by Jim Derochea - Marketing Communications, Solutions, Multi Channel Guru
How many of you went through, or are going through, the pain of trying to manage multiple W2P tools for your constituents that were developed by multiple solution providers? The old W2P model went out of vogue before many of us even realized it and for some, it's been a nightmare trying to recover. Where was W2P 2.0 when we needed it???
For a little anecdote, lets go back in time to 2004-2005...
After a number of years of advocating for the adoption of Web-to-Publish solutions within the MarComm Department that I worked for at the time, in hopes of streamlining many of our repetitive "down and dirty" jobs and campaigns, there was finally a breakthrough. The company gave the thumbs-up to adopt W2P technology and we immediately started brainstorming. After collaborating with other MarComm leaders on a list of potential W2P tools that included many constituent-facing, self-service W2P solutions, I quickly deduced that the 2004 W2P landscape was outdated for our needs. To me W2P was a distinct channel, just like email or print and thus, needed to be addressed as such, as opposed to addressing it as many individual solutions.
For many years, the Printers provided the W2P services that gave the users a quick way to order materials. It was simple, providing a simple branded interface to order stationery, for example. It made sense for the Printer, because it drove print and it made sense for customers, because it streamlined the ordering process and helped to control costs. But our needs were exponential and I immediately raised the red flag!
I looked at the potential individual W2P needs that were now on my plate. Our constituents, both internal & external, were very unique and needed access to specific assets & needed unique functionality from all other constituents. The prevailing suggestion at the time was to seek out an optimal vendor/solution for each constituent's needs and build a unique W2P Self-Service tool for each. But this would not streamline anything...Some of the W2P providers only provided print output, while others provided the ability to produce static electronic assets only, while others could provide variable assets electronically, but didn't cross over to the print side well or vice-versa. Some offered canned solutions that met a specific need perfectly, while others provided Developers to customize the solution to suit our needs. I acknowledged that this would provide us with a robust, perfectly molded solution for each of our W2P projects, but would be very costly and would lead to severe "unintended consequences" down the road if we chose to use different solution providers to build the array of W2P tools for us. Unintended consequences such as having little to no integration between W2P solutions or little chance of leveraging one W2P solution for another constituent's solution later on or individual solutions not offering scalability for us as our business needs expanded. Since we did not have an Digital Asset Library, we also had no logical way to "feed" each W2P tool with the most current assets, except to try to manage it manually, which would have been a full-time, major undertaking in itself. And simplistically, I could foresee some poor Sales Executive, a Broker of ours or an inside Customer Service associate having to remember many different website addresses and having to log on to each site separately, to conduct their business. As much as the W2P technology was the best answer to solve each individual constituent's 'problem', the summate of the solutions was poised to create far more problems than they solved.
So, I sought out industry experts, many of who seemed as perplexed as I was at the time. As gratifying as it was to get their acknowledgement for being such a forward-thinker, it didn't net me any substantial leads. I eventually drew up a couple of proposals to try to avoid going down a path of unintended consequences.
The first proposal would only be a cosmetic band-aid to help our constituents navigate the various W2P solutions which involved the building of a permissions based, branded portal that would simply be a 'warehouse' of our individual W2P tools.
Users would be given access only to the W2P solutions that they had permission to utilize and the rest of them would be suppressed. But it lacked full integration, especially to share assets and to compile aggregate reporting data. The second was more daring and involved the same permission based branded portal idea, combined with the building and implementation of a robust DAM system to "feed" the various W2P tools as well as a rules based reporting filter that compiled the W2P data from each tool, into a master file.
Unfortunately, economics and timing ruled and neither proposal saw the light of day, but it raised my awareness that the W2P model of yesterday needed to change and change rapidly. The days of offering only specialized W2P solutions was quickly reaching it's end. Companies needed W2P solutions that not only streamlined & managed their print and inventories, but they needed Web-based (W2P) tools to allow access to specific assets and functionality to various internal and external constituents across multiple channels and they needed it all integrated.
Back then, we needed Web-to-Publish 2.0!!! (notice I use the word "publish" because the use of W2P technology transcends print and encompasses the deployment of both print and electronic assets these days!)
Today, 5 years later, more and more solution providers are offering W2P solutions that are fully or nearly fully integrated, so though it may take some digging, there are integrated W2P solutions out there. Some now call them W2P 2.0 solutions. Many of the EMM or MCM Suites now have this capability as well, so if you are also looking to integrate campaign management, deployment across channels, robust reporting, CRM, etc, as well as to integrate your W2P tools, then one of these solutions are worth a look!
So, if you have not taken a look at your W2P plans in terms of future scalability and integration, maybe now is a good time to do so. Proposing a plan to the right leaders during these fragile economic times, that will truly make your organization more efficient, agile, integrated and intelligent, surely can't hurt your relevance to the organization!
Go Web 2.0! :-)
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