Web Content Management is dead but death is just the beginning

Remember the times when people thought that Earth was a centre of the Universe? It was a happy time. People shared hobbies like burning witches or buying membership cards of The Inquisition.

Putting Earth in the centre of the Universe was very natural. I mean if you stand on the Earth everything does revolve around you! And that is, I think, traditional WCM logic. Putting Company in the centre of the Universe where The Visitor can only be… well… the visitor.

Traditional WCM was built to help publish content created in the organization. Most commonly it was used for building and hosting external websites. Then marketing people would update their pages once or twice a year and… that’s it.

WCM from technical perspective was focused on version control, access control, content authoring workflow and other tools that made content… more static.

In today’s Internet reality of real-time web, social networks of hyper-active people that are posting status updates every 3 seconds it’s not good enough. Version control is obsolete – the more real-time interaction becomes, the less we care about revisions. We try to post new content as often as possible and we try to post it… outside of our WebSite! This may sound a bit “Copernicus”, but Earth (in our case the Company) must start to revolve around the Customer – and must embrace the same tools that customers are using to post content to the web.

The reason why we should do it is simple – focusing on updating our website would be as good as screaming those updates in the middle of the woods. I mean – you can always do that if you like – but it’s not very effective.

We try to reach with our content more and more people and that is why we use external blog platforms, we write guest posts, we post to Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social media tools that are out there. But that creates one tiny problem.

If you create a lot of good quality content that can help you sell your products or services and you create it outside of your WebSite – ultimately you end up with… nothing on your website. And here comes the next step in the WCM evolution. Tools that help you create content (product descriptions, company description etc.) and aggregate external one that you’ve created in the social media world. Example of such thinking you can find on flavors.me .

But having content in place doesn’t serve primary purpose of the website – marketing and sales. If company is putting a website they expect that it’ll help generate business, help collaborate with the customers or at least improve product awareness. And here comes the next step – CRM logic embedded into the very front page of the website. So you can easily extract leads, follow-up on them and measure conversion rates from the visitor to paying customer.

So WCM is dead, or at least should be very quickly. And this creates another problem. How should we call that next “CRM+website editing/social media aggregating” thing? I’m sure that someone will come up with the cool name.