Building and Optimizing Rich Web Experiences
Leading enterprises strive to achieve higher levels of customer engagement through online channels, and this means they must easily, quickly and cost effectively provide fresh, personal, relevant content anytime, anywhere, on any device, all through a consistent and dynamic end-user experience. Traditional Web content management system (CMS) solutions are no longer sufficient, and a richer and broader range of capabilities that enable Web experience management-managing and optimizing the site visitor experience across the Web, mobile apps, social networks and more—must now be leveraged in this new era of engagement.
The Need for Web Experience Management
Over the last few years, the Internet has undergone a tremendous amount of fundamental change in its landscape—social, personal and mobile.
1. Social—The Web is becoming increasingly more social and much less anonymous. The power of sharing can enhance or destroy brands in seconds.
2. Personal—While the Internet is continuously expanding in terms of ubiquity, at the same time it's becoming much more local and much more personal in terms of user experience.
3. Mobile—The growth of mobile access to the Internet is rapidly expanding to the point where access from tablets and phones will soon exceed that from desktops and laptops.
The very way we communicate with customers is changing, and when fundamental change like this occurs, those who recognize the change and move quickly to adapt will benefit the most.
A New Era of Engagement
Each of these trends reinforces the others, and fuels further adoption and innovation. It is these technologies—and the behaviors and capabilities they foster—that have brought us to a new era, which Forrester calls the "era of engagement."
Driving these trends are people—our friends, leads, customers, critics and fans. This is our audience and the other half of the conversation, and in today's age of engagement, they want to participate and expect us to engage them on their terms—on their schedule, in the context of their location, in their language and optimized for their device. To effectively tackle this challenge of serving a mass audience with limited resources, enterprises require strategy and effective tools to help get the job done.
Web experience management (WEM) provides us with the toolset to take on this otherwise daunting task. The capabilities of WEM allow you to create, manage and deliver dynamic, targeted and consistent content across various online channels including your website, social media, marketing campaign sites, mobile applications and more. In short, it takes a lot more than a traditional Web CMS to meet these new demands.
Key Principles of Web Experience Management
To effectively implement WEM, enterprises must start with their business strategy and goals, which should drive their messaging and engagement strategy, which in turn should drive their content strategy. In other words, the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that businesses face should be considered first and foremost. Too often organizations fail to do this by jumping straight into a technology selection without due consideration of the business drivers.
Around this foundation, we wrap the fundamentals of basic Web content management. It's important to remember that content is still king. Business users and marketers need easy-to-use, yet powerful, content authoring and publishing capabilities. They need rich content models that allow them to create engaging visitor experiences, to easily create new content assets, to quickly find and repurpose existing content, and to preview content and the site visitor experience for all online channels.
Upon this foundation, an effective WEM solution provides a comprehensive collection of capabilities that allow organizations to create, manage and deliver dynamic, targeted and consistent content and visitor experiences across multiple touch points—corporate website, dedicated marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, social media sites and more. While WEM requirements are going to vary from organization to organization, some of the most critical features needed by essentially all enterprises include content targeting and personalization, mobile device support, faceted search and navigation, multi-channel publishing, integrated Web analytics, and campaign management.
Open Architecture for WEM
At Rivet Logic, we believe an open source solution based on Alfresco provides a best-in-class approach to successfully implement a WEM strategy. Alfresco's robust content management platform provides the foundational Web content services, while Crafter Rivet—a complete and comprehensive WEM application that we built on top of Alfresco-provides multi-channel Web experience management through a rich user interface and a high-performance content delivery system.
Crafter Rivet leverages the content management, search, workflow and deployment services of Alfresco's repository to enable authoring, management and publishing of all content. It also provides a comprehensive set of user-friendly yet powerful features for marketers and other content editors that include dashboards, WYSIWYG authoring, real-time in-context preview, workflow, integrated Web analytics and multi-channel publishing, among others.
Through a well-executed WEM strategy, organizations can now deliver their valued content across a variety of channels through one platform, without compromising on the quality or user experience.
Rivet Logic is an award-winning consulting and systems integration firm that helps organizations better engage with customers, improve collaboration and streamline business operations. Through a full suite of solutions for content management, collaboration and community, Rivet Logic enables organizations to fully leverage the power of industry-leading open source software. With deep expertise in technologies such as Alfresco, Liferay, Apache Solr, and MongoDB, Rivet Logic crafts content-rich solutions that power next-generation Web properties, social business applications, and collaborative communities. With offices throughout the USA, Rivet Logic serves clients across a wide range of industries. Rivet Logic-Artisans of Open Source. Visit rivetlogic.com.