I’m just back and caught up with all the follow-ups from the Gartner Portals & Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles, where Hippo was proud to be a participant and exhibitor.

One of the things that struck me most about the conference was how closely aligned Gartner and Hippo are about the future of Web content management and the views I expressed in an earlier somewhat controversial post in Emerce (Dutch). One of the themes that kept coming up in the sessions were how organizations of all sizes are making increased investments in an expanded Web content platform in order to affect sales and customer service. This isn’t new of course. But what is new is how expanded this view is.

It’s not just about Web sites any longer. It’s an integrated Web experience across the Web site, mobile platforms, social, email and all of them across multiple languages. And, most importantly, it’s about delivering content that’s contextually relevant to the user no matter what platform, device or language they use to interact with the business.

In short – and contrary to the way most content management systems operate today – it’s about LOSING control over your web pages – and instead managing content in a way that empowers your audience to access it in any way they want.

Let’s look at it from 5 perspectives:

1. Our Strategy Is Now A Content Strategy – Not A Web Site Strategy
   Consumers now expect our digital content in a contextually relevant way – no matter where, when and what device they access it with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mobile phone, a television a toaster or the bathroom mirror – the consumer now expects content to be available to them whenever and wherever they are. And, businesses are struggling to deliver that content across those channels with their traditional tools. As Endeca revealed in a study conducted earlier this year, businesses have made improving the user experience a priority, but are struggling to solve the technical challenge of which technology will deliver “cohesive user experiences”.

2. Use Context To Deliver Smarter ContentWe now know so much more about the context of a particular request on our Web content. We can know a user’s location, their preferred language, their device and their previous interaction with our content. So, we need to start looking at this context every time we deliver a search result, or our “home page” to that user. How can we start personalizing that content – and delivering a context-aware experience?

3. SEO Is Changing – Long Live Social Relevance
   With the addition of the “+1” - Google has finally recognized the importance of applying social filters on top of search results. This means that organic search and search engine optimization are changing forever. But, beyond what it means to our SEO strategy – it means that we too should be looking at using the social graphs of our users to deliver a more relevant experience. We’ve got to look at our content repository in context with the social graph of our audiences. We have to ask ourselves how can we start to deliver our product catalog, or our online magazine with more relevance to the networks of our audience? Ultimately this will mean greater sales, more page views, and higher loyalty.

4. Can Our Content Platform Help With CRM?
   Context goes beyond just the implicit attributes that bring a visitor to us (e.g. organic search or a banner ad campaign). Context is also “what do we know about this user explicitly” – and namely we should inherently know “is this visitor a previous customer?” Our content management and delivery system needs to integrate with our CRM so that we can begin to use that data to deliver a better experience to that user based on our relationship with them. If they’ve purchased a particular product – hitting them with in-house banner ads for that product makes no sense. It’s wasteful as well as irrelevant. Let’s optimize the customers’ experience based on our relationship with them.

5. Static Web Designs - Let It Go….
   This is a tough one – but we ultimately need to stop trying to guess how people will navigate through our content platforms. If we can empower people and our interfaces to conform to each other – based on their preferences and behavior -- then we will have truly delivered a contextually aware platform. Obviously, this vision is further down the road. But we can ask ourselves today “how easy is it to build and optimize interfaces on our content today?” Can we make our content available through an open and standardized API that allows us (or quite frankly our customers) to assemble interfaces on top of it. Look how Twitter has been able to cultivate an entire ecosystem of applications that sit on top of its content platform. 

   

    We should ask ourselves how we can do something similar.

All of these are areas, I’m proud to say, where Hippo is focused in our product and service development. We really do believe that there’s a new standard for how organizations can empower their audiences to engage with content. It comes from our passion about Open Source and Open Standards. We’ve been empowering our users for more than 10 years.

It was great to see this thinking also coming from the analysts and customers in Los Angeles at the Gartner conference. We’re really excited for the future of Web content.

And, of course we’d like to hear your opinion on it too.