Ed Brill

Earlier this week, OpenNTF.org launched the Collaboration Today community website at http://collaborationtoday.info.

As Niklas Heidloff wrote on the OpenNTF blog:

The content you will find on Collaboration Today is a compilation of current and relevant news for IBM Collaboration Solutions professionals focussing on IBM products and technologies including IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Domino, IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Sametime.

It's a visually striking site, all built on XPages and utilizing the OneUI constructs. Other IBM executives like Sandy Carter and Jeff Schick had positive reactions to the launch, and we will certainly be asking IBM sellers to help drive awareness of it to customers.

Between Collaboration Today and PlanetLotus.org, I feel like we have two great community resources for identifying relevant, timely content online. However, they do differ in one way. Back to Mr. Heidloff:

The site Editors are responsible for adding content to the site, categorizing it and can specifically flag it to show on the Home page. Each category has different content Editors, which are all listed on the About page. If you are interested in becoming an editor, please read the moderation policies and contact us.

This is really, really important. In the process of writing my book (eight draft chapters done, btw), I had the opportunity to speak with Ben Edwards, who heads up IBM's digital strategy. Edwards talked with me about how the nature of marketing is changing, and that we have learned that potential customers no longer start by coming to the front door of a company's website. Instead, most buying journeys today start with search. The second step is usually not corporate content, but rather human assessment. It seems that as buyers, we have learned that authentic voice, not brochure-ware, is the way to validate our potential interest in a product or service. As such curation has become a critical aspect of social business -- people trust people, and would rather read content that is backed by the promise of a human interaction. Having someone with domain expertise or knowledge provide the assurance of a good product -- or the warning of a bad one -- is far more valuable in today's experience than the spec sheet. Ultimately, if you like what the humans are telling you, you'll move on in your buying journey. We're seeing that on ibm.com, where referrals from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, shopping and review sites, and pretty much anywhere other than directly from Google are now on the rise. Those referrals then have a much higher likelihood of staying on ibm.com longer, doing something like downloading a white paper, or buying something.

Thus, curated content -- not advertising -- rules the roost today. Having humans provide that assisted guide to Collaboration Today means you are only getting the most useful stuff. No flame baits, no trolls, no attention-seekers.

Thank you to the entire team that built this site:  Bruce Elgort, Per Henrik Lausten, Serdar Basegmez, Frank van der Linden and Niklas Heidloff.

Link: Collaboration Today >