly, is accessible outside of the firewall. 

At Ektron, we built the eIntranet to provide all the benefits inherent in the social business tools that are garnering so much media attention today. Ektron’s eIntranet uses email as the vehicle to power business collaboration for the mobile worker. And, using eIntranet’s email enablement, mobile workers can do much more than simply receive notices of activities occurring on their collaborative intranet.

An app or mobile-enabled website cannot provide the ubiquitous access to the intranet for business users that email currently does. The biggest challenge, access from outside the firewall to the network, is solved by the eIntranet’s e-mail enablement approach to mobile collaboration.

For example, status updates are emailed automatically and replies sent through a mobile device’s email client are posted back to the activity stream on the intranet. To power document collaboration, eIntranet sends files as attachments to mobile team members who can then check out and make changes to the document on their mobile device. When the updated document is emailed back, eIntranet automatically adds it to the appropriate group space as a new version of the document being worked on, tracking all historical information.

Consider this Business Week article from 1975 on the “office of the future.” Much of what was predicted has come true and has had the positive benefits envisioned. One source predicted, however, that by 1990 “most record-handling will be electronic.” Twenty years after the predicted time-frame, the goal of the paperless office is just now coming close to being a reality.

At Ektron, we believe that email’s demise is similar to the quest for a paperless office. We may want some of the noise in our inboxes to be quieted by social tools and they may indeed be—some day. In the meantime, you need social business tools that help you get business goals accomplished. Email remains the best way to do so, given the entire IT infrastructure in which these tools have to exist.

Ever feel like you’re trying to find your way around your company’s intranet or website? You’re lost. 

In a previous blog post I talked about Activity Streams, which incorporate the benefit of timeline navigation. They allow you to explore a running timeline of your own – and your peers’ – activities to easily locate content.

Social Navigation is just as powerful; it helps you navigate to the most useful and most popular information quickly.  It uses the input and actions from the community to bubble up the most useful content to the top of the list.  The more people view, rate, comment on a piece of information will probably mean that it is more important. 

In this example, we’re managing a list by Highest Rated, Most Recent, and Most Viewed (see Figure 1). We could also have tabs for Most Emailed and Most Commented On.  

Figure 1 

Drilling Into the List 

Anytime you have a list of documents (actually any list) it is important to categorize that list. An easy way to categorize documents for example is in a folder structure. This form of categorization is called a taxonomy. 

Figure 2 

• Figure 1 is the Social Proof of every piece of content in ALL the folders.
• Figure 2 shows the Social proof of the content within A folder.

As the quantity of information grows, filtering becomes more and more important! Combining social proof with categorization optimizes your navigation even further.

Today’s employees want to find colleagues’ contact information or information about their colleagues within seconds. They want it at the tip of their fingertips…right away. Where do we usually go to search for something? We Google it. And information is returned to us in milliseconds.

Bring the same fast results to your workplace. Ektron offers your employees multiple ways to find people at your company.

 1.  Search for Colleagues:

There’s even predictive search built in, so if you start typing in a colleague’s name it will return you with some predictions of what you’re about to search:

2. Find colleagues by Display Name, First Name, Last Name, Tags, Email, User Properties, or Category.

You can even Add Filters to your search. Or check off the box My Colleagues Only to search for the colleagues you’ve already friended on the eIntranet.

Search by colleague skill set as well to locate specific expertise.

3. Find employees in the Colleague Directory:

You can even Filter by Category such as by looking up a colleague in a certain department (Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Support, etc.)

4. View the User Tag Cloud and click on one of the tags to find colleagues tagged with that term/phrase.

 Then click on a tag such as “Sales” to see the results:

 5. People GeoSearch

Want the World’s Best Address Book? Now your company can have it with Ektron’s eIntranet.

What’s the business value of timeline navigation? Have you ever worked on a document 3 days ago and forget where you put it? “What folder did I put it in?” we ask ourselves. Often if we know the answer to this question, we look in that folder and then we click on Date Modified to look at the first few documents to see if it’s there.

Timeline navigation solves this problem. You remember when you worked on it, but not where you put it. Look at your activity stream which displays all your activity (uploading documents, posting a message, friending a colleague) and click on the document from your activity stream – since it shows the date of your activity (1 week ago, 2 days ago, 4 hours ago, etc).

Or, have you ever worked on multiple documents over the course of a few days?

9 am: You start working on a project plan Word document

9:30 am: Attend a Marketing meeting with your fellow colleagues

10:15 am: Make updates to the PowerPoint you and your colleagues were just discussing in the meeting

10:45 am: Open up that project plan document you were previously working on and revise it

11:00 am: Meet with your team to discuss product enhancements

11:30 am: Go back to that PowerPoint you were working on to add new slides

And the day goes on with you working on 3 more documents…

With timeline navigation, you no longer have to open up different folders to find the documents you were working on. Click on it right from your activity stream where it shows the exact time you made an update to it. It opens up, you make edits and add new content, save it, attend your next meeting, eat lunch, and then come back and view your activity stream to find whatever document you were working on the past few hours/days/weeks, etc.

Allow your employees to be more productive. Now they don’t have to search hours (okay or even minutes – searching 20 minutes for a document when they could actually complete the changes they need to make within that timeframe) for a document they could find within a few seconds.

And timeline navigation also shows the message a group member (or yourself) posted on the message board to one of your group spaces, who you or your colleagues have friended, if you or your colleagues wrote a blog post, if you or your colleagues have updated their status and more…all by date and time.

When Ektron was first developing our social capabilities several years ago, I envisioned the benefits that they would bring to company collaboration and communication, both externally on public facing sites and internally on intranets. Social integration has become critical to meeting user expectations and cannot be an architectural afterthought. With corporate intranets, social will play a key role in their success and user adoption and has to be a part of any forward-thinking solution that companies adopt for their internal collaboration and communication strategies.

The key words there are “part of the solution”. Social functionality and collaboration cannot exist in a vacuum apart from critical business processes. While today’s intranets cannot succeed by only providing business 1.0 processes, it is also true that internal corporate portals cannot meet business goals simply by providing social collaboration tools and group spaces. Successful intranets need to seamlessly integrate the beneficial aspects of social software with the core information delivery, findability and content management necessary to provide a complete and positive user experience.

Even as they use their intranet as a collaborative space, employees also need to find information that can be used in that collaboration. Certainly, I expect some employees will leverage timeline and social navigation, but others will find it faster to use an intranet search filtered by taxonomy categories to narrow results. Similarly, just as employees communicate with each other on activity streams, forums and blogs, they still need to find others (and groups to participate in) via corporate directories. Departments also need a presence on the corporate intranet. For example, a human resource department needs a place to post company calendars and forms. Marketing departments need a place to distribute collateral once they are done collaborating on it.

Furthermore, a social solution cannot just be bolted on to an existing intranet. Social has to be integrated completely into the intranet infrastructure so that interaction between users, with information on the intranet and with critical business tools (such as Salesforce, SAP and others) is seamless.

These are just a few of the factors we recognized and built the user experience of our eIntranet around. Combining essential business functionality with proven collaboration tools allows employees to use all of the resources at hand to succeed in their responsibilities. Social collaboration tools that deride “business 1.0” as obsolete do so at their peril. By ignoring the everyday needs of a business beyond collaboration, they are ignoring processes and activities that are core to every company.

Intranets in the past, the ones that only met the process needs of a business, were weak in the adoption area. They needed the human, collaborative element that social software can bring to them. Research shows that collaboration increases productivity and, therefore, the bottom line. But Forrester Research also shows that 73 percent of employees regularly turn to their corporate intranet to access the information they need.

These two elements, the collaborative business element and the information access and core business processes, cannot exist in a vacuum. With eIntranet, we’ve produced a true business application that gives today’s companies what they need in an intranet. eIntranet goes beyond being a socially collaborative software package and is much more than a portal to information. I think you will find it addresses your business needs in a singular way that no other application can match.

Sincerely,

Bill Rogers
CEO and Founder, Ektron Inc.

In 2008, we introduced social collaboration to intranets. Two years later, those are the buzz words in the industry and other software companies are just catching up to where we were two years ago. Meanwhile, our research with IT managers, CIOs, sales, marketing and HR departments has made it clear to us that social collaboration while critical to business success, is only one piece of a successful intranet.

An intranet needs to be easy to use, easy to deploy and easy to extend. An intranet has to be about information finding the employee. It has to be about communicating in real time and making sure that the most relevant information finds the right people. The intranet has to be a resource that employees want to use.

These are the principles on which we’ve built the new eIntranet (www.ektron.com/eintranet). By merging social and web content management best practices, we’ve built a user experience that encourages adoption. Its intuitive interface provides a quick learning curve for users and access to exactly the people and information that employees need every day. Everyone we have showed it to recognizes the need for this kind of experience.

Like Facebook, people keep going back to eIntranet again and again. But eIntranet is about more than the social collaboration that a “business Facebook” offers. It’s about information sharing, corporate communication and easily finding the best data and collateral that has been produced by the very collaboration we empowered employees to take part in two years ago.

In fact, employees don’t just find information. Information finds them. The most viewed, highest ranked and most shared information rises to the top of searches and into the hands of users. For instance, new employees looking at eIntranet will find collateral that their peers use most, without having to dig through file after file to find the best information.

Hand in hand with this “social navigation” is timeline navigation. There have been times when I’ve worked on a document, but I can’t remember where I saved it. I do know when I worked on it last. I know I’m not alone. eIntranet lets me go back through my Activity Stream to when I think I worked on it and find it that way. That goes for other people’s documents as well, making it especially useful for collaboration on projects. Going through group activity streams to find out project status and the latest iteration is quicker than sifting through folders only to find several versions of a document.

Corporate communication is enhanced by Activity Streams and Web 2.0 features like blogs and forums. Messages from management communicate directly with employees, wherever they are. Notifications of these messages pop up in an employee’s filtered stream of information, along with the other information that is relevant to their job role. So do reports and information from Salesforce and other business critical systems that eIntranet has been integrated with. Extensions of eIntranet’s capabilities are quick and employees access that data as if they always knew where it was.

According to Forrester Research, “the symptoms of an ailing intranet are not hard to recognize: poor adoption, irritated users, failed tasks and ingenious (but unproductive) workarounds in order to avoid the intranet altogether.” eIntranet solves these issues. Workarounds are unnecessary with its extensibility and users can quickly get the information they need most, while continuing to collaborate on new projects in group spaces. eIntranet gives businesses the ability to leverage the collective intelligence of their company to give them measurable business advantages.

eIntranet is changing the way businesses communicate and share information. It’s getting a lot of attention from businesses, analysts and the press. The people who are hearing about it are almost as enthusiastic as I am. Check out all of the details about eIntranet and let me know how it will change the way your employees work.

Sincerely,

Bill Rogers
CEO and Founder, Ektron Inc.

When we first decided to commit to .NET, we were confident that it would emerge as the framework that developers wanted to work on. Ever since we embraced the technology, we have been able to leverage its flexibility and deliver increasingly more powerful solutions. In addition, the accessibility that it offers to developers gives them unlimited options to build out the websites that their companies need. Site visitors are expecting more and more from the sites they visit and .NET lets developers “give’em what they want.”

It’s no surprise to me that developers prefer .NET. I’ve seen a lot of companies come to Ektron specifically because they prefer working in that framework. I expect that .NET will continue to be the best framework out there for a long time to come.

During the LUG tour this year, we’ve been demonstrating the capabilities of our new social CRM widget. Attendees have been excited not only about the real time communication that social CRM offers, but also about the integration possibilities that the widget represents. The social CRM widget integrates otherwise siloed systems, including Twitter and Salesforce, along with social activity from your Ektron-powered community. This “action stream” widget empowers a salesperson to manage his or her business relationships in one place. 

In his recent report, The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem, Forrester analyst and Synergy 2010 keynote speaker Stephen Powers writes about how systems (such as content services, analytics and CRM software) are isolated. In order to support the rich, dynamic experiences that site visitors expect, the information and features of each of these systems need to be brought together in one spot. An Ektron widget, such as our social CRM widget, can pull these pieces together and add value to the interactions that take place on your website.

Widgets are .NET user controls that separate the functionality they expose from any specific .ASPX page on the site. This means that a business user can drag and drop a widget onto any page and configure it for their specific needs. In the case of the social CRM widget, a salesperson would add keywords to search for on Twitter. A widget could also be created to pull reports or analytics information from a third party application like Salesforce.com.

The social CRM widget delivers Tweets directly to the salesperson, who can then reply in real time. When appropriate, the salesperson can create a discussion group based on the Tweets that come in and then send out a bit.ly link, directing people to this conversation. This pulls people back to your site and builds out answers for a self-populating knowledge base.

Tasks (based on received Tweets and activity on your site) can be assigned to Salesforce users without ever leaving the widget. Salesforce remains the hub of sales activity with all communications happening in the widget recorded on the appropriate customer's account.

Today’s business relationships rely on real time communication. By integrating and centralizing the discussion with the social CRM wdiget, your sales team has a significant advantage in their ability to build customer loyalty and satisfaction.

The possibilities of using PageBuilder and widgets to pull together siloed systems are limitless. Communications widgets (similar to the social CRM), ecommerce widgets, content aggregation widgets and more all benefit organizations as they build sites that are centered around their users’ expectations. By integrating systems with widgets, the information is no longer isolated and business users will be able to make more efficient use of integrated functionality. I’m sure that we’ll be seeing more of this type of widget on the Ektron Exchange, both created by our inhouse Code Factory Group and our developer community.

As I attend Ektron’s Local User Groups (LUG) meetings, I get to hear about what many of you are doing. From Web content management to social software to marketing optimization, many of you are taking full advantage of Ektron’s latest technology.

Take, for instance, the University Health Systems of Eastern Carolina. Previously, UHS’s multisite configuration was managed through a 10-year old system that could no longer keep up with UHS’s needs. The multiple sites need to share information and are administered by the same group of people, so it was essential for the process to be more efficient. Using Ektron, UHS launched their main site (www.uhseast.com) along with two other sites (East Carolina Heart Institute and ViQuest Wellness), utilizing Ektron's multi-site capability and eSync to coordinate and streamline their updates. You can read more about what UHS is doing in this recent case study.

Another example is the County of Santa Barbara. They faced the challenge of coordinating content coming from 23 departments. Prior to launching their new solution, many of the departments had their own sub-sites, each with their own look and feel. Like UHS, the County of Santa Barbara took advantage of Ektron’s multisite capabilities to deploy a consistent theme across all of their departments. Managing content with Smart Forms and sharing it across online locations ensures that there are not multiple versions or discrepancies, especially with time-sensitive information. More details about the County of Santa Barbara’s implementation have also been documented in a recent case study.

NASDAQ also took full advantage of our technology and expertise, implementing the latest social software features and functionality while still recognizing the core needs of their community site. John Jacobs, chief marketing officer at NASDAQ, recognizes that users want to be empowered online. Using Ektron’s social software, user engagement is a significant part of the experience that we helped NASDAQ deliver.

NASDAQ selected Ektron based on the customizability of the solution, the technology, SEO capability and the efficiencies we could bring to their infrastructure. Jacobs joins Gartner analyst Mick MacComascaigh and me in a new webcast to discuss NASDAQ’s success creating a social community as well as trends in Web content management and marketing optimization. 

As I said, I’m very excited about these projects and the others that are nearing completion. I look forward to telling you about more in the near future, either here, at a LUG or at Synergy 2010. I’d also encourage you to attend a LUG near you. You can also continue the conversation online in the forums on the DevCenter and by visiting our new code exchange, where you can learn from your peers’ ongoing projects.

Sincerely,

Bill Rogers,
CEO & Founder

When you come right down to it, people visit Web sites for the content they deliver. The better the content, the stickier the sites are and the more likely that visitors will come back and tell friends and colleagues about the site. Web content management is about delivering the best content to Web audiences.

But how do you know what the best content is? A study in April 2009 showed that only 4% of marketers could identify winning content. The best way to make sure that you’re delivering the right content for your audience is to leverage their activity on your site. It’s why we’ve embraced multivariate testing as part of our solution and what we believe is the best way to deliver relevant content.

Visitors to your site can play a large role in defining what content resonates most with your audience. What content is being viewed the most? What are visitors sending out to the social Web? How is content being rated? And are people talking about it? This is the information that defines what information is “best.” It’s the content that is getting the most response from people, whether they are just looking for it or are going further and interacting with the information. Ektron can leverage this activity data to make sure that your best content is front and center.

It’s not only about how the best content is defined by site visitors. Delivering good content is also about having a better idea of what individuals are looking for. The more information you have about your site visitors, the more you can target the best content to them. Delivering relevant content has a powerful resonance with site visitors; the information means something to them and directly reflects why they visited the Web site in the first place. Everything from URL parameters and physical location to date and time and group membership can define what the best content is that should be delivered to an individual user. Even the way site visitors navigate the pages on your Web site is useful for defining what they are looking for so that you can deliver the right content to them. To make the “right” content even more precise, a site powered by Ektron can use multiple parameters to refine the results that populate the page.

These techniques are very effective on their own to deliver information to your audience and you can combine them to yield even more precisely targeted results. This puts the best content within the context of who the user is and why they are looking at your site. It will let you deliver ads that they are more likely to respond to, increasing click through rates and producing better responses to marketing campaigns. This more efficient use and management of content will lead to optimized marketing efforts and more user-centric site experiences.

I believe this is the way content needs to be managed to keep up with the way that people want to use the Web. A more personalized and targeted experience will ultimately bring (and keep) more visitors to your sites and grow your brand as much as SEO and traditional marketing combined. I look forward to hearing what you think about this and how you are shaping your Web presence to meet the needs of your audience.

Sincerely,

Bill Rogers
CEO & Founder

From building a software platform capable of supporting the benefits of an active virtual community to building relationships that benefit our customers and our company alike, Ektron believes in the power of community. This commitment means giving you as many opportunities as possible to be active. One of the best ways to tap into the Ektron community is our upcoming Local User Group (LUG) tour which starts in Boston on March 16.

The LUGs are more than an in-person opportunity to see the new technology Ektron is adding to our Web content management platform to power your own online relationships. They give you the chance to speak with our executive team while exchanging ideas with other Ektron users in your area. The relationships that are formed at the LUGS are precisely what we think of when we consider the benefits community brings to our company.

Ektron believes there is more to our community than simply customers helping customers. There are a number of Ektron employees, including your Account Managers, who are active on the DevCenter, proactively answering questions and offering solutions that save you time and energy. The LUG meetings bring the online relationships you may have already built on the DevCenter into a brick-and-mortar environment.

Given this connection between the goals of the LUGs and the DevCenter, it only makes sense that we would unveil the Ektron Exchange, an exciting addition to our DevCenter, during this year’s LUGs. The Ektron Exchange will be a comprehensive Ektron code-sharing resource where developers and partners can share widgets and other solutions to common challenges while actively engaging in peer-to-peer collaboration.

The DevCenter, the LUGs and soon the Ektron Exchange are where your voices are heard. We take your ideas very seriously. The needs you have shared at previous LUGs have helped define our product roadmap. In order to continue to quickly react to the evolving demands of our user community, we are creating a Code Factory Group (CFG). This dedicated team of engineers will be developing new features (including widgets and user controls) that you will be able to find on the Exchange and implement right away. You will hear more about the CFG and its role at the LUGs and also have a chance to define some of the challenges we will look to address through this group.

Community is also about employee-to-employee relationships and that is what is so exciting about the second half of the agenda at this year’s LUGs. At Ektron, as well as with our customers, I’ve seen first hand how our intranet application has improved the way our employees interact, manage projects and find information while adding to our overall operational efficiency. Along with input from you, this experience has informed the direction of the new eIntranet 2.0. Completely re-engineered from the ground up, this collaborative intranet application will also be unveiled during the LUGs.

The Ektron community is unique in the Web content management industry, spanning the online world and in-person interactive opportunities like our Local User Group tour. The relationships formed in this community go beyond simple problem solving. The members have become trusted resources both inside and outside of Ektron for the whole community, driving innovation and contributing to each other’s projects.

When you come to the LUGs, you’ll get to see this activity first hand and actively participate in building these relationships. The schedule of meetings and the agenda for each one is up on our Web site now. Check and see which local group you are a part of and register here to come and get connected with the Ektron community.

Sincerely,

Bill Rogers
CEO & Founder

In the new year, Ektron’s customers are looking for new ways to build on the opportunities that the seismic events of 2009 presented. Ektron has a unique ability to address the three online needs of any business: Web content management, social software and marketing optimization.

Online marketing is first and foremost driven by effective content delivery. In 2010, you will need to have more information about the traffic coming to and interacting with your site so that you can make the right decisions for your business. This data has to be within the context of the content you are managing and further enhanced by multivariate testing that takes the pulse of your site visitors and makes content delivery decisions that generate the most conversions.

Effective content delivery is no longer enough online. The expectation is continuing to move towards a more open and social standard for even the largest companies. For example, amazon.com has set new standards for what users expect from a corporate Web site. By embracing user-generated content, transparent communication, customer service and personalization, amazon.com has created an online environment that gives consumers a rich experience and multiple reasons to keep coming back.

Both on and off your Web site, you’ll need to give users the same kind of interactive opportunities. A customer-centric experience that empowers visitors to your site will grow brand awareness and increase customer loyalty. A study by the Altimeter Group showed that companies with high levels of social media activity saw revenue grow an average of 18% over a 12 month period. Companies with very low activity saw their revenue shrink. To ensure that your company is in the growth category, you have to start engaging your audience everywhere they are currently active.

Ektron recognized early on the power of community online and has led in integrating social software into our platform. With Ektron you already have the tools to deliver unique, personalized experiences that sites like amazon.com have made the expected standard. With our new social media strategic consulting team, Ektron can also provide you with Web content management and social software experts that can help you determine how to use our Web content management capabilities to ensure your online success, whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish.

With all of these puzzle pieces in place I’m very excited about what’s coming next. As each unique opportunity comes up for your organization, Ektron will be right there with the resources to help you to maximize the results.

Happy New Year!

CEO & Founder

Social media is all about the user experience. By putting a powerful social experience around the e-commerce part of your site you can give site visitors an interactive experience that will influence and accelerate their purchase decisions. User interaction with the e-commerce content, with other users and with the rest of the content on your Web site is the way that you will build an engaged community for your brand. Cindy Gallop, the former chairman of the international creative agency BBH, recently stated: "If you build a seriously engaged, seriously involved, seriously loyal hardcore community around your brand, they will do your selling for you.”

This is the reason we built our own e-commerce engine as an integrated part of CMS400.NET. Your whole Web site’s user experience can engage that “hardcore community” and the interactions users have with your content needs to extend seamlessly into the online sales aspect of your site. The experience is integral to promoting your brand and online sales. “Bolt-on” e-commerce solutions, while they perform adequately for processing transactions, have inherent limitations and challenges. When it comes to integrating with the whole site’s experience, they cannot leverage the content or functionality that the rest of the Web site can use. Content is what drives users into the buying process and content delivery needs to continue through the sales cycle for your site’s e-commerce to be successful.

Using our eCommerce, it’s a straightforward process to extend your site’s content and the user experience into your online sales. From multimedia widgets that showcase what it is you’re selling to taxonomy classification that suggests products and makes finding what your customers are looking for easy, these are the elements you’re already using on your existing site and should be part of the sales experience as well. Commenting and ratings can further promote the conversation around what you’re selling and micro-messaging can get users interacting with each other and your corporate team while they’re shopping.

These features can be powerful additions to your site and provide the engaging environment that your customers crave. Social proof (and, therefore, user-generated content) is the biggest influencer in purchasing decisions and having it as part of your e-commerce can drive sales and give you valuable feedback about your products and services. It also gives you the opportunity to directly clear up any questions customers might have.

I firmly believe that future of the Web is in the social user experience and it is absolutely critical that the experience flows seamlessly across your site. E-commerce is a big piece of the Web site puzzle, but it’s always been treated as an accessory and this instance is no exception. I think it is critical that online sales start to incorporate the social media that is being implemented in the other areas of sites in order for e-commerce to succeed. By managing it with the same application as the rest of your site, e-commerce is able to leverage all of the power Ektron provides.

Best regards,

Bill Rogers
CEO and Founder, Ektron Inc.

This exchange of ideas is just one way that our worldwide customer conference goes beyond flashy demos. Synergy is as much about the existing technology you’ve been building your Web presence with as it is about new developments we’re introducing. I got to see a number of case studies from both clients and partners that showcased solutions they built with Ektron. Case studies from NASDAQ, John Hancock, Seattle University and King’s Daughters Medical Center highlighted real life Web challenges whose solutions are having a direct and dramatic effect on businesses, whether it is increasing revenue, brand awareness or growing a community.

NASDAQ gave an inspiring presentation about how they have implemented version 8.0 of CMS400.NET to build an interactive user experience on their site. Using the new activity streams and micro-messaging as a driving technology for communication, their community is growing and users are reacting positively. Attendees walked away from this presentation (and other presentations like it) with new ideas about leveraging Ektron to achieve similar results with their own Web sites.

One of the new technologies that people got very excited about is our multivariate testing. Attendees are seeing this as the best way to quickly respond to user preferences for design, layout, content, forms, branding and more. Multivariate testing is a step beyond A/B testing. A/B testing only compares and chooses from two different versions of a page while Ektron’s multivariate experiments test a number of different (and occasionally subtle) variations on a page before automatically selecting a “winner” (based on number of conversions). Multivariate testing leverages PageBuilder and widgets, two of the other technologies that Synergy visitors were very interested in.

One attendee told me that PageBuilder will make it easier for his development team to work with his company’s marketing department. His group will be able to build a framework of templates and widget functionality that the marketers roll out messaging on. There will be less of a delay and more immediate responses to the needs of both areas of the company. This kind of efficiency is exactly what Ektron’s content management platform has always been built around. It is great to hear that users of our software really understand and plan on taking advantage of the benefits we envisioned when we were building PageBuilder.

I left Synergy invigorated. The excitement at Synergy was infectious. Attendees couldn’t wait to get started implementing new techniques they learned and introduce the new technology to the rest of their team. On December 3, 2009 we’ll be hosting a Webinar where you’ll be able to get a good look at some of what we introduced, specifically the CMS400.NET Version 8 functionality that relates to marketing. Sign up here to get an in depth look at how we can help you optimize your Web site and grow and solidify your brand in your marketplace.

Best regards,

Bill Rogers
CEO and Founder, Ektron Inc.

Going hand in hand with the analytics, we have added multivariate testing to our suite of tools for building Web sites. Your Web site plays a critical role in your marketing efforts, and the experience users have on your site can determine success or failure. With multivariate testing, you can implement immediate user feedback and ensure that your site is as effective as possible. Multivariate testing leverages the power of PageBuilder and enables your marketing teams to roll out and test multiple versions of a page at once, experimenting with imagery, navigation, branding, layout and more to find the most effective combination for turning page visits into conversions. In addition to reporting on the “winner” of the experiment, it can also automatically switch off all of the “losing” versions of a page to maximize the effectiveness of that area of your site.

Activity stream and micro-messaging functionality has also been added for you to use immediately on your sites. With Facebook and Twitter, users have come to expect this kind of functionality and Ektron’s activity streaming has the added advantage of being searchable and filterable, making it ideally suited for intranets and other collaborative Web sites where timeline navigation can improve efficiency. With this powerful social media tool and our existing social networking and Web 2.0 technology (combined with our complete content management platform), we are building a complete social software solution that can fit every and any need. We already have some very interesting sites that are using this technology

The new calendar feature improves on the calendar control that we offered before. This isn’t a case of adding to the current feature, this calendar was rebuilt from the ground up to create a powerful marketing, scheduling and event tool for public sites and intranets. As an event and time management solution for public facing and intranet site, it has multiple display options, intuitive editing, filtering by taxonomy and mashup capability that enables you (and your users) to combine multiple calendars from different areas into single customized calendars that put all pertinent information at your fingertips and in context of other events and assets.

The upcoming edition of Ektron CMS400.NET integrates your best-of-breed analytics tool into the content management system, putting the results directly adjacent to the text, images and navigation that you want to optimize. By doing this, analytics information is put into context. You are able to see changes in traffic as it relates directly to changes in your marketing efforts, from copy updates to new product launches to changes in layout, without having to jump back and forth between software interfaces.

Why choose a best of breed third party tool to handle your analytics? I’m a firm believer in you using the best tool for the job and these dedicated third party tools are the best at analytics. If you’re already using one, you won’t need to convert and it will integrate seamlessly into CMS400.NET. You’ll continue to have access to your legacy data and, while it is now part of the cms, your preferred and customized reports will remain available to you as part of the Workarea’s digital dashboard.

Equally important is performance. Because CMS400.NET leverages a provider model, all performance and CPU usage needed to capture, analyze and report traffic data will be handled on a third party system ensuring no loss of performance on your CMS400.NET Web server. If analytics is not coming from a third party system, more processing power is needed from your Web server in order to capture, store and report for every site visitor. It can and will slow down your Web site, no matter how optimized your hardware configuration is.

Furthermore, as new capabilities come available from these analytics specialists, you will be able to leverage the new reports in CMS400.NET easily, letting your site scale as needed. CMS400.NET leverages analytics tools in a way not dissimilar to the way we leverage the .NET platform: we build on them and grow with them, using them to expand the capabilities that you can bring to your Web sites.

These new tools will launch very shortly, and you will be able to learn more about them directly at Synergy 2009, Nov. 1-4. We have several sessions dedicated to the use of analytics and how you can leverage these new capabilities on your own existing sites, not to mention the one-on-one time you’ll have with our own specialists at the networking events. Space and rooms are still available, but the special price of $995 is only good through October 1. I look forward to seeing you there!

Social media is simply the most powerful medium for getting your company’s message across. It’s where word-of-mouth marketing meets technology and it exists as social networks, activity feeds, blogs, threaded discussions, user reviews, ratings and comments (both on your Web site and on other channels). This is where a company’s message meets the social Web. Good and bad information both spread rapidly (the bad often more so). Your company can choose to participate in the conversation and elicit some control over the direction it takes, or it can sit back and let consumers say what they will. But your brand’s reputation will evolve here and this organic branding will establish the social proof you’re looking for.

According to a number of studies, consumers trust their spouses’ and friends’ opinions significantly more than they trust advertising when it comes to making decisions. This trust that they have in the people closest to them is the first layer of social proof that you should be looking for in order to succeed on the social Web. These are the people that your audience relies on and who you need to be referring back to your company as an expert in its field, whatever field that is.

The fact is, on the Web, you can’t be everywhere at once. But the people who believe in your organization and who follow what you say can and will spread the word for you, to their friends and their friends-of-friends, and to the networks they participate in. And establishing positive social proof is good for your SEO too. Every search engine is looking for trusted authority sites to rank high in their search results. They’re now turning their attention to social media to determine what those sites are (Google is now including a Digg button in their toolbar and GoogleWiki is encouraging users to rank sites). Being recognized as a leader in your field will have your audience referring back to your company, referring your links to others, growing your SEO and cementing your message to your brand.

You’re probably thinking, this is great, but how does it relate to content management? The message that they’re spreading on the social Web is the content they find wherever your company leaves its mark. From videos on your Web site to comments on a blog to employee Tweets, they’re all part of how your company is perceived. Good, effective content establishes you as an authoritative source, both on your Web site and as your message spreads to other networks. Mismanagement of content, on the other hand, can result in the corruption of your message and a loss of control. Your company could spend more time and money cleaning up the mess than it does promoting your good information.

By making sure that your content is reflecting your company’s message, you ensure that the social proof being built is establishing your brand in the most positive way possible and is in line with the branding you’ve established. When you’re telling the world about the expertise your company has, your primary source of information and messaging has to be conveyed perfectly in order to move the social media conversation in the direction you want it to go.

No matter how good your product is, your reputation is just as valuable. Putting the social Web to work for you with social media is the ultimate in word of mouth advertising and it deserves a strategy founded in tried and true principles. We’ve put together a guide to the why’s and how’s of building a solid social media strategy. I encourage you to read it and see how it applies to what you are trying to do on the Web.

Last month, I talked a bit about the Widgets that developers build for use with our PageBuilder technology. I touched on how these open architecture pieces of functionality can be dragged and dropped onto a page by non-technical designers and administrators to build out exactly the kind of page they need. Because Ektron Widgets are built with clean code and aren’t attached to a template, they can be reused across multiple pages and projects.

This might seem like a lot of control that is being given to non-technical users. In reality, it’s no more than they had before. Designers and non-technical stakeholders are often a big part of the Web site team that determines what functionality is needed on a site or page and the designers are directly involved in page layout. What PageBuilder does is streamline the process of deploying the site by refining the roles of the designers, marketing team and other non-technical team members who are involved in making the page building decisions.

For a marketing team, when they need to create a new campaign page or want to do some A/B testing, PageBuilder makes it clean and efficient process. A wizard walks them through selecting the page name and the template.  Then, the designers and Web masters can build out the functionality on that Web page by dragging and dropping Widgets that the developers have built for the Web project. It could be Widget functionality that was built for other parts of the Web site, another project or it could be brand new for this page. In any of these cases, the marketing team doesn’t need to make requests to the developers every time they want to add a new page and need functionality built into it. They can reuse what’s already available, changing the properties to reflect the purpose of the page. This saves an incredible amount of time in page development and launch (testing the new page or pages is a lot quicker too; many of the Widgets will have already been used successfully). 

Pages built with PageBuilder fit in seamlessly with the rest of the site. Look and feel is controlled by the templates and other development work, while layout and page functionality is decided by the best people suited for it, the designers and marketers. These pages also leverage the core content management features of CMS400.NET. You’re able to control SEO properties, including URL aliases, metadata, taxonomy, titles and descriptions, at a page level, as opposed to the content level. Approval chains and permissions can also be applied to the whole page, and entire page histories are kept, making it even easier to roll back to earlier versions.

With Ektron’s PageBuilder technology, rolling out new product or services pages is more efficient, as is adding and modifying functionality to existing pages. The ease of A/B testing is also boosted, as you can launch two versions of a campaign page with different aliases and track your success with analytics. Microsites are also quick to launch as needed and in conjunction with technology like eSync, easy to manage.

I’ve been working directly with our engineers to come up with new Widgets for you to use in your marketing efforts and I’ve also seen some impressive Widgets coming from developers outside of Ektron working with PageBuilder. The new Twitter Widget is just an example of spreading your message using social media on your own site.

To learn more about PageBuilder check out a new video we just created all about it here.

Sincerely,

Bill Rogers
Ektron CEO and Founder