Note to CEOs & Publishers: Choosing a CMS

I've been building and buying CMS' since 1995 -- and have seen the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. The number one reason people won't work with technology is because it is too difficult to use. They have their day jobs -- and interpreting the screens and workflow that are foreign to them ... well, people just won't do it. And they don't. And the technology is a big fat expensive failure.

The problem with a CMS is that CEOs don't understand that they are not merely a "getting-stuff-onto-the-web tool." The "S" in CMS stands for System -- not product. That system is supposed to unite the world of creating, collaborating, collecting and channeling content. The mentality that it is merely something that gets content onto the web is the reason so many sites are, well, anemic. And, frankly, the reason so many balance sheets are sickly. Traffic doesn't stick (nor return) to sites that don't anticipate readers needs.

Instead of being a seamless solution into the entire workflow, the CMS tends to be an ad hoc interruption into an already stressful day. It would be like having two homes, and having to carry everything you need from one home to the next. Pretty soon you buy duplicates of everything just to keep yourself sane. Your wallet is lighter, right? Or, you start focusing on one abode more than the other. Now the other is lacking. See how this doesn't work out?

It's also the reason why the pure-plays, the companies that are solely online are driving the innovations in the industry. They have created, from scratch, an entire digital content supply chain, without having to worry about the turf wars surrounding the various bastions in the traditional world. No, they have built a digital infrastructure that allows the ebb, flow and sharing of digital content. They don't necessarily have it all figured out -- but they aren't being anchored by a century old legacy system.

The challenge for CEOs who grew up on the traditional business side, is that they never worked the "Fry Station." In McDonalds, to move up the management ladder, a person has to work every role: cashier, fry station and cook the burgers. That notion of working your way up through every department holds true in most industries. That is what made you a great CEO. You worked the Fry Station.

However, for many, digital entered into our professional lives at the mid or late point of our careers. We are managing -- and now relying on something -- we just don't understand. And as such, we rely on others to guide us. That may or may not be a good move. So here are my guidelines for purchasing a CMS:

1. Work the Fry Station. Ignorance is no excuse for not obeying the law -- and its no excuse for managing your company. You can start out by creating a blog if you are too embarrassed to ask an underling to show you how to work the current CMS. But roll up your sleeves and get going. Create a post. Create it in Word and try to paste it into your blog. Try and update from your Blackberry. Create some tags. Change your mind. This little lesson will be priceless.
   
2. Trust ... but Verify. You hired a CTO to manage -- but does he or she have an agenda? CTOs are human too. Some like to build things so that they can have a bigger development staff. You have to ask yourself -- which business are you in, the software development business -- or not. Because let me tell you, building and maintaining a CMS is a fulltime job. As soon as it is built, it is obsolete and needs to be improved upon. Is that the expertise you really want to invest and cultivate?
3. Examine the Workflow. As I said before, the word CMS is a real misnomer, since it suggests a single product, instead of systemic approach to the 4Cs: creating, collaborating, collecting and channeling content. Look at each of these steps in the supply chain, and develop a system that works across the entire company. If you update here -- will it update there (automatically) -- or does someone have to remember to "move it to the other house."
   
4. Align CMS with Business Goals. In case I haven't been clear, a true CMS should not merely shovel stuff onto the web. List what you want to accomplish business wise: (hints: optimize operations, lower production costs, monetize assets) and align your system to your goals. This means taking a very hard look at Point 3 above.
5. Align CMS with Department Needs. A good CMS should touch EVERY department in your company, and across silos. Editorial will be an obvious benefactor of the 4Cs, as research, creation, collaboration and production should be seamless and make their lives easier. But Marketing should find that the CMS will be search engine friendly and allow ease in email marketing. Sales should notice that it is now easy to create new products and get them to market faster. IT should find that it is no longer dinged for every change that needs to happen on the web. Accounting should see operations cost decline and revenues increase.
6. Cut Your Losses. I get it. You spent a ton of money on your current system, but it's not answering your business needs. Go back to the two home metaphor: you can't get your money back, but you can stop spending resources on duplications. As my father loves to say, a loss today is cheaper than one tomorrow.
   
7. Build for the Future. You have no idea what the next great application will be. Who would have thought Twitter would take off? Or that so many viewers would flock to the CNN/Facebook collaboration during the inauguration. A system that does not allow "hooks" into new technologies -- or doesn't allow it without 9 months of labor -- just will not pass muster in a world where nimble is number 1.

But the biggest takeaway on all this is you can't manage what you don't know; you have to work the Fry Station. Who knows, you might enjoy it!

Time to Face the Music

I'm taking a break from writing on the fate of print for a while, because frankly, I've run out of words to describe "dismal, bleak, futile." Best give poor Thesaurus -- and publishers -- a break. (Mein Gott! With what their futures hold we best just pass out razor blades to the poor blokes and let them be done. Ooh, very bad joke: What's black and white and red all over ...)

In any event, let's focus on another victim of this century's Creative Destruction. That was the incongruous concept made popular by 20th Century Economist Joseph Schumpeter who trumpeted that innovation is the force that sustains long-term economic growth. The downside, he admitted, is that some established companies that enjoyed some degree of monopoly power might find their values … diminished.

The Internet surely would have been Schumpeter’s idea of a Creative Destructor, as it – and its offspring of innovations have impacted every conceivable sector: retail, music, media and business information, to name but a few. All of these industries have found that shifting from a physical world (CDs, stores and print products) to a digital one has been made so much more complicated by the likes of Google, MSN, Yahoo and user-generated sites like YouTube, P2P downloading, FaceBook and Flickr. Listen to music executives bemoan the sharing of music – and you might forget that the industry has grown to $130B!

The challenge has been, ahem, to the middle men. The Internet formed a conduit between the creator of music and the consumers bypassing the Big Four Labels. Their Sturm und Drang regarding 21st Century musical rationalism would be amusing and if not for the draconian measures they have taken to ensure their monopoly. In case you missed it, what with the tanking of the newspaper industry, the Titanic voyage of the finanical industry, and the intense pressure on all of us to jumpstart the economy by doing massive holiday shopping, the RIAA decided, last month, to end its reign of terror on 13-year olds. Yes, it has decided that it would partner with the ISPs to go after music pirates. More on that when I parse through the legal language.

In the meantime, what does this mean to the music industry? Well, probably that some of the overpaid suits at the Big Four will now be let go, as less self-important people are needed to support the dying medium of CDs, which really, if you think about it is nothing more than a container. This unbundling of content, selling the parts for less than the whole, but where the sum of them exceeds it, is playing quite favorably with kids. Decontainerizing and unbundling content has meant new life for old tunes. Because for all the hand-wringing the music industry has never been healthier!

Yes, yes, sales of CDs are down -- but that doesn't mean interest in music is down. The problem is, the measurement metric has become obsolete. It would be as if we measured interest in transportation by the number of people who owned horses. The demand is, as in print, to put the content into a mutable format so that it can be available in any container an individual wanted (and to figure out how to charge for that service). Music itself has never been more ubiquitous. From iPods, to ringtones, to the music in online games -- music is vivacissimo!

The numbers are astounding: More than 45 billion downloads (albeit 95 percent illegal, still 45 billion!!). Last year's concert sales actually rose! At a time when the average ticket price was over $65. Too, how else to explain the interest in a 25-year old heavy metal band? AC/DC, which warrants its own channel on Sirius XM Radio, is one of my 10-year old's favorite bands. I know, because my 10-year old flicks to that channel in our car. And it hit me, that Guitar Hero introduced this classic metal band to a whole new generation.

Yes, the inustry is challenged: the measurement metric is obsolete, the business model is evolving, and sartorial executives can network with outplaced bankers. But clearly, the band plays on.

Publisher Push-Back & Other Relationship Tips

Opened up a missive in InfoCommerce's newsletter this morning. Russell Perkins has been warning publishers for some time that they have acted like lemmings in embracing business models that shift the burden of risk from advertisers to publishers. First advertisers insisted they would only pay if people clicked through to the ad site (never mind how hideous or uncompelling the ad creative might be; and then they said, well we'll pay if a bonafide lead generates, to finally, here let me throw you a little spiff for doing all the heavy lifting while Harvey on the phone bank closes the sale.

The pay-per-click model (PPC) was started by a small firm Goto.com which was rolled up into Overture (Yahoo). But the model really came alive when, a year later, Google launched AdWords in 1999. Suddenly bidding for traffic was all the rage. And it is a wonderful model for search engines, but a very risky one for publishers, who are developing sites with meaningful content around which to place ads. The risk to advertisers for this model is nil: spend a few dollars to get traffic to their sites in exchange for potential sales? why the PPC model turned out to be both advertising and the limousine to get buyers to them!

In fact, advertisers were so empowered by this model that they started demanding that the publisher not receive anything unless a sale was made - and within a time period of 30-90 days before the site's cookie expired (or was vacuumed away). I mentioned the PPC conundrum to Jean-Philippe Gauthier when he was Vice President of Gesca Digital the online arm for Quebec's leading business site CyberPresse. He told me how a leading insurance wanted banner ads on a PPC model. Gauthier agreed -- on one condition: that the banner did not name the insurer.

Of course the insurer was upset, because it turns out branding is valuable afterall! This advertiser didn't want to pay for it, but when it was off the table, suddenly there was a change of heart.

Perkins urges Publishers to start pushing back like Gauthier did, and to remind ourselves that if we are hell-bent on doing lead generation, we do so at a substantial increase than mere dollars per lead. Put the burden of risk of doing business back on the advertisers, he chides. Further, he even suggests some sort of monthly subscription fee to be considered for the leads.

That's the approach that we took with Pure Contemporary: to create a lead generation program based on manufacturers getting a little skin in the game by allowing them to create a virtual catalog for a fee. Each page is search engine optimized, and leads are forwarded to the advertiser. We are not unique in doing this, many publishers in the database directory space like Thomasnet and GlobalSpec have branded themselves as marketing resources, not just mere publishers. Yes, it is a bit more of a consultative sell, but that is how we as online information providers add value to the advertiser-publisher relationship.

It really isn't about keeping score as to whom has more risk, it's about creating a win-win. Because frankly, without that, one of you is out of business, and that isn't good for any relationship.