Off- and Online

There has been a persistent myth in the back of our minds for the past two decades — the myth of increasing interactivity, and now “social” interaction. Early adopters fuel the idea that since people are social animals, they will want to constantly share everything they’re doing and thinking — often, while simultaneously doing something else. But what if most of us are, in fact, passive and somewhat introverted? What if the 99% remain silent? Continue reading “Getting 99% more traffic”

One of the most annoying things in digital and online, something I keep hearing, is people going “that’s too technical for me,” usually about something fairly trivial. I don’t consider myself to be a technical person, but in this space, tech comes with the territory. There’s no getting around it. Continue reading ““This online stuff is too technical for me””

Rules of thumb can be dangerous — because of the inherent broad generalizations. But they can also be quite useful, especially if they highlight something that may be unpleasant to hear, but shouldn’t be ignored. Continue reading “Your CMS will be 7 times as expensive as you think”

I’ve said this before, in various ways. But sometimes, the simple analogies seem to work the best: if you think of SharePoint, think of it as a Swiss Army Knife.

That sounds great, doesn’t it? It’s like the multi-tool of content technologies. Imagine a major vendor and integrators turning up at dinner to explain how great their Swiss Army Knife is for any purpose, and yes, it’s excellent to carve your food with, too. Why go with just a knife, if you can have a whole range of additional functionality in one system? Continue reading “SharePoint is a Swiss Army Knife”

Perhaps you’re thinking about adding some “2.0” to your site or intranet, to obtain that great user generated content (UGC) — but where do you start?

You start with commenting, of course. No blog would be a real blog without it. And most kinds of social & collaboration software wouldn’t be considered very social (or collaborative) without the option to comment on content, either. And the best thing about commenting: how hard can it be, really? Continue reading “UGC, 2.0, and Commenting Services”

What, your system vendor doesn’t have an app store yet? Apple has popularized the concept, and most phone platforms now have something similar: Google’s Android Market and Nokia’s Ovi Store come to mind. So now everyone has to have one, not just devices, but enterprise software as well. Continue reading “App Store? There’s an App for that”

It’s “Creating Headlines 101” — if you want to make an impact, you say “X is dead,” or at least ask rhetorically, “is Y an X killer?” This comes from a longstanding tradition. Most recently, Wired Magazine managed to reach the zenith with the article “The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet.” Even though that’s been discussed to death on the web (dead itself), allow me to spoof their title one last time. Just to make an entirely different point: whereas the mobile web is alive and kicking — it’s becoming nearly impossible to create mobile apps. Continue reading “Mobile Apps are Dead. Long Live the Mobile Web”

I tend use cars as a metaphor to describe the differences among software products. Even in internal discussions among our team of analysts. Which is how this came up last week: I described a particular system as a Toyota compared to another vendor’s Ferrari, “never mind the fact that Ferraris are expensive and hard to keep running, they’re still in a different league.” To which one of my colleagues said, “Yes, but you’d still buy one.” Continue reading “Do you really want a Ferrari?”

Last week, I presented at Mobile Mojo — an event about Mobile & Social. It was an interesting gathering, with a lot of buzz. One of the highlights was certainly Peter Hinssen’s excellent keynote about “The New Normal” — “a concept that states we are now halfway through the digital revolution.”

His last slide argued that the old adage “content is king” is no longer true — instead, “contact is king.” That statement made a lot of sense at this conference, and was reiterated somewhat less eloquently by other attendees. If the event’s all about mobile and social, why should there still be such a focus on content management? Continue reading “Content is still King”

I sometimes warn that a vendor’s content management system is well suited to “simple” scenarios, but not necessarily a good fit for “more complex” cases. That’s a bit problematic: “simple” and “complex” are very subjective. So let me elaborate. Continue reading “Do you need a simple or a complex CMS?”