Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Three of Real Story Group's Technology Predictions for 2012 particularly caught my eye: big data meets web marketing; CRM and CMS on collision course; and new job titles emerge.

Real Story Group (CMS Watch as was) does its annual prediction around this time of year, giving its 12 top predictions for the next year.

The three that caught my eye from this year's batch were:

• Big data meets web marketing - the use of "big data" (marketing intelligence from data warehouses) to target marketing on the web. Personalisation of web content is certainly a trend we are seeing, and something we advise many of our clients to implement. Web users are notoriously fickle and abandon website visits if the content isn't immediately relevant. Personalisation leads to users spending more time on your site and in many cases to more conversions.
• CRM and CMS on collision course - the distinction between CRMs and CMSs will become increasingly blurred with CRM vendors introducing more CMS features and CMS vendors introducing CRM features. The key feature both sets of vendors are after is connecting to customers (very similar to the item above, but extending to email and social media contacts). CMSs such as Drupal and Sitecore are introducing increasingly sophisticated contact management and campaign management features, and many CRM providers offer portals. I would certainly agree with Real Story Group's advice - that integration between CRM and CMS is the best option in many cases (and I've seen some very messy results from taking the portal approach).
• New job titles emerge - such as Social Media Monitor, Marketing Technologist and Digital Media Manager. This shows the need for specialist roles to address the new themes to have emerged over the last 2-3 years. We've seen a number of organisations with digital managers, social media officers, social media managers or community facilitators, or recruiting for them. For digital, it shows that text website content is only part of the story. For social media, it shows that forums need facilitators and social media needs analysis and input.