In this age of analytics, marketers are data detectives. A/B testing can help resolve many of their quandaries related to online marketing.

But, first, what is A/B testing? It is a process in which you choose the best-performing version of a webpage, by randomly displaying different versions of your site to visitors and assessing the performance of each variant against a desired metric (such as clicks or sign-ups). You can test by tweaking one page element (such as headline, call to action, or image) at a time, or you can test changes to several page elements all at once (the latter is referred to as "multivariate testing"). Thus, when you use A/B testing, you are not flying blind. You're letting data drive your design choices and decisions. Think of A/B testing as "the scientific method meeting online marketing."

Not just for webpages, A/B testing use cases span email campaigns, banner ads, mobile apps, and other marketing scenarios in which even a small increase in conversion rate significantly moves the needle on business outcomes. 

Strictly speaking, A/B testing techniques are not new. However, until a few years ago, the complexity of implementation meant that only companies with large teams of marketing analysts, data scientists, and developers were able to effectively use them in practice.

Read More.

Nicastro: How do you define digital experience ?

Byrne: To me it's a mindset. It means you start with the screen and work backwards, rather than starting with your IT systems and looking forward. It puts the needs of the constituent — customer, prospect, employee, whatever — first and foremost. This remains a somewhat radical idea, by the way.

Nicastro: You emphasize the need to select the right DX technologies. What technologies do you mean by that?

Byrne: This is a great question and unlikely to be sorted out soon. At Real Story Group we see it as a confluence of core informational and experiential platforms centered around digital and media asset management, web content and experience management, social engagement and marketing automation. It also includes a range of upstream and downstream systems, like online video platforms (OVPs), e-commerce, customer relationship management and more.

Nicastro: What tips can you share about selecting DX technology?

Byrne: The most important one: take an empirical, test-based approach that revolves around hands-on education and vetting.

Read the full article here.

Let’s tweak the classic 4Ps of Marketing: Purpose, Product, Process and Promotion. These 4Ps are content marketing’s critical success factors.

Purpose: What purpose does your content serve? What customer need does it speak to? It's easy to forget these first principles in the clamor to create content. But spray and pray seldom works. Stay laser-focused. A clearly defined purpose helps you measure performance, course-correct when you are drifting and aligns content marketing with the overall marketing KPIs.

Product: You can pick any two: Quality. Quantity. Yes, both of them. And circa 2015, your content portfolio should go beyond blogs and white papers. It should also include e-books, FAQs, slide decks, case examples, infographics, pop quizzes, ROI estimators, images and videos.

Process: No one said it’s going to be easy. That’s where process discipline comes in. Define your content calendar, identify experts dispersed across the organization (memo to marketing: don’t fly solo here), cajole them to tell their stories and stick to the plan. Be prepared for a marathon. This is no sprint.

Promotion: This is the toughest part. It is really, really noisy out there. Don’t budget just for content production but allocate enough resources for content promotion and distribution. Experiment with different channels to see what works best for your industry. Run campaigns and reel in audiences with progressive depth — bite, snack, meal.

To conclude: Go on and crack the 4P code. Content marketing can be your marketing mix element with the maximum leverage.

Read the full article here.

Website localization isn't for everyone, but it can help enterprises bridge geographical barriers and cope with multilingual markets.

Did you know according to a 2014 industry survey by The Real Story Group, DAM implementations are thought to be successful only 50% of the time? However a working DAM implementation will save you hours and hours of wasted time and greatly improve your work processes.

Here are a few pointers outlined by industry experts to improve your odds.

1. Examine your workflow and see where the pain points are.

2. Develop a metadata strategy if you don't already have one.

3. Add the metadata.

4. Create training.

Read More.

But tool immaturity remains a major obstacle, said Real Story Group Analyst Kashyap Kompella. Given the sheer volume of Web traffic and social conversation, predictive social analytics requires some degree of automation, which in turn requires developing algorithms that can reliably interpret sentiment and help draw correlations between key data points. Sentiment analysis tools are being piloted to help make those connections, but Kompella said that technology is accurate only 50% to 70% of the time.

"If you are going to make big changes based on sentiment, you would want the accuracy to be higher than it currently is," he said. "Most of the tools demo well, because they're using very clean data sets, but when you meet messy, real-world data -- which is complex, multilingual and with all sorts of new patterns that keep coming up -- that breaks down." Read More.

It is almost a truism that marketing has become highly technology-intensive. Even while IT spending in other categories remains flat or has declined, the marketing function's spending on technology has held up--even in the recessionary environment.

A nearly ubiquitous component of any marketing technology portfolio is email marketing. In fact, there is a high probability your company is already using some form of it, even though you might not be aware of it.

A related component is marketing automation. Customers often talk of these in the same breath. In fact, some would argue that marketing automation is what email marketing wants to be. In other words, marketing automation is an evolution of email marketing. In reality, it is an adjacent-but comparable-set of tools.

In this article, we will look at this distinction in some detail and also summarize what marketers should know when evaluating these technologies. Read More.

...to take the example of Salesforce, both Radian6 and Buddy Media provide features for social media analytics. Radian6 is a general-purpose social media monitoring and intelligence tool and provides broad capabilities for social media analytics. Buddy Media, on the other hand, provides capabilities for monitoring your own social presence, like your Facebook page, Twitter account and so forth. The difference lies in focus; Radian6 is for broad social media, while Buddy Media is for your own specific social pages. Are those two different people in your enterprise?

This is just one example. With digital marketing suites from Oracle, Adobe, IBM and others, your team may also need to master multiple products—many of which do very similar things—to get the most benefit. You'll find this brings extra overhead to your processes, when you have to not only train people how to use different products but then also educate them on the often subtle differences of doing similar tasks from different places. Read More.

So where market performance falls, acquisition interest increases as potential suitors look to the chance of making a quick buck. A recent report by analyst firm RealStory looked at the chances of a Jive takeover. Real Story Group looked at both Jive in isolation (what does Jive’s tanking mean for current, and future, Jive customers) and the market in general (is Jive the “canary in the coalmine” that indicates a systemic problem in the enterprise collaboration software market?).

The report not only looks at the market implications, but takes a look at potential suitors for Jive. RealStory applied its Suitorbility analysis to come up with a quadrant assessing motivation to acquire with the likely impact on customers. The bottom line being that RealStory believes OpenText or Oracle are the most attracted to Jive while customers would do best from a Tibco or SAP deal. It’s a perfect example of a disconnect between vendor M&A appetite and what is the right thing for the customers. Real Story Group notes that existing Jive customers are largely satisfied with the product, and a takeover wouldn’t serve their needs well.

On to the findings of the report. Real Story Group sees two possible directions for Jive: firstly that it will dramatically reduce expenses in order to become a profit-orientated “value” play in equity markets or secondly that it will be acquired. More broadly though, Real Story Group reflects upon the fact that enterprises looking to avoid or complement SharePoint in this marketplace still face a highly fragmented set of alternatives, and should prepare to pursue multi-vendor strategies. RealStory notes that:

Concurrently, enterprise demand for “complements” to SharePoint is unlikely to abate, especially as Microsoft narrows SharePoint’s remit in the cloud. Moreover, Yammer is not a plausible alternative to Jive; Yammer is more of a single feature (activity stream) than a sort of elaborated social application — applications on which Jive’s customers depend. The challenge here for Jive is that its rich set of services probably appeals to a finite set of (very large) customers whose tolerance for continual upselling is limited. Therefore this scenario seems less plausible, even if the company succeeds at reducing its cost base aggressively.

After a period of relentless hype, clarity is emerging on use cases for Big Data, and the toolsets are also showing signs of maturity. Digital media publishers may have been slow to join the Big Data party, but it is not too late. This article provides a quick overview of the Big Data tools for publishers, and the focus here is not on internal business intelligence use cases, but on the content-creation side of the business.

Publishers care about two main stakeholders-readers and advertisers. In catering to them, three factors are paramount:

1. What content to create
2. How to personalize the content for the reader 
3. How to effectively monetize the generated traffic

Let's look at the Big Data tools and techniques available to address each one of these issues. Read More.

Enterprise social network vendor Yammer was a large and fast-growing player when Microsoft acquired it in late 2012, and the service has continued to expand still further under Redmond’s umbrella. Yammer boasts users in more than 150 countries, and the interface is localized into more than 20 languages.

At its core, Yammer is a microblogging service for employees to provide short status updates. Whereas Twitter asks, “What’s happening?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”

Over the years, Yammer’s functional services have expanded a bit to include the ability to express praise for co-workers, create polls, share documents and provision smaller discussion groups. In practice, however, some of those supplementary services aren’t as rich or well-integrated into SharePoint as you might find in competing products.

And you can find a lot of competing products: from collaboration suites that offer tightly integrated social networking services to supplemental “social layer” offerings that compete directly with Yammer. For more details, see Real Story Group’s vendor list.

Savvy SharePoint licensees, therefore, ask themselves: Is Yammer truly the best social layer for my enterprise? Read More.

Theresa Regli, Principal Analyst and Managing Partner at the Real Story Group, will be giving a presentation on mobile platforms for business at Interop.

Theresa said: “Facilitating a mobile digital workplace for employees continues to be big priority for CIOs and HR teams and in the last couple of years, a huge amount of progress has been made in this area.

“However, while the technology now exists to build interactive business apps very quickly and tailor them to different types of devices, as yet, many firms don’t have a strategy for it.

“In future, the focus in terms of mobile digital workplace will continue to be the use of web-based technologies to facilitate document access. One area where we are likely to see the digital workplace being ‘appified’ is in sales, which will continue to make it easier for sales teams to track leads and communicate leads. We also anticipate the growing use of ‘phablets’ (phone and tablet hybrid devices) to carry out workflow-oriented tasks such as sharing, editing and approving documents.” Read More.

Real Story Group analyst Theresa Regli described DAM as a highly specialized set of tools that are designed for specific tasks. While some vendors offer larger suites of functionality, she said that's often a case of licensing or purchasing separate technology and incorporating them into a common interface.

"I recently looked at a proposal from a large DAM vendor that wanted to sell 12 additional components with their core DAM," she said. "Of those 12 additional components, 11 were actually different products.

"Some of the bigger DAM vendors try to incorporate that into the whole user interface so it's one experience, but often that's kind of clunky, because you're really using something from another tool," she added, at another point. Read More.

Some DAMs are dabbling in Marketing Automation and Social Media Engagement technologies or are building partnerships and integrations with such software. Theresa Regli in her workshop on digital marketing likened marketing to a cocktail that only works when the right ingredients are correctly mixed together. You don’t get a sublime cocktail if the correct constituents aren’t mixed together using the right method without the correct measurement of the contributing parts, i.e. you can’t buy a one-size-fits-all marketing tool, you need multiple software working together in the right way in order to get a ‘tasty’ end product:

Social Media Monitoring offers a way of tracking the impact of social media through analysis of keywords related to particular topics / campaigns. Simpler platforms provide you with the raw information for analysis, whilst better ones carry out sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis uses basic algorithms that not only look for keywords but also deduce the sentiment of the words used, you can effectively see who ‘likes’ or ‘dislikes’ the subject of your search. Companies are using this technology to not only measure the success of a certain product, campaign or project, but also measure the success of their competitors. Read More.

Tony Byrne, founder of the Real Story Group, an independent technology analyst firm out of Silver Spring, Md., said he hasn't seen a model like HubSpot's partner loan program.

"But it makes sense," he told CMSWire. "Agencies are increasingly influencing — and sometimes running — client digital marketing strategies, and HubSpot will want to empower its closest partners. At the same time, marketing technology partnerships can be fickle — it's not like SharePoint where an integrator locks into only one supplier — so if I were HubSpot I wouldn't bank on 100 percent loyalty.  And as a customer, I wouldn't pick HubSpot just because my agency told me to do so."

Byrne added HubSpot sits is on a large pile of investor cash — Shah reminded partners of this Tuesday — and they "need to find creative ways to convert that cash into sales growth. This is just one more way of expanding your downstream sales capacity." Read More.

Different stories, then, but are their commonalities of approach in selecting and developing a DAM system? A persuasive affirmative answer was offered by Jarrod Gingras, analyst and managing director at Real Story Group, a rigorously vendor-independent technology evaluation firm. Gingras drew a convincing contrast between the traditional approach to choosing technologies like DAM--from "blind love" to assembling stacks of informational binders, from believing in the "horse race" (one solution must be best) to ending up with a "family car" solution like SharePoint, because it's in the garage already. I asked Gingras how many companies still went the traditional route: "About fifty percent." Read More.

In a 2012 article advocating for the use of the DAM Maturity Model, Real Story Group analyst Apoorv Durga stated:

“Projects continue to fail, even though IT technologies and processes are much more mature now than they were only a few years ago…. [reasons for failure] include: absence of a solid business case that justifies a DAM implementation; wrong product/tool selection; not allocating enough budget; business processes not addressed; lack of user training and education; lack of top management commitment and sponsorship; lack of stakeholder participation. It is often found that users assume technology will solve all their problems. But as can be seen from the indicative list above, tool selection is just one of [the] considerations” Read the full article here.

To begin putting cloud file sharing solutions in context, Apoorv Durga, research director at Real Story Group, says cloud file sharing and sync (CFSS) services are a set of services that provides features for “file sharing, sync, and lightweight collaboration using a cloud-centric deployment model.”

Durga says CFSS services are part of the broader enterprise content management (ECM) marketplace and, although they have differing offerings, there tends to be considerable overlap between ECM and CFSS vendors. “The reason for this overlap is that CFSS vendors have started to build traditional document management (DM) capabilities—such as version control—while ECM and DM vendors have built or acquired cloud-based file sharing, sync, and lightweight collaboration services.”

Durga says what’s important to know about these solutions is that ECM/DM vendors are best suited for “advanced and complex scenarios,” whereas standalone CFSS tools are better for simpler scenarios in which case ease of use is preferred. Read More.

The gap between potential and reality was a factor when DAM software users rated their overall customer satisfaction as "mediocre" to "middling" in a recent Real Story Group industry survey.

Real Story Group analyst Theresa Regli advised companies to keep it simple and to target specific problems when shopping for DAM software.

How are companies using DAM software? A photo library or central photo archive are the most common uses, when companies need a central place to store and retrieve photos, logo images and things like that. Read More.

The Internet of Things Explained

"Billions of devices" and "trillions of dollars" are often uttered in the same breath as the "Internet of Things." It's important to get this straight: The IoT is not a single application, platform, or even industry.

The IoT is a concept that refers to wirelessly connecting mobile and remote devices/equipment to the internet (or corporate intranets) using low-cost sensors. The main motivation (and hope) to connect everything to the internet is to enhance existing products and services.

Sometimes, machine-to-machine (M2M) is used interchangeably with IoT. Broadly speaking, they are similar. M2M (or industrial internet) is the term used in the context of B2B or industrial applications.

Strictly speaking, the IoT is not entirely new-you can think of it as the internet expanding from being a network of computers to being a network of both computers and things. What's new are the sensors-tiny sensors embedded in devices that can gather almost any kind of data about their surrounding environment (temperature, light, sound, time, movement, speed, distance, and more).

Read more about IoT Applications, Challenges, and Enterprise Implications

Conclusion

The adoption of the IoT will happen in waves, and the pace will vary from industry to industry. The impact of the IoT will be felt across marketing, operations, the supply chain, customer service, and its great enabler, IT. There will be stumbles along the way (e.g., the retrenchment of Google Glass in 2015), but there will be successes as well (e.g., Nest thermostats). To position your business for IoT success, pick relevant use cases, use an iterative implementation approach, and build on your existing digital enterprise skills.