I’ve been seeing the acronym ‘WEM’ a lot lately in my RSS feeds and wondering “What the heck do they mean by Web Engagement Management?” I did a little bit of research and found that this is not just a buzz word but an up-and-coming philosophy of how web developers, designers, and content providers should look at implementing content management systems.
Web Engagement Management (WEM) is recognizing the evolving nature of the web and tailoring technologies and strategies to match. Over the past decade, the web has progressed from the static pages to web 2.0 technologies now including mobile devices. With the ‘cloud’ coming, higher levels of integration, concerns for privacy, and greater use of multimedia, WEM offers a framework philosophy of how to adapt to the ever-changing technologies and consumer expectations.
CMSWire posted an article “What is Web Engagement Management (WEM)?” that talks about what this new strategy means and “how an organization brings together its resources to optimize their digital presence”.
CMS Wire offers the following 5 Pillars as part of the concept:
The 5 Pillars of WEM
Web Engagement Management is a composite concept. These are the 5 parts we consider its core:
- Content Optimization
This include native or tightly integrated analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing and optimization and SEO.- Multi-channel Management
Consistency is important and WEM maintains it by delivering the same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline.- Conversational Engagement
WEM supports this through communities, user generated content, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.- Demand Generation
Targeted marketing is huge. With an overall goal of increasing the number and quality of relationships, WEM comes to the aid of demand generators through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.- Sales Automation
Love isn’t the only two-way street, and as social media analyst Jeremiah Owyang put it, “real-time isn’t fast enough.” This idea is manifest in WEM in areas like two-way CRM integration, social CRM and e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.
Obviously not every website, company, or customer target is the same, so these pillars all rest upon the need for pairing your business needs with the evolving nature of the web and communications channels. As we’ve seen in recent years, the move for more electronic information rather than paper is not a blanket ethos but rather industry and, more importantly, audience specific.
As technologies emerge, WEM offers a great framework to think about how to utilize current resources to become an agile organization in these radically changing times for marketing and communications.
This edited post was first published on the MIT WebPub blog on May 13, 2010.