Web content management vendor Vignette has just released a new set of tools allowing firms to offer community and social networking functionality on their customer-facing sites and intranets. It seems like the whole wonderful world of Web 2.0 is fast becoming the battleground for differentiating in the super-competitive enterprise content management (ECM) and web content management (WCM) space.
Vignette Community Services includes tools which can help firms offer ratings, reviews, tagging and other functionality on their sites. The vendor is also providing content moderation tools - an essential feature for any firm which wants to allow user-generated content on its site. Community Applications, meanwhile is all about collaborative functionality – think along the lines of blogs, wikis, forums and so on. So why is Vignette doing this? Well, despite all the hype surrounding Web 2.0, and despite the numerous conflicting definitions of what this over-used word actually means, there is actually some sound reasoning behind offering visitors to your web site a means to interact in a more meaningful and rewarding way.
Web 1.0 was all about firms forcing their messages and marketing on customers. Web 2.0 is all about them providing the means for customers to collaborate and participate, listening to what they want, and then delivering it. Vignette's Guy Westlake is right when he says that providing user-generated content functionality alone can do wonders to help strengthen brands and drive revenue, and provides vital feedback to help firms produce new goods and services.
The vendor is well on the way to achieving its vision for its underlying Web Experience platform, having previously released Vignette Recommendations – software which offers firms the means to personalise their customers' web experiences. It crucially delivers content based on the user's intent rather than history, and then dynamically serves up relevant content. The firm also made moves to ease the management of digital media assets by updating its rich media services product.
And Vignette isn't the only WCM firm doing this kind of thing. As the analyst community has noted, ECM and WCM functionality is rapidly becoming commoditised. Look at most of the big players and they all offer similar things, so this is an opportunity for some early movers to steal a march on their rivals, and give forward thinking clients what they want – a means to create stickier sites and give their customers what they want. It won't be the end of the Web 2.0 posturing and eventually this functionality too will become standardised, but in the meantime expect to see all the usual content management suspects trying to differentiate along these lines.
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