Ian Truscott's Blog

We at SDL are looking forward to the opportunity to participate in Internet Week New York (https://www.internetweekny.com/). 

It’s an event that has run since 2008 as a festival that takes place all over the city, with diverse events in different locations "celebrating NYC's thriving and diverse internet industry and community". 

The result is a critical mass of web-focused events that I’ve heard described in the same breath as SXSW (http://sxsw.com/), presumably without the films, music, but with a firmer focus on web engagement tech and what excites the digital engagement professional. 

However, the folks behind Internet Week New York have an interesting model for choosing the sessions that that will be on their agenda.They open up submission and then let their community vote for who they’d like to see. Calling it Make the Stage, you can read about it here.  (#makethestage on twitter)

Working with our partner Siteworx we have put together two sessions that I’m excited about presenting with them. 

One of our sessions is called “Developers: The Rock Stars of Marketing?” that is inspired by a blog post I wrote, when I was back at Alterian and something I am really looking forward to talking about withTim McLaughlin, President and Founder of Siteworx. You can vote for that session here: http://bit.ly/H8zQQX

Alternatively, we have also proposed a slightly different session titled: “Saving the CMO … Bridging the Gap between What Designers Dream and Technologists Create!” where together with Tim from Siteworx we are going to present: "a roadmap to achieve both big ideas and measurable, provable success by bridging the gap between what designers dream and technologists create". You can vote for that session here: http://bit.ly/HXDLhD

But, we won’t be there without your votes! So please, check out the links and follow the #makethestage Twitter hashtag and see how we get on.  

See you in New York?

At the beginning of this month, I was in a conference room in Santa Clara, at my first SDL Innovate conference.

An annual event where we get together as the SDL group and share with our customers and partners what we have been doing, what we are planning and maybe inspire with some thought provoking presentations from around our broader industry.

One of those thought provoking presentations that really resonated with me was the day two keynote by Mike Walsh - and looking around the engaged faces, affirming nods and occasional murmur of “YES” around the 400+ folks I shared the room with, I wasn't alone. 

As I round out my first year at SDL I have the privilege to be speaking at SDL Innovate this year and in this post, I’d like to share a little bit about what we are going to be talking about next Tuesday (March 6).  

The theme of the whole event is Mastering Global Customer Engagement and during our session we will be addressing how SDL Tridion enables our customers to enage with their customers through providing relevant digital customer experiences, across multiple devices and channels.

The session on Tuesday will blend discussion of our roadmap for 2012 and practical experience of solving needs today with SDL Tridion 2011. I am excited by the format, as we have assembled a panel of SDL Tridion experts to lend their implementation and technical expertise to the discussion and share what our customers can do with our product today.   

We are very fortunate to have a great technical community and through our MVP program we recognize those who offer exceptional contributions to that community.  We are therefore delighted to welcome Chris Summers from Urban Cherry, a 2012 SDL Tridion MVP to the panel.

We will also welcome two of our most valued and knowledgeable SDL WCMS developers; Frank van Puffelen Principal Developer from our Innovation center in Boston and Nuno Linhares, Principal Consultant from our Professional Services team in New York.

Our panel will be completed by Julian Wraith, a Technical Account Manager who has worked with some of our largest international clients, working with them to develop customer engagement solutions.

I will open by discussing our product direction, new products that are scheduled for release and I will then hand over to the panel to dive into key trends and customer engagement requirements we are seeing with our customers. For this session we will be focusing on mobile, content targeting and social and the panel will share some of the best practices and techniques that are helping our customers today. 

I encourage you to follow the hashtag  #SDLInnovate for updates and my fellow panelist @nunolinhares,  @julesdw,  @urbancherry  and @puf.

I look forward to seeing you next week in Santa Clara,

@iantruscott

Yesterday (Monday) it was official, Alterian have become a very welcome part of SDL. This is personally very exciting for me, as I am an Alterian alumnus. But more importantly, it elevates our company’s ability to meet the contemporary needs of our customers; to engage with their customers. 

People use the term ‘game changer’ quite a lot, but on our 20 year anniversary of being founded as Software Documentation Localization (SDL), this is a clear signal of intent to be at the vanguard of what global information management means today. We are continuing on the journey to serve the digital consumer that included the acquisition of Tridion to form our WCM solutions division in 2007.  

Those contemporary information management requirements are described by various acronyms, but I think we are settling on Customer Experience Management (CXM) and this acquisition brings together a family of products that can address those needs. 

In saying that I don’t mean some artificial spreadsheet or graph laid out by an analyst (as much as I respect them) - I mean it responds to real needs I am hearing from our customers today. 

Real people, in large, sophisticated organizations that are looking for how they systemize social engagement, how they reach their customers with a high degree of relevance, across multiple channels and in multiple languages.

Here are my top 3 of things top like about having Alterian in the fold:

1. The combination of language and social. This is really exciting, understanding the sentiment of what is being said out there is the science of social media monitoring and this starts with the language that is being spoken. 

2. Actionable insights. The combination of understanding your audience through observing behavior, social media monitoring and transactions - and then being able to address the audience across multiple channels. It’s a message I carried when I was at Alterian and is even more powerful when combined with componentized, structured content management and language.  

3. Expertise not just technology.  After I left Alterian, they acquired Intrepid with a view to help customers understand social media engagement. This is a great example of recognizing that we don’t just sell technology, but we have to assist customers understand the value and how to shape their strategies, especially in something as relatively new as social. Customers do approach us as trusted advisors and not just about social media, but across the board Alterian brings us closer to the world of the CMO and the challenges they face. 

These are just my quick thoughts, a top three of a list that is sure to be expanded as we bring our products together in 2012.  

Welcome Alterian, I look forward to working with you.. again!

(OK, that might be the fourth thing I like - the people).

Ian Truscott

On Twitter: @iantruscott

To find out more information regarding the acquisition you can check out our dedicated site regarding the deal. Alternatively watch the video of John Hunter and Mark Lancaster discussing the benefits of this acquisition.

Recently Forrester released their latest analysis of the WCM market with the publication of “The Forrester Wave™: Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience, Q3 2011”. 

This wave represents a slight shift from previous reports that were primarily focused on publishing external websites and places more emphasis on engaging the visitor, through social/community functionality, globally over multiple digital channels and wrapped up with a level of orchestration and measurement.

This isn't new territory for the WCM folks at Forrester, it's really an extension of their "Persuasive Content" research that I think started around 2005.  

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about our attendance at the Mulitlingual Web event organized by W3C and I shared my observations through the lens of a content management professional and marketing technologist. I concluded the post, promising to blog again about the presentation I gave. Well here we are, finally!

The objective of my presentation was to bring together the business challenge of translation/localisation with those of engaging an audience over the web.

My primary points were:

• All content is global, once you publish it's out there
• To be relevant, you first have to localize your content
• To hear the needs your audience, you need to understand their language
• We need to create global communities, across language
• Management of content variants for each audience and channel is a complex business 

I then dashed through 20 minutes of slides in 15 and along the way I lost my ability to use a mouse! 

Anyway, the good folks at the event have shared a video of my presentation (click on me below), including slides - a rather nice job I think. I don't mean my presentation, I mean a rather nice job of the video...

I hope you enjoy it, I look forward to your comments. You may also be interested in what Sophie Hurst said at the same event.

The next event is in November, we hope to be there - find out more here. 

A few weeks ago we were fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a W3C multilingual event in Pisa (see http://www.multilingualweb.eu/),  where I had the privilege to speak. 

The event was an eclectic mix of folks  from the multilingual web ecosystem; from EU funded projects, academic researchers, Google, Microsoft to smaller vendors and (most importantly) the folks that are facing this challenge today. 

I've recently joined SDL and as I intend to at least try to blog here regularly, I thought I ought to  start off with an introduction. So, hi! I'm Ian Truscott, I have recently joined the Web Content Management division as VP Products, North America. 

What does that mean? Well I am part of our product leadership team and my focus will be on our significant North American market. I'll be working with customers, partners and analysts to share our roadmap and gather requirements and trends to help inform our  product strategy. 

I come into this role having enjoyed a year as an analyst for the Gilbane Group (now part of Outsell Inc). I spent the previous decade in the WCM space, working for software vendors in product leadership positions in product marketing and product strategy. 

It's an exciting time to be coming on board, we have SDL Tridion 2011 fresh out of the box that has been well received by customers and analysts and a rolling roadmap of innovative products and enhancements this year. 

We are delivering practical products that help marketers get their arms around these challenging multi-channel engaging times. When it comes to our customers engaging their audience online, we have customer success, where plenty of folks are still talking about the theory. 

I admit, I talk a lot about engagement online (as you can read in my personal blog). I think we are entering a period in this industry where the promise of a pervasive, multi-channel, relevant web experience is now a business imperative and I believe we are in a great position to respond to these market needs. Needs that have clearly moved on from simply publishing pages and our marketing technology platforms need to reflect that. 

In addition, of course, once you publish content to the web it is global and the first step to making it relevant is to make it local. To translate it, to contextualize it for this local visitor and then manage and maintain the huge number of variants that can result from this process. 

So, hello to you, the SDL community. I hope you'll find my contribution here useful and I look forward to meeting lots of you in the coming months. If you'd like to connect, you can also find me on Twitter (@iantruscott).