Content Marketers and the Emerging pubOS

This is a guest post by Derek Gordon, CMO, Daylife

Let’s face it: most marketing and publishing professionals have a love/hate relationship with web content management systems (CMS). Everyone else has a deeply ingrained hate/hate relationship.

For years I’ve watched publishers and marketers struggle with sub-par CMS options, including difficult-to-manage, home-grown legacy solutions; open source applications that are often obtuse and sorely lacking in features, flexibility, and basic documentation; and enterprise offerings that do some things very well and others poorly or not at all.

Now the field is changing. The “pubOS” is emerging as a set of best practices and tools for the cloud-based technology/media stack. PubOS is shorthand for “publisher operating system.” Simply put, this is the set of cloud-based media technology services on which traditional, emerging, and brand marketing publishers can build their web destinations, whether they be browser-based, mobile or tablet.

The boundaries for the pubOS are blurry, but what it does encompass is services for authoring, licensing, developer tools, editor tools, analytics, insights, feature delivery, design, team management, UGC management, and more.

There are some easily-defined, key attributes of the pubOS however. These services are:

• Cloud-based
• Available from multiple vendors
• Interoperable

This is not your traditional CMS construct, where you’re locked in to one vendor for all of your tools. The pubOS gives the publisher choice, agility, lower total cost of ownership, and speed of innovation.

More and more organizations that use one form of publishing or another to connect with an audience are moving towards customized systems based on the precepts of the pubOS. Many of these are targeted, additive layers of useful functionality and UI on top of a legacy CMS, saving the trouble of scrapping everything and starting at zero — others are rebuilt from scratch. But rather than being loaded with gratuitous functionality meant to (weakly) address any potential use case, they’re instead being designed for very specific needs, like those of a marketer for powerful multimedia curation.

How’d we get here? It’s less about the CMS aging gracelessly (though it certainly has) than about how publishing is changing so rapidly. There’s simply more to publishing than there used to be; more media types, devices, form factors, audience segments, features, browsers, and distribution channels. Media volume and velocity keep ratcheting up, too.

Erin Griffith wrote an insightful piece for AdWeek.com wherein she outlines the challenges publishers and marketers face where technology investments are involved.

“No publication has a better story about back-end chaos than BusinessWeek. Before it was acquired by Bloomberg LP, the publication sank a shocking $20 million into the back-end development of Business Exchange, a professional social networking site being built atop a proprietary content management system. Employees blamed BusinessWeek’s bloated tech investment for the company’s financial demise and eventual fire sale to Bloomberg, which paid a paltry sum—reported as between $2 million and $5 million—for it in 2009.”

There are solutions. Many marketing organizations and publishers are moving to open source CMS solutions such as Drupal and Joomla.  Still others, like The Huffington Post, use customized instances of turnkey, cloud-based solutions like Moveable Type and WordPress that work very well at a low overall cost.

Other cloud-based offerings, like the Daylife Publisher Suite, deliver solutions that are CMS-agnostic and solve many of the systemic problems publishers and brands face daily with legacy (and hard-to-replace) content management systems. With cloud-based applications like these, you get features, functionality, editorial and analytical intelligence, and workflow improvements with nothing but a quick initial integration. For inbound marketers, the idea is to build a proposition for audiences or consumers, and outsource the rest.

In a pubOS world, publishers and marketers are able to choose all the various parts of their publishing system from multiple providers. The CMS won’t go away, but its place in the ecosystem will evolve just like ad servers have before them.

Soon the media technology stack will resemble the flexible, nimble, efficient cloud-based advertising technology stack we all take for granted today. I’m starting to see a number of companies being funded to build a variety of cloud-based publisher services. And publishers are starting to consume them in increasing numbers.

As a result, I expect to see the rise of new “love/love” relationships in the publishing and content marketing worlds soon!

Derek Gordon is a marketing and communications strategist with more than 20 years of success launching brands, reinvigorating product lines, and activating markets. His leadership at emerging and established brands has led to the establishment of new market categories, and increases in market share, customer acquisition, revenue and ROI across marketing disciplines. Derek is a noted specialist in content strategies that lead to better SEO, increased customer engagement, and improved online social interaction. He also publishes a personal Web ‘zine, The Daily Casserole, and is a weekly columnist for Media Post.