Join the dots - Convergence the talk at TFM 10

No doubt I was strolling the aisles of last year's Technology For Marketing (TFM) show in a bit of a daze looking for relevant info for the project in hand. This year however,  I was introducing an ex-colleague from many years ago to the broader delights of digital marketing/technologies so was obviously paying a bit more attention than usual.

I'm not sure if I overlooked the fact that dotMailer was now just one smaller part of a much bigger dotDigital Group last year but I was somewhat surprised to see a whole bunch of 'dotCompanies' where once there was one. My eye was drawn to dotCommerce and dotContentManagement being promoted - I'm pretty sure there was a dotSEO in there somewhere and I'm guessing a dotSocialMedia must be on the cards somewhere.

It seems a single point solution doesn't cut it these days and an ever growing number of organisations are expanding their offerings across the digital space, with a lot of commentary about the convergence of WCM, Social Media, Analytics, eCommerce and/or CRM.

Maybe on my upcoming web project challenges for 2010 this will finally be the year when I use one provider for more than one of the requirement areas mentioned above. Previously I've always focused on best of breed and/or tactical point solutions before but perhaps we are reaching a position where a traditionally Web Content Management orientated solution offers sufficient email marketing, social media and analytics capabilities to consider a more integrated approach.

I've had some promising experiences with Joomla, Drupal and EPiServer in the last year for integrating WCM with community building but I'm still drawn to familiar long established point solutions for things like email marketing and analytics. Does anyone have strong tangible examples of email marketing and analytics integration in Content Management Systems that counter the best of breed approaches?

Observations made in presentations about 'conversation being king' and content being boring are starting to resonate having seen first hand how social media generated conversation can have a direct effect on ecommerce activity.

Some chats with SEO specialists suggest an interesting time ahead with real-time search and also that Google may finally be making moves to squash link farming activities more effectively than before. I've seen increasing evidence over the last year that these old black hat techniques are still working and this really undermines the efforts of those who approach search marketing ethically and professionally. With Google's 'don't do evil' brand value increasingly being called into question it risks greater damage if it opens the door to even more search spamming in its efforts to keep pace with Twitter and Facebook.