Yesterday at the Search Engine Marketing Expo, in Santa Clara, Calif., Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was interviewed by Danny Sullivan, Editor in Chief at Search Engine Land, chief sponsors of the event. 

In a wide-ranging interview, Ballmer acknowledged the obvious, that Google was number one, and that it wasn't likely Bing would ever catch them. Of course, he didn't come right and say it because he's far too good a politician for that. When asked specifically by Sullivan if he would be happy being number two, Ballmer responded, "There's no good answer. We've got great long-term optimism. Tomorrow's goal is to gain a few points, a tenth here, a tenth there and just keep working and working."

In fact, a few points are really all of they've gained since launching last year to much fanfare and a top-dollar ad campaign. I've said many times that Bing is a decent search engine. It looks pretty and it has some very nice features, but Google's market share numbers have remained steady since the launch, so it's not hurting Google a bit.

Sullivan asked the obvious questions about whether Yahoo! search can survive Bing. Catching Yahoo! actually is a far more realistic goal than catching Google, but Ballmer obviously couldn't just write off his big partner. When asked about this, he said, "The number one objective is for Bing to be the number one product that it can be. There's an advantage to having the power of two, as opposed to the power of one." 

Ballmer is a slick politician, which is his job as CEO of a big company like Microsoft. He has to talk up his products and sell the company to the world, but he obviously knows that trying to catch Google is an unrealistic goal. They are the number one search engine, and it's going to take something monumental to change that. For now, Bing is just a small part of what Microsoft does. It's not their core business, and gaining a couple of points of market share here and there is a good thing.

If Microsoft can continue to push Google to innovate, in the end, it will have succeeded in acting as a check against the search giant, and as consumers, that's not a bad outcome (although it's probably not the one Ballmer would admit to be hoping for).

For more information:
- see the Search Engine Land Live Blog post from SMX West

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Tony Byrne has a short post on the CMS Watch Blog today about a Twitter debate over whether WordPress is a "true" CMS or not. Byrne says since companies are using it as such, that makes it a CMS.

As a WordPress user, I have to agree. It may not be a sophisticated web content management system, but it does everything you need a CMS to do. It provides a structure for entering and managing your content and administering the back end of your website. You can add analytics tools to monitor your website traffic and you can design and build in search engine optimization. You can customize it to create a design that reflects your organization's look, feel and brand.

What's more you can manage your media and even do some light editing. It's not exactly digital asset management at its most advanced, but it does the job. If you are using it as a blog, you can control the comments stream and WordPress has an excellent comment spam filter. 

So it might not be the most innovative CMS around, but CMSs as whole sit on along a spectrum of functionality. If it offers what you need, it's good enough. If it doesn't, you need to look at something that meets your needs. For a small business or an individual, a tool like WordPress is highly valuable. Just because it isn't necessarily suited to the needs of a larger organization is no reason to write it off.

For more information:
- see Tony Byrne's blog post

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Clarabridge, a text analytics firm with products that are typically only within reach of the largest organizations, announced recently that they had launched a Beta of an online portal aimed squarely at smaller organizations that don't have the budget for Clarabridge's other solutions.

Customers can upload emails, survey open-end verbatims, transcripts, social media content and any other textual data sources into the portal. In fact, under a limited time offer, you can use Clarabridge's tools to analyze up to 10,000 records for free.

After you upload the data, Clarabridge's analytics software analyzes it, categorizes it and determines general sentiment analysis. Users can drill down through the data or view reports based on it. 

Justin Langseth, Clarabridge president and chief technology officer is excited to be offering this type of capability to a market that typically can't access these types of tools. "Now anyone in the world can upload their textual data to our hosted application, and Clarabridge can read, categorize, assign sentiments and linguistically analyze it hundreds of times faster than is manually possible," he said.

If you want to take advantage of the free service, you need to sign up for the Beta program on the Clarabridge website. Pricing and availability, post-Beta should be available later this year.

For more information:
- see the Clarabridge press release

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This week Jive Software released Ideation, an idea filtering and organizing tool. In many organizations, ideas may be locked on local hard drives or inside Excel spreadsheets, but this tool provides an outlet for the community to talk about these ideas and vote them up or down.

Users can submit ideas, then they can be filtered according to where they are in the process. Filters include "Active," "For Future Consideration," "Under Review" and so forth. A manager or community member can easily find the types of ideas he or she wants by narrowing the list with a filter. The community can then vote on these ideas in a manner that looks similar to Digg, but also leave comments, start a discussion, add a video or any of the actions you might expect in a collaboration tool. The Ideation tool is part of the Jive suite so it's completely integrated with other tools.

J.C. Groon, who is head of innovation programs at NAVTEQ, a company that generates digital map and traffic solutions, says Ideation has helped employees generate and find the best ideas, regardless of where they are in the world. "Success in our innovation program depends on our ability to enable our employees to interact across geographic and functional boundaries and innovate together." A tool like Ideation enables them to do this.

In a business, where you don't see many new ideas, a tool to manage ideas is a good one and it's unique. It provides a way for employees to check out the viability of their ideas, and while there is probably going to be political and social intrigue mixed in with all of this, it gives companies that thrive on ideas a place to test them out and see what others think.

Ideation is available as a module for Jive software customers.

For more information:
- see the Jive press release

Related Articles:
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Google announced on its blog recently that it has added a Nearby filtering option. It lets you sort results by your geographic location. This can be your default location or a custom location (if you are on the road or planning a trip, for example). For more information, see the Google blog post.

> "Why CMS vendor acquisitions are bad for customers," by Seth Gottlieb, Content Here Blog
> "Goodbye Newssift, we hardly new you," by Nick Patience, Too Much Information - 451 Group Blog
> "You can't hurry relevance," by Daniel Tunkelang, Noisy Channel Blog
> "U.S. Department of Defense releases official policy on social media," by David Meerman Scott from Web Ink Now Blog
> "Print is dead: Long live print," by Kit Eaton, Fast Company magazine

And Finally... "Fancy math allows near perfect enhancement of poor quality images" by Adam Frucci, Gizmodo Blog

Guest post by Robert Rose
I just spent a few days at two different clients. One is a $4 Billion enterprise that has global divisions and uses a myriad of enterprise software products--including more than their fair share of content management systems (and by the way I’m referring only to web CMSs from this point forward). The other is a small non-profit, running mostly open source software, most notably to manage the content on their website.

What did they have in common? Well, other than excellent Peet’s coffee (which seemed oddly coincidental), both had CMS implementations that failed, and both were looking to re-examine their options.

You’ve all seen the statistics: 85 percent of all CMS implementations fail. Or, is it 65 percent? Or only 40 percent? Gack--let’s get Gartner on the phone. We can actually settle the debate once and for all: 100 percent of all CMSs fail at some point after implementation.

So, the question isn't: "Is the CMS going to fail?" The question is: "How big will the failure be?" And, once you acknowledge that--feel free to go through the entire Kubler-Ross grief cycle--you can address the core issues, get tremendous value out of whatever solution you deploy and mitigate the challenge of the new process you’ll ultimately put in place. 

First, why do they all fail?

Wikipedia defines content management as "a collection of procedures used to manage workflow in a collaborative environment." Put simply, a CMS is a process meant to grease the workflow skids for managing web content. It doesn’t matter if it is a million dollar software tool or some dude named Sergei FTPing files from Dreamweaver, every organization that updates a website has a CMS.

So no matter who handles the implementation of the CMS, the only thing that's possible is to capture that workflow process as a singular moment in time.

Now, of course, some initial implementations go well; and some don't. And there have been excellent implementation best-practices posted by practitioners such as Jeff Cram, Seth Gottlieb, and Lisa Welchman and her crew.

But regardless of how good your initial implementation is, your CMS is only as good as its ability to change. I can tell you that almost all of the clients I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the last 10 years in web content management have answered the initial “Why are you changing your CMS” question with some variant of the following: 

• Our existing CMS just doesn’t meet our needs any longer.
• Our IT group is bottlenecking our ability to produce content fast enough.
• We need to empower our local non-technical people to manage their own content.
• We are re-designing our website and our existing CMS just won’t handle it.

But I can also tell you that many times, once you dig a little further, you also find:

• The initial implementation of their existing CMS was actually quite professionally handled.
• Although the IT group actually is “bottlenecking” the content production process, the organization actually has zero appetite for errors, and their process, while slow, is actually error free.
• They actually tried rolling out the process to the local managers and it “just never quite took”--so, of course, a new software tool will fix that.
• The re-design of the website is really driving the desire for a CMS re-design, because it just feels like things should start “fresh”.   

Now, I do realize that sometimes a failure is just a failure. Products fail. Implementations really do go haywire. Software companies go bust or merge, and requirements sometimes really do radically change to a point where a new tool is needed.  

But that’s also the point: Whether you have a great implementation or a horrible one; or whether you chose an excellent product or a poor one; your CMS process will change. The key to how big that change will be is how much attention you paid while the change was happening.

In short, all CMSs fail and boil down to a situation where, “We’ve changed and our CMS hasn’t.”

Change you really can believe in…

Ideally the choice to purchase a new tool to manage your CMS process should be to take advantage of new opportunities--and grow into new challenges--not solve old problems.

How do we make sure that your impending CMS failure is only a small speed bump and doesn’t necessarily mean you have to switch solutions wholesale? Here are three things to keep in mind:

1. Recognize that your organization will change. You or your team actually might change jobs. The workflow will change. The approval processes will change, and your website had better change or you may not have a choice about the changing jobs thing. Don’t be afraid to re-examine your CMS implementation every six months or so. Does it still reflect your internal process, or have end-users institutionalized “work-arounds” based on the way content “really gets done”.  
   
   Every CMS implementation (independent of the product) I’ve looked at that was more than one year old had some of this residue. Here’s the way it works. A veteran user says to a new user “I know this is how they say to do it, but if you just do “this” it gets it done faster/easier/with less hassle. Over time, “this” becomes a problem because “this” becomes “these” and inevitably “these” seem like the product has failed to meet some core requirements. If you address those issues iteratively, your system will last longer, your tool will produce many more smiles and the inevitable failures become smaller.?  
2. 
   
3. Recognize that nobody *really* wants to use a CMS. A CMS is not email or iTunes or Facebook. No matter how slick the interface is, a content management system is something in which no one wants to spend any more time than absolutely necessary. It’s also a software tool that typically only a few people in your organization will use with any frequency. And those core users are who you should build your process around. I’ve seen too many clients try and make the really infrequent “end-users” really happy and end up with far too many “simplified” templates and an over-complicated workflow.??
   
   Seth Gottlieb really nailed this idea in a recent blog post: The Myth of the Occasional CMS User. Remember, before the CMS, Sally in marketing used to just email the press release to Joe in IT to go up on the site. It took two weeks to get published, but Sally could move on to other things. Now that you’re “empowering” Sally and she may not be as grateful for that as you think. Interesting factoid here: If you’re in the middle of looking at new CMS software, your estimate for the number of end-users is almost assuredly too high. If you think you have 20, you probably only have six or eight core end-users. In my experience, I’ve watched almost every implementation shrink over time to be about half of the original set of end-users. In only very rare instances does the number of users increase. In fact, over time, charming end-users (you know who they are) cajole core users to manage their content for them.  ? 
4. 
   
5. Your requirements are not unique, so don't make them so.?I’ve been in too many meetings where someone will say “they’ve never seen a project like ours”. Guess what? Yes they have. Every CMS implementation has about 85 percent to 95 percent of the same stuff, and then the remaining 5 percent to 10 percent are indeed, weird esoteric requirements that your organization is bringing to the table. If you’re looking at the appropriate strata of CMS tools for your business, chances are any of them will handle the basic blocking and tackling of your requirements. You may like one interface over another; or one sales guy over another, but any decent CMS will handle your basic workflow needs, and will make it easier for your non-technical people to manage web content. So, certainly when you’re reviewing CMS vendors look at the entire fit of the vendor. (CMSMyth has an excellent post on this topic.)
   
   But once you get into the implementation, don’t try using every esoteric feature of that chosen CMS. Recognize that the process you deploy today will change. It just will. And the more complex you make the implementation today the harder it will be to change it down the road. Your risk for larger failure goes up with every decision in favor of complexity that you make.      
   
   In the end, remember that implementing a CMS for your organization is not simply a successful build, install or subscription to software. That’s a very small piece of the project. The real project is designing a process for change. That’s the whole idea of a content management system. No matter how big or how small your organization is, you’re anticipating change, and building a process that supports it iteratively.

And, look at what’s happening on the consulting and vendor landscape. This is where an experienced practitioner can help you. The reason it’s so confusing is because CMS tools typically support some processes much better than others (see the fit criteria mentioned earlier).

• If your process is focused on web marketing, there’s an app for that.
• If it’s facilitating employee access to digital assets, there’s an app for that.
• If it’s focused on compliance and governance, there’s an app for that.  
• If it’s global thermonuclear war...well, there I can’t help you...

Taking an iterative approach to your content management process is the best way to ensure that when you fail, you fail fast, small, gracefully and with insight on how to make it better in the future.

Robert Rose is the Founder and Chief Troublemaker at Big Blue Moose, a consulting firm that develops marketing strategy, demand generation programs, web technology selection, social media and content strategy. For the last eight years Rose served as VP, Marketing & Strategy for CrownPeak; a SaaS company focused on web content solutions for marketers.  

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