By Janus Boye
“Let the content folks do their job”
In my conversation with Ottawa-based Mark Demeny from Optimizely, the conversation quickly turned to how we can best empower content creators and site builders. There’s still too much thinking required according to Mark and that’s from someone who’s spent his working life since the late ’90s on web systems and digital platforms.
On February 1st, less than 2 months ago, Mark left Contentful and joined Episerver on Feb 1. Just one week later, Episerver renamed to Optimizely and Mark’s responsibility as Director, Product Management turned from Episerver CMS to what is now called the Optimizely Content Cloud.
At Optimizely he is collaborating with many of his former colleagues from his 8 years at Sitecore and on his to-do-list for the coming months is updating the product architecture and integration to the rest of the Optimizely suite. Mark is our expert of the month.
Success in the CMS world is all about execution
It’s been less than 100 days for Mark at Optimizely and already he’s quite impressed from what he’s seen from the inside. This includes the existing investment in the platform, but also the acquisitions of Optimizely and customer data platform, Zaius.
It’s all about doing good work and realising that digital experiences are complex and content is complex, so how can you help your customers in the best way.
According to Mark, as an industry, we still don’t do well when it comes to helping people understand the context of the content they are creating or the channels they are publishing to or the customer journeys. There’s still plenty of room for improvement after 20 years of iterating on the problem.
As Mark wrote in August 2020 in his post “Why Are Most Organizations Stuck Solving The Same Content Problems As 20 Years Ago?”, one of the major issues is that management often does not have an understanding of the value of content. So it’s not just about creating content like an assembly line, it’s also about creating the right content, surfacing it to the right audience and helping content creators do better.
Better ways of working with content
In between 8 years at Sitecore and joining Optimizely, Mark also spend a bit over a year as Director of Content Management Strategy at headless CMS vendor Contentful. This made Mark understand some of the appeals of the headless trend.
To quote Mark:
“Headless vendors have done well because they made it easier to create and distribute content”.
To elaborate, Mark pointed out that going headless to many customers meant truly breaking free of the page paradigm. Some might argue that happened with the introduction of responsive design, but that turned out to have a bigger impact on the customer experience than the authoring experience.
Another way of thinking about better ways to work with content according to Mark is to get out of the way as a tool. Mark advises trying to remove the bias of existing siloed sites and focus on the content strategy and customer journeys and go from there. While most scenarios still involve the creation of pages (web is still the most important channel, after all) - but it’s important not to start from this point as it’s harder to add additional channels and ways of working with content and customer needs after the fact.
During our conversation, Mark pondered that sometimes a simpler and more single-task oriented interface might actually be more empowering for a content creator, but also allowing more people within an organization to create and have “ownership” of content or customer experiences.
Content: It’s complicated
Besides thinking about how you can author anywhere and author better, Mark also talked about what he called contextual content.
This could be customer data or product recommendations that are offered in a personalized and relevant way based on your preferences. Mark’s seeing a rise in how content is being used in different ways and across different channels. The volume, velocity and variety of content have been in hypergrowth for almost 20 years.
Unfortunately, as Mark said:
From an authoring perspective, there’s now a bit of a disconnect if we look at how content is managed or understood across the different channels. Often users are still unsure what effect their changes will have downstream. In the pre-omnichannel world, it was very easy to see your changes in a single WYSIWYG view, but now those changes may be pushed to mobile devices, other pages or even other regions or teams.
For this year, Mark’s focus is on continuing to simplify the CMS to make it easier for content creators and to provide tools to actually serve. Specifically, Optimizely is trying to bring authoring experiences and contextual understanding of that content closer together.
Learn more about Mark and his work
You can find more about Mark, his work and what he calls random martech thoughts on his own site: markdemeny.com.
He’s also previously written a popular post for this blog on accounting for customer experience. This covers how do we measure the impact and value of our work on improving the customer experience.