Every few years marketers coin a new phrase that starts to stick. The next thing you know you're throwing the phrase around like an old dodgeball (the old kind that was made of hard rubber and really hurt when it smacked you in the face). If you know the phrase, it doesn't land hard, but if you don't, you look a little silly nodding your head like you understand while your brain tries to decode it. Today's phrase is "Web Engagement Management."

In a nutshell, if web content management was Barry Bonds before "supplements," web engagement management is Barry Bonds after. Web engagement management (WEM) has web content management at its core but extends on that core by adding measurement and personalization. It also ties in social media, lead generation, and testing best practices. CMS Wire has a nice article about it: The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management. What does this all mean? It means your job as a marketer is about to get harder and more confusing... at first, anyway.

WEM is about observiing, measuring, and responding to your website visitors' behaviors. It is about knowing them and targeting content that is highly relevant and gets them to convert more often. But that's fairly standard stuff when it comes to website marketing. We've been doing that a long time, so what's different? WEM, as a tool, brings together previously disparate technologies to capture and manage the distribution of leads, personalizes the visitor experience by pulling external profile data, and manages the new two-way, three-way, or X-way conversations from outside social channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc).

This is where website marketing has always been difficult. Plugging into external systems is expensive, difficult, and often takes a great deal of time to build. In addition, having the broad vision and understanding of how all these puzzle pieces fit together is not typically in the standard marketer's toolbox. The great direct marketing folks (whether snail mail or email) get it and don't have much trouble making these connections. Those who have more focused or single channel roles, though, will have a harder time seeing this large marketing maze in their minds. So, there is a lot of learning to do.

The bad news is that web content management toolsets who claim to be evolving into web engagement management don't make it easy... yet. There are tools available that offer these types of integrations but they are typicallly reserved for the big guys with deep pockets and they are still separate tools. If you are one of these big guys, then good for you. For the rest of us, we'll probably just need to wait a bit longer until the tools have caught up with the need or jump in, get your feet wet, and start learning now.

The goal to all web content management software companies, inclluding Marketpath, is to build web engagement management into the core of their systems and to simplify the difficulties of execution. It willl take a few years before all the kinks are worked out and the systems operate in a standard simplistic fashion. But if you wait until then, you will very likely be leaving money on the table. Get started now and work with the tools available. Your early adoption now will mean experience and better decision making later when all the other marketers are just getting started.

Over the next few weeks, everyone that uses Google will begin to see its new "+1" feature showing up in search results and across the web.  This new feature can be thought of as the Facebook "Like" button, as it is simply a recommendation for whatever type of content the +1 icon is attached to.  Once activated, the button will change colors, letting you know that you have "+1'd" the article, ad, webpage, image, or video (and on and on).  If one of your friends or contacts happens to come across that particular piece of content that you "+1'd", they will see your name as someone who recommends that information.  Each time you "+1" something, you're basically leaving your mark to all that follow that you trust this piece of content, and that it is worth checking out.  It's a much more passive way to recommend something to your network than sending an email, or a tweet, or posting on Facebook.

We've seen Google dip its toes into the "social pool" before, often times with failed results.  Google Buzz, which was launched last year, didn't really ever gain traction compared to Facebook, Twitter, and 4Square - all of which it was trying to compete with or replace.  Google Wave was another foray into the social collaboration world that crashed and burned.  On the other hand, the new +1 feature might have some added benefit in the search engine optimization world, which would make it a very enticing new avenue to pursue.  It is far too early to tell, however, how Google will utilize these "+1's" in its algorithm, but I would fully expect Google to factor the data in at some point.  There is already plenty of speculation out there about what Google has up its sleeve, like in this article from CMS Wire, or this one from Search Engine Land.

With so much attention being given to social media these days, it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in the corporate marketing world.  Will we soon see TV ads ending with "Like us on Facebook AND +1 us on Google?" Will the social media experts out there begin to measure how many "+1's" you have and try to assign a monetary value to it?  Or, will this be another failed attempt at seamlessly bridging the gap between social media and search?

I attended the Techpoint Innovation Summit '09 this week and listened to a thought provoking speech by Harvard Business School Professor and bestselling author Clayton Christensen.  Professor Christensen, author of "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "The Innovators Solution" spoke on the topic of disruptive innovation and described a very interesting approach to thinking about product improvement and innovation.  You can view a portion of a speech in which the professor describes hiring a milkshake to do a job.

As I listened to Professor Christensen talk about milkshakes, I got hungry and also starting thinking about Marketpath, the company I recently joined, and how innovative an organization it is.  Sitting there, I quickly came up with the following list of Marketpath innovations:

• Marketpath introduced one of the first Software as a Service (SaaS) Web Content Management offerings.
• Marketpath launched one of the first Software as a Service (Saas) products in the State of Indiana.
• Marketpath introduced SEO friendly tools (including URL re-writing) into our CMS in 2007, allowing non-technical users to optimize natural search results and site traffic.
• Marketpath Storefront was launched in 2008, integrating our ecommerce platform with our Content Management product to bring ease of use and SEO tools to the world of on-line selling.
• Marketpath integrated Blogging Software into our Web Content Management System (WCMS) in 2008 to improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and increase usability.

All of the innovations listed above, and many others from Marketpath, were designed to allow non-technical marketers to successfully and easily run their interactive marketing programs.  In the future, look for more innovations from Marketpath that matter to our customers, but disrupt our competition and industry. 

Here's to innovation, disruption, and milkshakes!

I just read a blog post on CMSwire that outlined a few of the trends that are going to really drive content management in 2009.  Two of these three trends were about Web 2.0 integration and e-commerce integration and how each piece will become an extremely important part of each and every website over the next year.  Almost every content management system out there today can help someone effectively manage landing pages, text, pictures, and menu structure (to name a few things), but not every one can help with the two things mentioned above. 

Having your website, blog, and shopping cart all managed by the same system helps keep things organized and streamlined.  Managing products, content, blog posts and comments all from the same interface can help you and your staff save time and money.  It is all possible with the right, easy CMS.  Be ahead of the curve in 2009, be a trend setter.  Make your website work for you.