What London museums can teach e-retail about web content management
Content management is becoming a key means of differentiation for leading e-retail sites, with the way most web retailers deploy web content management falling into one of three buckets, according to recent findings from Forrester Research. The Forrester Wave Report on Web Content Management, Q3 2005, finds that to maximize content reuse, most retailers use web content management as a central source for product data and content – an aggregation point from which they can then push content into multiple channels – or as a feed into an external product data repository – one that normalizes and aggregates both structured and unstructured data centrally, allowing output for various channels.
A third common deployment for e-retailers is to integrate a web content management solution with a commerce platform that serves as a central source for product data. Forrester’s report notes that some content management products now incorporate delivery capabilities as well.
All of that functionality requires investment, and to realize the most benefit from it, Forrester notes that e-retailers should also be leveraging spending on web content management for use in other initiatives such as multi-channel marketing. With what it says are many retailers investing in additional technology to harness dynamic customized content use in other channels, Forrester says companies should coordinate the initiatives to avoid overlapping spending and leverage content and targeting tools.
London’s Natural History Museum, for example, uses its web content management system as a central source for scientific research, collections, and exhibit information, according to Forrester’s report. It also can push content to kiosks within the museum and to its web site. London’s Tate Gallery uses its web content management system to push information on events and exhibitions to its web site as well as to printed catalogs via XML feed.
“Like these museums, sellers should design and create content for multi-channel deployment and then push it through publishing workflows to ensure the correct format for each channel,” notes Forrester’s report. While such functionality currently requires a customized approach, Forrester expects web content management vendors to provide more of it in packaged applications in the future.
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