A needle in a haystack

Sitecore7, the new version of sitecore's flagship product is called a game changer because the architecture is based on search technology. Using search technology as an information access layer has been done before and is not entirely new. Faceted search was just that and giving a faceted search as a navigation structure is still a good way of presenting information. What makes Sitecore7 interesting is the fact that they are giving the power to the marketeers to tweak and tune the search results. That was a functionality reserved for pure-play search engines in the past. The fact that search engines and Web Content Management solutions are coming together into a single platform is an interesting evolution.

Sitecore says that from a marketer’s perspective, a customer’s search query is an opportunity to present information that triggers a conversion and drives revenue. That's entirely true and that is the essence of customer engagement. How can you guide a visitor/prospect into a journey that leads to buying a product ? This hard questions isn't answered with a good navigation only. To tackle this a web engagement platform needs first of all a strong analytics part where you can view and analyse all actions taken by a visitor on a website. Ideally, this analytics engine should drive a targeting engine (the second part needed in a WEM platform) which serves the right content to the right visitor at the right moment. And last but not least a WEM platform should have a great Experience Delivery system. Customer Engagement is driven by creativity and creativity must be captured in a system that understands the art of turning this creativity into a true experience. This experience is not only html on a website, or ink on paper, this is a cross-device, omnichannel experience that makes a customer go from an advertisement in a brick-and-mortar store to a facebook fanpage, to an online webshop.

Since creating true omnichannel experiences is the new holy grail for marketeers, it is obvious that modern content management systems must be able to go away from a single-repository vision. The way that sitecore is moving into could be the right direction. Content is published on different channels and resides in different repositories and what could be better than a search engines to bring those together. The next step could be (or rather should be) to add intelligence to the search engine. In order to be able to search for a needle in a haystack search engines need to explore ways to add more intelligence to their engine. And maybe, this will lead to the long awaited semantic web. Who would have thought that modern marketeers would drive the way to the semantic web...