0700 What four value chains define engagement, and the next five years of innovation and investment?

Now, this brings us to what’s underneath these brand-interaction resources: digital services infrastructure. Now we will examine one aspect of a digital service infrastructure: the content supply chain.

However, before we talk about content supply chains, I want to call attention to what we call Centers of Excellence of a global content and services supply chain and one strategic point: you need a Web ecosystem strategy that clarifies which center of excellence should live on your balance sheet and which ones should live on a partner’s balance sheet.

So what does the publishing firm look like in three years? Or, what’s the publishing firm beginning to look like today that looks even more interesting in three years?

In this figure, I use a few new but useful metaphors to depict the digital supply chain for media and brand interaction.

To make this useful, we need to first start with Shannon - the self-directed, online consumer that wants to engage and interact using her all-digital third hand with two thumbs and blazingly fast eye-hand motor skills; a self-directed consumer that will immediately share and socialize a new find with the intent or hope that her friends declare or confirm it “cool.”

We start with Shannon and how she organizes Brandspace and backwards from Shannon’s experience of your brand.

The first thing that we encounter is engagement theaters — metaphor that I now use to describe the integration of a Web CMS, faceted search, dynamic navigation, and content personalization to a really crisp and vibrant brand voice.

You will notice that the Engagement Theater become the point of integration of four value chains: social media operations on the left, innovation supply chains in the middle, content supply chains on the lower left, and marketing operations of sponsors on the top right.

Engagement theaters convey the idea of narrative, storytelling, actors, timing, set and setting of a stage, and the progression of plot or development of a character through well-defined phases or acts of a play.

I intend to use Engagement Theaters to move marketing planners - engagement planners — beyond the geeky and non-useful notion of “user experience” and deeper into the realm of who wants to do or produce what, how, for whom, under what conditions and constraints - which is really an applied theory of knowledge worker productivity where a self-directed buyer represents a special class of knowledge worker and his or her outputs - answers, insights, and self-service satisfactions - not only meet or exceed their individual criteria for value, but meet or exceed the criteria of others in their network of trust and information sharing.

Yeah, quite a mouthful; so, let’s simplify it: Engagement planners should work backwards from what Shannon wants to achieve in her social network. Done right, Shannon becomes your brand ambassador: she proffers her experience of your product or service as something potentially cool to her friends. Engagement theaters also set up good questions such as, “Did you make it easy for her to do that? Beyond RSS and ‘email this to a friend’ function, did you link to a blog, forum, or Wikipedia reference? Did you offer a widget suitable for her posting it on her blog, website, Facebook page, etc.?
Now, content optimization - the next capability of a digital supply chain - feeds the engagement theater. Content optimization transforms content into cash money.

Content optimization starts with a text mining or semantic profiling system, classifying a whole bunch of Web-ready articles by various topics or ontologies.

For example, when you visit a Business Week or an Economist and click on a story of Darfur, there’ll be 10 more articles somehow related to Africa, disasters and/or UN Relief Functions.

If you brought up UN Relief Functions, you’ll come into another topic amount of 3 or 4 other contexts for consumption. As those contexts are created by all of this tagged — press-tagged content — you then have ads served into those contents.

Content optimization supports dynamic individualized navigation and contextual consumption of content and ads appropriate to the content. This entails the interplay of three sets of metadata or contextual information about content, users, and advertisements.

Content metadata provides rich, nuanced descriptions of the subject and topics within an article or posting, such as proper nouns of people, places, and products and concept nouns such as activities, markets, technologies, trends, decades, dates, and time frames.

User metadata comprises information inferred from current and previous sessions about interests and criteria as well as information provided by the user by way of subscription or financial transaction.

Advertisement metadata provides descriptions of the offered products or services as well as what types of customers would find the offering relevant, if not compelling.

Contextual consumption helps engagement planners ask, “How does this ad best suit user preferences in a particular context of this feature article or discussion content?”

Now here’s the real kick in the pants: If you really master Content optimization, you search engine optimization almost for free.

Let me say that another way: if you optimize consumption contexts of content, users, and advertisements, you will have in the process optimized your web properties for search engines.

So, the optimization of consumption contexts of content, users, and advertisements will boost the number of unique visitors, induce them to stay longer in highly relevant sessions, expose them to a larger inventory of ads (that translate into higher click-through ad revenues), give them more reasons to bookmark and share the site with their friends, blog or post about the cool stuff they found on your site, motivate them to opt-in or subscribe to premium content channels or areas and, if you offer it, increase the number paid subscriptions to super premium content. Life is great!

So, I think that Content Optimization will soon explode, answering the essential question, “How do we take off all of our legacy content and really tag for success?”

Now, that leads us to the Content Refinery that essentially constitutes an XML database with special handlers or ingest technologies that deconstruct and tag legacy content such as Office documents and PDFs, external content such as syndicated news feeds or raw content from you blogs and forums, or just published content from legacy print-publishing systems.

Content Refineries process widely diverse sources of editorial and media - content that may not be “web ready” — creating small bite-size packages of tagged and formatted content objects that you can re-flow into print, online, or mobile delivery and presentation packages. Content Refineries ensure that you can maximize the value of your digital assets.

Next in the content supply chain, we have the multimedia editorial operations. We can’t go into this here, except to say that multimedia editorial operations often entail some pretty complex, multi-departmental systems, processes, and accountabilities - and therefore difficult and expensive to change or upgrade with new technology.