SDL Innovate - what a blast!

This year's SDL Innovate conference was certainly one of the highlights of my career with SDL. What a great event we had (leave a comment if you agree!) with many interesting sessions, partner demos, guest speakers, and more importantly, good networking.

As promised in my previous post, here's a run-through of my short session on Tuesday afternoon about Targeting and your content.

The topic of the session I was involved in was "SDL Tridion Roadmap and Community Panel", with our VP of Products Ian Truscott getting us started by sharing the release plan for 2012, with the highlights being a new Tridion user interface (previously known as SiteEdit) for content editors, Enterprise Content Libraries for external systems integration and a new Tridion release towards the end of the year - more on these topics at a later date sometime soon.

While we were preparing for this session, me & Frank decided that rather than discuss what's coming up in products we should talk about what our current products already do but not all customers are doing:

• Social
• Targeting
• Mobile

Here's what I had to say about Targeting.

We've been targeting (and targeted) for a long time
Ever since humans started trading, targeting has been done by everyone. From the butcher that tries to sell you his "best" meats, to the baker, there has always been an element of targeting, so it is certainly not a surprise that we do it on the web.

Targeting is always about getting something from you
We are always trying to sell something - content you're interested in (increase my views!), a visit to the closest store, a product, a return visit to the site. The objective of targeting is always to convince you of something you may be interested in.

There's many ways to target visitors
Almost everything on the web today involves targeting of some sort. We can always think about good old Amazon.com as the grandfather of targeting, and one of the things about Amazon is that they don't even try to be subtle about it - You bought this before, so you're likely to want this now.

Other sites also target you, but in subtler ways - LinkedIn regularly shows me job ads for jobs with the same Job Title I currently have, and google will show you a map in the search results page if you search for "walmart" or "starbucks" - all of that is targeting.

So, let's take a tour of how Targeting evolved in the past 10 years
10 years ago we could already target visitors (yes, Tridion had it!) based on 2 types of information we could retrieve from you:

• Data you would tells about you on a registration form (Explicit)
• Your click behavior browsing our site (Implicit)

We could do quite a lot of targeting based on this data, but the only data source we had for this behavior was our own website.

Fast forward 5 years to 2007
By 2007 most enterprises had finally sorted out their back end integrations, and we could start merging information from your "real" life and your virtual life. I suddenly knew that you were now at my site, and just had bought 5 cans of beer on one of our supermarkets this afternoon, and that perhaps you were trying to get some more delivered (long live loyalty cards!).

So now my data sources about a visitor were certainly growing - but still mostly confined to my own space.

Targeting in 2012
Now we have SO much information about visitors that the challenge becomes a "data management" challenge rather than an operational one. We (can) have access to so much data - your twitter streams, your facebook profile (and your friends'), your LinkedIn profile, your stack overflow, your blog, and this coupled with Social Intelligence tools can give us such a fine grained view of who you are, where you live, which products you like (and dislike) that the visitor becomes its own marketing segment.

What does it mean to content?
The biggest challenge for content creation teams is that with targeting comes content explosion. We have to start having a LOT more content than we ever did before if we want to cater to all possible variations of a user's preferences, history, Twitter opinions, frequent flier program, job title, etc, and a strong usage of taxonomy for your content is definitely recommended.

Key take away points:

• More data than ever before about your visitors - and this will only increase
• Customers want targeting. They want you to know who they are
• Your content model must evolve from being page-centric to being customer-centric
• Tools help execute - but cannot define your strategy

SDL Tridion Jobs, Part II

Back in 2008 I wrote a post about the growing number of job offers for Tridion in the US. Back in those days, about 18 months after we had opened our office in New York, I was surprised to see that we had as many as 7 active job offers on the Internet for Tridion experts in the US. Before I crossed the pond from Amsterdam I was probably getting an average of a job offer per week, and it (understandingly) took a while for that to pick up in the US since we had absolutely no market share back then.

Boy, have we come a long way...

About 50% of tweets mentioning "tridion" are job offers. Monster.com lists 17 job openings for Tridion developers. Dice lists 14. The Washington Post lists 89. Simply hired 125.

Now play close attention to this graph comparing relative job growth between us and the 2 main competitors we're usually competing against.

Tridion, Fatwire, CQ5 Job Trends

Tridion jobs - Fatwire jobs - Cq5 jobs

Oh yeah, we have come a long way. Let me know if you're searching for a job in a growing software area...

SDL Tridion jobs

When moving to this side of the Atlantic - nearly 16 months ago - one of the clear issues I knew I would face was the lack of "brand value" for SDL Tridion. In Europe I had heard of Tridion years before I even thought of joining the company, and - especially in holland - you could even find the odd friend that though not working directly in IT would have heard of the name.

But in the "land of the free" not such luck. Tri-who? It also gave rise to some interesting misspellings of the name, like Trideon, Tridian (this one has to do with my accent, I'm sure) and the ever present Trillian.

I thought at that time that an interesting way to find out how well we're doing in the market is to just start randomly searching for Tridion Jobs at job sites and Google. Last time I had done this I think I had only found one job offer for a non-European based company (and it was for AIG).

Today I tried again, and here's what I found...

• Senior Internet Business Analyst - Metlife, New York NY
  
• Associate Web Editor - Hanley Wood, Washington D.C.
  
• Technical Writer, Content Manager, Information Architect - Modis
  
• Architecture Engineer - Kaiser Permanente, Oakland CA
  
• Senior Pre-Sales Consultant/Sales Engineer - Percussion Software, Boston MA
  
• Human Resources eCommunications Specialist - Sodexo, MD
• Associate Director, Web Management - AIG, Houston TX
• Web Editor - Elsevier, Morristown

Wow.

Keep in mind that these are the ones for which I could find the company behind the ad, there's a lot out there for recruiting agencies - and of course, our own job ads. But it sure shows that times, they are a-changin'.

Challenging Post

How do you say something you really want THIS much to tell, but can't because it's classified? How do you leave enough hints for people to understand what you really want to say without violating a NDA?

Earlier in my career I would feel tempted to just write down what I wanted with no worries, but nowadays, because I am often on "the other side" of this question, I've learned to respect the IP (Intellectual Property) of others.

Here's my best try. Some of my friends did not understand my move to my current employer, mainly because it "restricts" the product-choice freedom I always defended (and because most of the technology is based on Microsoft stuff).

So, I have to backtrack a bit on this decision and explain:

After the decision to move to the Netherlands was taken, and after it was made clear I would have to change jobs to do it, I looked at the market and decided my future would go through one of the two areas which, for me, have the best outlook: EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) or WCM (Web Content Management). Ideally, a mix of both.

And that's what I found here. I can (and will start soon, I hope) do loads of integration work to enable WCM systems to talk to a company's back-end. And Tridion felt as a good choice because of their market projection in Europe, their proven technical leadership in the domain, and the quite challenging times Tridion is going through now: becoming a BIG player in the WCM domain.

And now, an as-yet-unpublished research paper from a major research group that will be released in the near future will confirm that I took the right decision.

See, I said it. And didn't violate any NDA. ;-)