Gilbane Boston 2008 - Three takeaways

A contingent from NLC attended the Gilbane CMS conference in Boston last week. The theme was Where Content Management Meets Social Media and indeed, social media was the reverse elephant in the room – on everyone’s mind, and stirring passionate discussion at every turn.

Keynotes and sessions covered everything from the state of the industry to open standards to the rise of open source. The state of the economy was a strong overall influence, and Fatwire’s controversial keynote added some colour. The conference Twitter stream was also active.

These are my three most notable takeaways from the conference.

Social media and the generational divide

Social media was the hot topic of the conference. Many are still struggling with social media’s definition and value proposition, though some excellent points were made by panellists – such as, the value lies in engaging with the community, building trust and removing the friction of business. More notably, confusion reigned when lines were not drawn between social media within the enterprise (ie, team collaboration), and social media outside the enterprise (ie, marketing and customer engagement).

A portion of the industry analyst panel (and the audience) expressed scepticism towards Twitter, and other audience members responded in passionate defence. Some discussions edged towards generational stereotyping, with some decrying liberties taken with Facebook, and others claiming to “hate” email. Bottom line: if your employees can’t be trusted on Facebook, you shouldn’t have hired them. Secondly, openness to social technologies crosses generational lines; there are many younger people who do not engage in social media, and many older ones who lead the pack.

Social publishing and mashup architectures

Panellist Jeff Whatcott of Acquia used the term “social publishing” to refer to the combination of these three components:

1. web content management
2. social software (blogs, wikis, social networking platforms, forums, etc. )
3. web application frameworks

It was a timely reference and the audience responded enthusiastically. The modern website is evolving into a mashup of CMS-managed content, custom development, cloud services, social components and user-generated content. Traditional web content management platforms do not typically encompass this entire breadth, though many are transitioning in that direction.

It remains to be seen how unified platforms will evolve to handle all these components, given the current approach, which usually involves integrating best-of-breed components together for a unified website solution.

Open content vs. managed/proprietary content

Speech topics including “freely accessible content for all” and open standards such as CMIS were juxtaposed against topics such as digital rights management. There is still a need for these two concepts to co-exist, although the lines blur depending on the industry, and the emergence of the cloud/SaaS adds further complexity. It was clear we are still navigating a tricky legal landscape in this respect.