Introducing our Regional Manager for BeLux

As a natural development, the amount of business generated out of Belgium and Luxembourg the past year called for local representation. I am of course proud that the work I have been part of doing, together with our great and productive partners in the region, have made this possible.

So to keep our momentem in the region, Sitecore International very recently hired mr. Eddy Lalou as Regional Manager for BeLux to further strengthen our position and partnerships. Mr. Lalou, a man with many talents and much experience from the world of IT and management, started officially February 15th 2010.

Although this was already ‘leaked’ to our partners some while ago, I have just spent 2 days on the road in Belgium together with Eddy last week. The objective was to visit as many partners as possible to introduce Eddy properly.

We had a nice little roadtrip around the area of Gent, Antwerp, Leuven and Brussels during the 2 days, as the partners received Eddy extremely well.
Of course this addition to the growing numbers of Sitecore employees will also make things a lot easier and better for our local partners, so it is definately a win-win. We also took the opportunity to share our latest roadmap, which definately was greatly appreciated. Some of those inputs are still ‘eyes only' – but keep a close eye on the coming press releases to learn what is coming from one of the leading ASP.NET content management system providers…

Apart from the meet-and-greet, we had the chance to discuss other key things, such as the plan for the near future with all the stuff we need to do, as well as Eddy’s great vision for the region.

At this point I would like to make it clear, that I will of course still be focusing on Belgium and Luxembourg for the coming months. This is to ensure that Eddy gets the best start possible, and that the transition will be a smooth as can be.

Apparently the world is still turning

Monday, January 18th was my first day back at work after being on paternity leave for 14 days. As promised in the previous post “expecting a delivery”, I can now proudly provide some pictures of my little miracle (she does not have a name yet). Pictures are listed at the bottom of the post.

 

Back at work
In short Monday 18th was obviously very different from my new life with my firstborn child. Not only was i back at work – my first working day consisted of me travelling to Paris for a meeting with a potential client. Quite a tough start one might say, as the past couple of weeks have meant being with my family 24/7 (and almost being awake 24/7)…

But then again what could possibly be more tough than getting up at 4 a.m. for the third consecutive nightly “baby-situation” (diaper change, pacifier gone missing, hunger, etc.) anyway?

As usual I cannot disclose any specific details of the project (and who brought me to Paris), but as the trend has been lately, the agenda included how Sitecore and MOSS compliment each other. Of course MOSS is not new on the ECM scene and the 2010 version is up for release soon. But I guess the type of clients we are facing more and more often, simply makes this a typical situation. In some cases they have MOSS already, or are looking to invest in it because they need some sort of ECM solution. Naturally they scout the market to check the available opportunities and thanks to our strong product, and the great reviews by the analysts, even large corporations now realize that Sitecore offers something which need to be investigated.

As if often turns out, people mistake the relationship between the offerings of the 2 products, and regard us and MOSS as competing products. Although this could be argued as true if you really want to be picky, the fact is, that the 2 products are not offering the same – and each have their strong points. This has been debated many times already (great blogpost by Julius Ganns, Netzkern), but the ultra short version is, that MOSS is strong on collaboration and weak on WCM, where Sitecore offers the opposite.

So the bottomline is, that combining these 2 different products can result in a very strong platform which offer great document management and collaboration as well as good support for multiple languages and great content management across even large organizations. Cases which prove this type of setup already exist – one being the dollar.com car rental website. For more information about combining Sitecore and MOSS, please see the whitepaper available on sitecore.net.

 

 

Here are a few shots of my firstborn only a few hours old. The date of birth was 01.01.2010 – but as I like to say, reset your calendar to year zero, as the birth of my little princess will surely mark a change in history...

 

Proud father signing off…

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!