One on One with Brett Zucker of Bridgeline Digital

Brett Zucker has been an executive at Bridgeline Digital since 2002. In 2006, he was promoted to Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer where he is the driving force behind the company's flagship iApps suite. We asked him about where web content management fits inside most organizations today.

FCM: You have SEO right at the top of your list of features on your website. What role does SEO play in content management?

BZ: Getting found by search engines is vital to the success of a website, which is why we at Bridgeline feel that SEO plays such a pivotal role in content management. The search ranking business is cutthroat and everyone--prospects, customers, even your grandmother--uses search engines today when looking for something on the Internet. So remaining high in search engine page rankings is critical. One of the main vehicles for improving page rankings is optimized site content, but for the most part, there is a general lack of understanding around the science of SEO. But that shouldn't be a factor when it comes to managing content. Content management systems should have built-in tools that automate as much of the SEO process as possible, making it simple for the non-technical marketer or content author to benefit from optimized content and an overall optimized website.

And technical users should be afforded the option of an advanced toolset to really dig in and manage metadata and other tags. We developed the iAPPS Product Suite and iAPPS Content Manager to have many built-in SEO features such as auto-301 redirects, automatic XML sitemap creation, as well as navigation and menu name based URLs. If you just consider auto-301 redirects, they can have a major impact on your search rankings and most marketers have no idea what they are. And most IT teams don't have the bandwidth to stay on top of them. What an advantage it is for a marketing team to have something so technically important taken care of without any IT involvement.

FCM: Why does your company see web content management as a marketing job?

BZ: Historically, it has been the IT department that has managed technology decisions and budget. However, we are seeing that more and more it's the marketing and business side of organizations that are driving interactive technology initiatives and overall spend. They need solutions--public websites that drive lead generation, web-based business process applications for insurance enrollments, reseller microsite systems. We see a content management system as a critical need in all of these initiatives and the benefits of managing web content on these web properties as something that directly impacts marketing.

It's marketing that is tasked with building brand awareness and driving lead generation--and content management is what lets them quickly and easily drive personalized content to their customers, launch new email campaigns with dedicated landing pages, and promote and protect their brand online. That's one of the primary reasons why we were so focused on building an administrative interface within iAPPS that is as user friendly as possible. 

FCM: How important is it for marketing to be able to build websites on the fly using a CMS?

BZ: Business moves at an incredibly fast pace these days and when it comes to maintaining that competitive edge, marketers must be able to create new content and sometimes launch whole websites or co-branded microsites on the fly. Adding and modifying campaigns, launching a new product, adding a new customer with personalized content needs--there are numerous reasons a marketer would want to create sites on the fly. We find that these situations typically require the need to deliver precisely targeted, persuasive content. These targeted sites can speak directly to the intended audience because they provide content that is compelling to them, driving engagement, conversion and ROI.

And as important as it is to be able to quickly and easily build a website on the fly, being able to do it in a way that does not sacrifice the brand is extremely important as well--a strong content management system like iAPPS can facilitate that. Conversely, when marketers are not empowered with the ability to quickly launch a site and have to rely on IT resources, they often encounter publishing bottlenecks that waste significant amounts of time, money and opportunity.

FCM: What role should analytics play in this process and can your product work with other analytics packages besides your own?

BZ: The role of analytics in web content management is not just to report on history and provide precise understanding of user behavior, but more importantly, to apply that intelligence to content development and delivery--thereby driving desired behavior. That last part is where external analytics falls down. All analytics tools, external or natively integrated, report on site visitor interaction for events that have occurred in the past. Natively integrated analytics packages, like that in iAPPS, can take it to the next logical level--providing insight into how to apply that analytical data to site content presentation and ultimately give you a method to take action on that insight. For example, iAPPS Analytics can not only provide the analytical data for an SEO keyword campaign with reporting on conversions and bounce rates, but can then intuitively link these two metrics and with a recommendation engine-like feature, offering suggestions on changes that could improve that overall bounce rate. 

While iAPPS Content Manager will work with other analytics packages, those packages are unable to provide the recommendation capabilities of the deeply integrated iAPPS Analytics. External analytics solutions report but can't support our view of the primary goal of web analytics--providing actionable information to help drive smarter content decisions.

FCM: What role does social media have in web content management, especially from the marketing perspective?

BZ: Social media has definitely become an important tool for marketers. At the most basic level, a dedicated blog offers the opportunity to decentralize the creation of lots of fresh, search-optimized, subject matter expert content. Social outposts like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and SlideShare, to name just a few, can help drive awareness and bring in site visitors. And though the science of social networking is far from established fact, and a lot of companies are engaging in it without having a clear strategy and vision, there is no doubt that we are in the infancy--or at least the adolescent years--of something big that is going to continue to drive innovation and steer much of the ongoing trends and development in interactive technology.

Therefore it is imperative that web content management systems be able to seamlessly take advantage of social media outlets. Depending on a company's business goals, for example, content sharing and community can be the key to deeper penetration. A web CMS can work well in the social media space to help push these companies to the forefront through sharing and community features. For example, iAPPS Content Manager can leverage the APIs of sharing tools to push content through sharing/bookmarking widgets like ShareThis or AddToAny. And from the community perspective, iAPPS’ integration of features like blogs, commenting, product ratings, and user profiles can help businesses interact on a more personal level with their users.

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