Online Marketing Suite Creativity

Lately I started thinking if the “Online Marketing Suite” (OMS) offered by Sitecore was really offering enough. According to analysts we’re doing pretty good in this area already, but there’s always room for improvement ;-)

So I wondered, what else could the package offer.

What first came to mind, is actually very simple and will require a mix of the already existing features. Basically OMS could deliver a banner control system for targeted advertising. Obviously this would only be interesting for portals which are running ads on their site, or offers sponsorship in the shape of advertisement.

I realize that 3rd party systems which delivers such functionality already exist, but this option, like everything else in OMS would excel in the fact that we can base it very accurately on the visitors and the type of content they are interested in.

Facebook is doing this to an almost criminal point, by offering advertisers to display their messages to a selected crowd based on interest, demographics and so on.

So what makes a good targeted advertising control?!?

• Ability to segment visitors based on demographics/GeoIP: Check.
• Ability to explicitely personalize content for identified users: Check.
• Ability to deliver campaign and conversion data: Check
• Ability to deliver multivariate ads for the same ad campaign: Check.

What else do we need, well that depends on how detailed we want to be. To deliver a great service to whoever wants to sponsor a site, we need to sell them accurate valuable exposures, eg 1000 exposures to potential clients for $100. So we need to control how many times an ad is displayed. Not too difficult, but lets make it interesting. Perhaps the sponsor would like to try 3 exposures per visitor before giving up on getting a conversion from that individual, and instead display the ad to others. It is all about targeting your message to an interested audience. Once you do that, the number of conversions per thousand exposures will go up. Obviously sponsors would most likely want to receive some kind of reporting as well, but I will skip that part for now.

That brings me to the desired process in Sitecore:

• Sponsor requests to advertise their services. E.g. 5.000 exposures to a target audience of “Engineers/technically savvy visitors in German speaking countries”.
• Creation of a new ‘Targeted Advertising’ item and any number of ‘spots’ (in case the sponsor desires to try a multivariate approach), in the shape of image(s), or small flashfile(s).
• Definition of segmentation and other personalization properties.
• Ad goes live.
• Reports of clickthru’s (and multivariate successrate, if applicable) is delivered to the sponsor.

Obviously this conceptual idea needs some polishing, as well as minor coding (in order to limit the number of exposures etc), before it could become a module. As mentioned in the beginning, this sort of functionality is mostly interesting for portals who already have sponsored advertising such as beliefnet.com or kino.dk.

If you have other ideas for extending what is already in the OMS package, I would be glad to hear about them.

 

As this is probably my last post in 2009, I wish you a Happy new year!

Expecting a delivery

So we entered the final Month of the year, and it is time for a lot of things. Some companies have closing budgets, some people are getting ready for holidays, and me, well I am getting ready for something completely fantastic.

On December 3rd it was 4 years ago since I met my girlfriend, and this wonderful relationship is manifesting itself around December 27 where we are expecting our first child. Now that is a delivery which will certainly change my life.

Obviously this doens’t really have anything to do with Sitecore, but any parent will recognize how grand it is, and hopefully nod smilingly when I show up at the office looking like I haven’t slept for days (which might also become true). I guess it is safe to say I will soon be working 2 jobs: fulltime parent being one, and Sitecore being the other.

For the moment I have grounded myself regarding travelling, as nobody can really predict when the baby will come out. Naturally this is something I definately do not want to miss.

I expect to pick up my travel activities again in the beginning of 2010 and deliver more “on the road” posts by then…

Evidently, a blog

Last week Mark van Aalst released his much anticipated blog module “EviBlog” for Sitecore in a stable version. Mark has been working on the module for a while, and his work has definately payed off with a VERY impressive module.

The module is of course based on the latest Sitecore version (6.2) with support for Inline Editing as well as RSS, tag clouds, categories and so on. But that is not all, Mark have also added support for Microsoft Live Writer for those who enjoy writing content offline in a nice setting.

As the module was greatly expected, our Shared Source Coordinator Jimmie Overby has released 2 videos showcasing the module in action. These videos are available through Mark’s original blogpost.

The blog module is available for download on the Sitecore Shared Source Portal.

Great work Mark, keep it up!

What you say, and what they hear

Whenever I am writing emails or talking to people, I try my best to make sure that what I write or say is easy to understand. A message that is misinterpreted will most often cost you extra time and effort to solve gracefully. Practising this mindset continuously will of course improve your own communication skills over time, but it will most definately also make you realize whenever someone else fails to deliver a precise message – one that can not be misunderstood.

In general 2 things exist in communication “what you say” (and your own understanding and context of that), and “what the recipient hear” – which can be something completely different. Gary Larson, one of my favorite sketch/comic artists, already immortalized this basic rule of life [image link] (copyright restrictions might apply for the image). This also covers the problem that even despite your best efforts to deliver a clear message, maybe the recipient will still misinterpret the content.

 

Today i saw a real life example of something which probably made sense to the communicator, but which is easily misunderstood by the recipient. Basically this is a big example of what can go wrong in communication. I don’t think i need to explain further…

 

 

Normally things do not go as awry as in the advertisement above, but it serves as a reminder to carefully consider what you say or write before you execute.

 

So why am I reminding you all about this? Well basically because in online marketing, you have many options to deliver messages (also ‘bad’ messages), one is to do A/B testing (aka ‘split testing’ or ‘multivariate testing’) where several versions of a message can be defined and displayed to different visitors in order to track which option returns most conversions.

This is one of the basic features in Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite (OMS) by the way. Imagine that you are releasing a new product and you put a big message on your front page. Normally this will get attention directly, but if you re-phrased it a bit, maybe it would get even more hits. To test this, simply create a few versions and deliver them randomly to all visitors. Over time, one option will prove better than the others, and then you should obviously select this as the only option (and stop the A/B test). This concept is covered in a 2-3 minute video that was recently released on the Sitecore website. The video titled “Increasing your website conversions” is available on this page: http://www.sitecore.net/Products/Resources/Tours.aspx

We are also currently inviting people to attend a webinar about OMS, which will also cover how Sitecore deals with A/B testing. To read more and sign up, please see: http://www.sitecore.net/en/News/Webinars/2009/OMS-Webinar-December-09-Europe.aspx.

Post DMF 2009

One week ago I attended the DMF aka Digital Marketing First expo in the centre of Brussels. The reason for attending this show as an exhibitor, was based on our experience there in 2008 as visitors. Back then my colleague and I were quite baffled at the extremly nice exhibitions. Clearly many top agencies in Belgium regarded this event as "the place to be".

So with that in mind we deciced we simply had to be part of DMF this time around. And I am sure glad we did. Apart from networking with our existing partners (Uniway, The Reference & LBi), we got a few nice partner leads to take home. We also met with existing customers who are really great advocats of Sitecore. Stephen Delvoye from Bekaert is particularly satisfied, and certainly does not mind telling people how great he think Sitecore is. Marvelous!

As mentioned in the previous post, we had Mark van der Wal from Pectora co-host our booth. This was a great combo for us, as Pectora have already delivered some nice Sitecore cases, and since the theme of the event was mainly marketing oriented. Pectora delivers a Sitecore/InDesign integration which can help companies control content and assets across print- and online material. Mark being the nice guy he is, added great value to the show.

On the downside I have to admit that our booth came a bit short of some of the others. The guys from Emakina built a whole giant black box (almost a house actually) where they invited people in for a talk. LBi had a huge bar very nicely set up as well, while a lot of other creative companies clearly had been spending big bucks on the event.

Of course the important part of going to an event such as DMF is both to be seen, but also to make new business. On the latter part, I will be busy for quite a while.

One thing is for sure, see you at DMF next year!

Sitecore attending DMF 2009.

On October 22nd Sitecore will be present at the annual Digital Marketing First (DMF) event in Brussels "Tour & Taxis" expo. As this event is more focused on Online Marketing and not 'just' CMS, Sitecore has teamed up with our partner Pectora for the show.

Pectora is the inventor of a very nice Adobe InDesign integration to Sitecore, which allows content owners to build catalogues with ease in InDesign while at the same time having full control of all their products and their properties.

One good example of the Pectora/Sitecore solution is BoConcept, a furtniture retailer with 1000's of products, who use the solution to easily tailor PDF catalogues for print on their different markets, they also use the solution to save time on creating price signs for their 200 stores. Too learn more about this case, and the other Sitecore/Pectora projects, please feel free to stop by our booth (D17).

 

 

From Sitecore Lila Carlyle and myself will be present, ready to showcase our Online Marketing Suite (OMS). A web-marketing tool which have already been praised by analysts such as Gartner. In short the OMS can bring your website and other marketing initiatives much closer together.

Attending DMF is free for visitors, please go here to pre-register.

See you on the 22nd of October!

Microsoft Germany Partner Conference coming up

During next week I will participate in the partner conference for Microsoft Germany in Dresden. Together with me on the set will be Søren Bak Jepsen, the Director of Sitecore International as well as of course our Regional Director DACH  Marc Schneider.

The show is a 2 day event (September 8+9) for Microsoft and their partners to network as well as experience the many keynote sessions and learn about the latest market trends. More information here and here.

Come visit us at booth #22 to learn more about Sitecore and our recent product release of the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite.

Bis dann...

Pleased to say I told you so.

The long awaited Gartner Magic Quadrant report has now been released by Gartner. As Sitecore holds reprint rights, this new report is available through this Sitecore link (requires registration).

As mentioned in my previous post I envisioned that this report "would blow your mind". This gut-feeling of mine is actually backed up better than I expected in the report. We are placed furthest out on the "completeness of vision" axis, among the top visionaries, as well placed centrally on the "ability to execute" axis.

This places us ahead of all the pure .Net based players, and can be seen as the result of our global business strategy, as well as Sitecore focusing solely on product development while our partners focus on building first-class customer implementations.

Needless to say, we at Sitecore are of course very pleased with this report. This kind of market approval from one of the leading analysts is bound to make a difference in the competitive CMS market.

Sitecore International at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2009

Next week WPC is taking place in New Orleans. Although I myself am not going to be participating this year, my 2 colleagues Morten Ljungberg and Søren Bak Jepsen will be present.

Please be gentle with them as it is their first WPC experience. I remember from my trip last year that it is a lot of hard work, followed up by lots of networking and very little sleep. I also remember the Microsoft UK party - but that is a different story.

As one could expect, this years conference will be all about Sitecore's new release: Online Marketing Suite. If you have even the slightest interest in seeing this ground-breaking integrated marketing tool in action, do not hesitate to visit our booth. Sitecore is a Gold Sponsor, so it should not be hard to locate us.

Feedback on the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite

It has been some hectic weeks lately in Sitecore, mainly because we closed our fiscal year on June 30th - but also because we at the same time released our new version (Sitecore 6.1 including the OMS).

Doing both of these major events at the same time might seem as overkill and downright crazy, but we have actually managed quite well. At this point we cannot reveal any figures of the closed fiscal year, but just wait till the numbers have been chrunched and made public. It will blow your mind.

Part of the reason for releasing the product now, before the summer holidays really kick in, was also to have the product out prior to the upcoming Gartner report. A report which will probably also blow your mind.

I realize I am painting a really fantastic picture here, but I have to admit that this version (OMS) is also a huge test to our communication skills. There is alot of information to give out in terms of describing how the OMS can really make a difference for any website, even without getting into all the nitty gritty stuff.

I know for a fact that it is difficult because I have been in this situation a couple of times already. Even for trained senior Sitecore staff, the inner workings of OMS are a challenge to describe without confusing the receiver. Mainly because what might seem obvious to us, can look diffecult for the viewer. I think part of this is related to us technical people usually talking to other technical people. With OMS we will more often talk directly to marketing and sales people. Im not mocking non-technical people, but it can be challenging to learn and use their lingo, and talk "business value" instead of cool ground-breaking features.

Anyways, as I often seem to get side-tracked in my blog-posts, I will get back to the subject: Feedback on the OMS:

On Tuesday 7th we held a webinar for our partners to see OMS in action. We brought the big guns in shape of Lars F. Nielsen to host and run the presentation. The 30-or-so partner representatives who signed in was taken through a 2 hour live demonstration, as well as explanation of how to solve various analytics related issues. I was also signed in to surveil the session, in case my partners would have questions. During this, before the presentation was over, I recieved 2 mails from 2 different partners with headlines such as "Great product!" and "Excellent presentation, keep up the good work".

That made it pretty clear for me, that the product is certainly on the right track, and that our partners will be well equipped to meet their customers demands of marketing and analytics related features in the future.

 

A few screenshots from the slides used in the presentation:

Overview of the difference between another analytics tool and OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overview of the conversion impact of tracked campaigns in OMS

 

 

 

 

 

 

Overview of a typical setup of multi-variate (A/B) testing and the tracking of progress

 

 

 

 

 

For the partners who were unable to attend (+ the lucky ones already enjoying their holidays), we of course offer a video from the presentation. If you for some reason did not receive the follow-up email, and want to get your hands on the video + slides, throw me a mail.

Next stop WebScene 2009 in Brussels

In a few hours I will be travelling to Brussels to setup shop for the WebScene Expo 2009 event which starts tomorrow.

Hosted by Christian Daems and CMS-Channel, this June 9 event features many CMS vendors and partners and is definately the place to be for any serious player in the Benelux (and beyond) market.

 

From Sitecore 3 people are attending the show, my colleagues Torben Brams, Lila Carlyle and myself. By the way, we are of course sponsoring the event as you can also see on the website: www.websceneexpo.com.

We of course hope to meet a lot of people who are interested in knowing more about Sitecore and our upcoming release: Sitecore Online Marketing Suite (OMS). So if you are in the neighbourhood, please stop by our booth to learn more.

More information about the OMS is available on the Sitecore website and through the press release.

Welcome to the revolution

Today Sitecore announced the upcoming release of Sitecore. This new addition of groundbreaking marketing features is aimed at providing accurate analytics and real-time personalization on websites.

In short this release will address the growing problem of using 3rd party tools for website analytics. If your website visitors use a modern browser, which by default blocks all interaction with 3rd-party sites (for privacy reasons), then these visitors will be completely invisible to you. If you haven't even considered if your current analytics tool is subject to such browser filters, you better check that very soon. Potential conversions on your website may very well be lost in the void already.

So what is this "revolution" about? Well, Sitecore has adressed the issue subject to 3rd-party analytics tools by integrating site-analytics completely  into the CMS. Every action on the website is logged and can help you identify new leads and also divide visitors into groups based on their behavior (for real-time personalization).

Consider this post as an "early warning" of much more information to flow about the Sitecore OMS (Online Marketing Suite). Quite a lot of my fellow bloggers already leaked the link to the published information on the sitecore website where more information is available. Press release about the Sitecore OMS also available.

Enjoying the show

Last week I was in Brussels attending an Emakina event. Emakina Group actually owns The Reference which is one of our big partners in Belgium.

The event was titled "CMS for International accounts" and evolved around the process of choosing a Content Management System (which is not a trivial task as you need to identify the right tool for the right job).  They had found a really cool location to host the event, a place nowadays called Flagey Centre. This used to be the studios of the Belgian National Radio Broadcast I was told. All the studios were still intact but now turned into conference and event facilities.

Sitecore sponsored the event, and I was glad to see how many interested people showed up to learn about CMS.

To make sure the whole event wasnt biased by us or other vendors, different cases were presented. Each running on a different platform ranging from open source system Drupal to SharePoint, Tridion, Emagic and of course Sitecore. The Sitecore case presented was Betafence, a very tight B2B and B2C website with a large product catalogue, all easy to filter through using the nice features on the site. Philip Achten from our partner The Reference ran the presentation and did an enthusiastic and very impressive job.

So what was I doing in all of this you might ask, and to be honest I was sitting in the back of the theatre enjoying the show. Philip presented the case much better, and much more believable than I ever could. This however wasn't the scoop of the day for me personally. That came during "one of the other presentations" where some of the participants asked some really cool questions about the competitor CMS. Questions which, to the presenters regret, revealed some important weaknesses of their systems. Basically my job was done, and I never even left my seat!

A few short breaks, as well as the lunch after the presentations, left me some time to mingle with the Emakina crowd, talk to excisting Sitecore customers in person as well as meet some prospects. Finally I also caught up to speed with the projects that The Reference have in the pipeline. You got to hand it to these guys, they are very professional, and one of the reasons for the success we have on the Belgian market.

After the event, I went with Steven Volders from Emakina to their premises. Although time was sparse we managed to have a short meeting about Sitecore and our partner program. Looks like The Reference's bigbrother want's a piece of the action as well, and they are most welcome.

Two shows in one week

Week 12 of 2009 (March 16 to March 20) was a bit hectic for my department.

Monday March 16 my colleague Sri Carlyle and I went to Belgium to attend meetings with new partners. These meetings would take place in 2 different cities near Brussels, so as a result we had rented a car in advance online. The car we booked came with a built-in GPS (BMW 1-series). When we arrived in Brussels airport. we quickly learned that you dont always get what you ask for. Instead the woman at the counter told us our VW was ready. Come again?

After a bit of struggle and complaints about this replacement, we went to pick up our car, which we now had to pay an extra 10 Euro for in order to get a GPS. Apparently it pays off to complain, so instead of getting the VW we got upgraded to a BMW 318. By the way, do I have to mention this model comes with a built-in GPS? Regardless, I wonder where my extra 10 Euro went exactly.

Anyways, after some valuable meetings, we headed back to the big city and returned the car before going out to experience Brussels on foot. Although I have been through this city numerous times already, I haven't actually had much time to check it out. But I ensure you, there is lots to see.

 

The next morning we attended the Content Management Forum event in Brussels to network as well as give a keynote. Lars Nielsen, who flew down to do this presentation, did a great job talking about how you can drive increased revenue from your website during the financial crisis based on the latest reports from Forrester, whereas the other CMS  vendors were talking about features and functions. This approach resulted in quite a few enquiries from potential partners and customers, not only for a copy of the slides, but also to get to now more about Sitecore. All in all very positive and productive for us. We also had a chance to introduce some existing customers to each-other which was a very pleasant experience. We really have to get moving and get a local user group initiated. There is lots to gain from that. A short interview with Lars about his presentation is available on youtube by the way.

After the event I arrived home Tuesday night, more or less ready for flying out 18 hours later.

Wednesday went by quickly with me attending class (I have an ongoing study next to my job), and later going to the airport to catch the evening flight to Oslo.

As the headline suggests, the reason for going to Oslo was another event: The WebForum 2009 conference which took place at the Royal SAS Radisson. Not a huge event in number of exhibitors, but nonetheless a very important one to be part of. WebForum 2009 was a 2-day event packed with interesting keynotes and sessions. These sessions started with 2 members from the Obama campaign office sharing their insights from the recent election. As you probably know the Obama campaign had an unprecedented use of social networking, personalized email campaigns and youtube videos. I actually got to ask one of these individuals from the campaign, Mr. Dan McSwain, a question during lunch regarding the tremendous social networking effort he was part of. If you believe in 6-degrees of seperation, I guess I have been pretty close to Obama himself. I better tell my mom.

During and in between the sessions I manned out booth together with my colleagues Morten and Sri. Quite a few other CMS vendors were also present at the conference, none mentioned, none forgotten ;-)

Although the breaks between sessions were very short, we did manage to talk to quite a few people who had an interest in learning more about our product in relations to their upcoming projects. It is quite a challenge to present the full scope of the product in a 2-10 minute demo, but I think we managed to get the message across.

The first day of the event also came with a banquet in the evening. This was basically "a dinner and a show" as the musician/writer Jo Næsby hosted the dinner as well as the award-show called "Farmand prisen".  I guess it is a pity that I am not 100% fluent in Norwegian as it seemed I missed the point of most of his jokes.  After this event, most people went to the penthouse level bar "Summit". With clear skies over Oslo, the view was simply impressive. So was the price of the beer by the way.

On the second day of the event, Sri and I had some meetings with prospect partners to attend, so we left Morten at the booth and jumped a cab. As one of the prospect partners are already involved with one of our customers, the meeting went well and the resulting action plan was indeed positive for all parties.

Other than these meetings, the rest of day 2 went by much like the first, with new interesting leads to bring home.

To summarize the week, airplane food haven't improved (will it ever?) but getting to drive a nice "Beemer" as well as having a great view over Oslo made up for that. And then it is also always very inspiring to meet the competition and others from the industry who are willing to share their insights and visions.

Stockholm syndrome 2.0

I recently completed 2 days of certification training in Stockholm. This was actually my first time instructing a developer course on my own. Remember I got certified as an instructor back in November.

To start of with the hard facts, all the attendees passed the certification exam. Well done guys!

 

The training facilities in Kista (Stockholm's equivalent to Silicon Valley apparently) was quite nice, and the "classroom" offered all the necessary equipment as well as endless resources of coffee. However I quickly learned why they did not charge for the coffee. No one in their right mind would dare to charge anything for the brown foamy soup that came out of the self-service push-down cannisters. But being a caffeine addict, I somehow managed to drink it anyway.

 

The very interesting bit for me in doing the certification surfaced already during the roundrobin personal introduction. 4 out of 5 developers had all previously worked with the local Swedish competing product for a couple of years. So basically I had 4 chances of proving why Sitecore is a world-class product which is way ahead of the competition. I know this sounds harsh and very business oriented, and in reality it is not the purpose of the certification. Basically as an instructor you need to be objective and cover the material the best way possible and simply guide the students. Once they go through the course, they will realize the facts themselves.

To my great satisfaction, the students quickly caught on to the hook and expressed how the structure and the concepts of Sitecore was well crafted, and more flexible than what they were used to.

So you can easily say that Stockholm, or the suburb of Kista (pronounced 'Sheeesta') felt like a very welcoming environment, despite the luring threat of the bad coffee and the cold and wet winter of course. I wouldn't mind going back there some time.

Till then.

Sitecore blogs, now all neatly indexed

Mark Van Alst from Evident in The Netherlands have made a very nice site over the Christmas holidays which utilizes Google custom search to index over 30 Sitecore related blogs.

Check it out here: http://www.sitecoreblogsearch.com/

 

Original post by Mark: http://www.markvanaalst.com/2008/12/26/custom-search-for-sitecore-blogs/

Well done!