Bill Rogers Blog

There is a huge opportunity for the companies who get mobile right to separate themselves from their competitors on the Web. According to Gartner Inc., by 2013 mobile phones will be the most common device used to access the Web. Mobile traffic increased thirty-two percent during 2010. Approximately eighty-nine million people in the United States have accessed the mobile Web in the past year and fifty-three percent of these people access the Internet from their phone daily.

At Ektron, we believe that “context” is the key to providing Web experiences that deliver results. In the case of mobile, the context is that visitors are accessing your website from a mobile device, usually with a task in mind. Mobile users don’t need – in most cases don’t want – their mobile device to present the same Web experience as a desktop browser. What they’re looking for is the content that brought them to a website, and they want that content presented in a mobile friendly context. If a visitor has come to a site through a search, he doesn’t want to click through multiple, slow-loading, hard-to-read pages designed for the desktop. If prospects have arrived on your landing page via an e-mail marketing campaign, you definitely want that page to display correctly on any device a prospect is using.

In order to deliver Web experiences that account for mobile context, site managers should follow the “One Web” principle. The “One Web” principle advocates that Web access from a mobile device should be as simple, easy and convenient as Web access from the desktop. But, “One Web” doesn’t mean that exactly the same content must always be available in exactly the same way from any given URL.

Often the question of building an “app” comes up when I discuss the mobile Web with customers. Ektron can support mobile application development when it makes sense. However, we believe that by following the One Web principle, you can deliver a mobile browser-based experience with much larger reach, more cost effectively than by building device-specific applications. Combined with the HTML5 standard, One Web mobile sites can even incorporate rich media elements without losing potential visitors or taking on the additional cost of building and maintaining mobile applications.

Ektron’s eMobile tools are a key component of the Ektron web content management platform. Because Ektron separates content from presentation, you can display content appropriate for any device without added development time or costs. With Ektron you can auto-detect both the device and browser being used; Target content using mobile device location capabilities; measure the effectiveness of mobile site content and optimize it with multivariate testing; you can even preview the look and function of your mobile site on the desktop using the Ektron Mobile Emulator.

Contact an Ektron representative today to get more details on how Ektron can help to cost-effectively build a mobile Web site without compromising the customer experience or the ability to manage a site’s content.

We also will be hosting a Webinar on how to build a mobile site with Ektron on September 23. For more information, please register for this webinar today.

In 2006, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year was You. As Wikipedia says: You “represents the individual content creator on the World Wide Web.”

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.

Dear Reader,

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.

Social Navigation 

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.

Fumbling with that rolodex on your desk? Definitely old school. 

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.

Timeline Navigation in 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.

Have you seen Staples’ “Wow! That’s a low price!” commercial on TV?

Well if you haven’t, check it out.

Yes, I know, it’s a bit…well…annoying. But it gets the point across. The guy is looking at different products and pulls them off the shelf and says about each one, “Wow! That’s a low price!”

Guess what? We get a similar “Wow” reaction from our clients who first see our technology. “Wow! That’s a cool feature!” the VP of __ says when he sees timeline navigation. “Wow! That’s so easy!” the webmaster says when she sees PageBuilder. “Wow! I want that!” the VP of Marketing says when he sees targeting content to individual site visitors. “Wow! I can easily integrate that!” the developer says when he sees Ektron’s exchange community.

“Wow! You can do ALL that?!” “Wow! You have all that?!” “Wow! Can I see more?!”

Yes, yes, and yes.

We are the best solution out there. The BEST. We meet every one of your business needs, whether that is to improve operational efficiency through our web content management or our newly released intranet application, drive revenue growth through our marketing optimization suite, and/or build customer loyalty through our social software.

In the next few weeks I would like to share with you the “So What” of Ektron. Why should you choose us over our competitors? Why are we the best solution for you? And, why, when choosing Ektron – (because once you see it, you’ll get it…seeing is believing and in the software world evaluating and trying it out for yourselves is believing) – will you get a positive Return on Investment?

Do you want to engage, convert and retain your customers? Do you want to deliver the best web experience to your site visitors? Do you want to increase your web presence? What else do you want your website to do?

Stay tuned and soon you’ll be saying, “Wow! That’s something I want and need right now!”

Bill Rogers
CEO and Founder, Ektron Inc.

Dear Reader,

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.

Dear Reader,

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.

CMSWire recently reported that Microsoft’s .NET framework was voted the best overall framework by developers, according to a recent User’s Choice Survey on Frameworks by Evans Data Corporation.

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.