Having worked with Drupal 8 in a production setting at one of the top development agencies for the last 15 months, I feel that I can responsibly say that Drupal 8 is ready for prime time. In fact, given all of the great improvements that the platform has to offer, it’s hard to think of an scenario where I would recommend Drupal 7 to a client. These include a standardized Symfony2 framework, a twig templating system, partial page caching, configuration management, layouts, and much more.
To learn more about Drupal 8’s new features, I spent a day recently at DrupalCon Baltimore, an experience that has heightened my excitement about Drupal and the future of the platform. Here are the takeaways that we got from the conference:
- Focus on Lowering the Barriers of Entry
- Core initiatives targeted at improving content authoring
- Revamped Release Cycles
- Drupal maturing in large enterprise
Opening the Flood Gates
The Driesnote was amazing as always. This one was more exciting than usual as there was a strong emphasis on the community and the shift for Drupal to become more user-friendly and lowering the barriers of entry. From a technical standpoint, the standardization on the Symfony2 framework and the addition of the twig templating system make working with Drupal more attractive to PHP developers, opening the platform up to a much wider developer market. From the content side, Dries highlighted the work being lead by Keith Jay to provide a better out-of-the-box experience to all users.
Content is King
In an ever changing market, it is important to stay ahead of the curve and adapt your organization to meet the needs of your client base. We validated a big shift that we are seeing in the market where the decision-maker is no longer the IT team – It has shifted to the marketing team. It is great to see Drupal follow this trend with the strong focus on the new core initiatives around UX, such as layouts and in-place editing. Dries also highlighted Cristina Chumillas for her work in improving the UX of several core pages.
Maintenance made easy
Another exciting announcement was around the revamp of the Drupal release cycles to make core upgrades for both minor and major versions of Drupal easier. The new 6-month cycles have been running great, and I for one am excited to see it. In this new model, functionality will slowly be deprecated (instead of removed) throughout the minor release versions as new functionality is added. This will give module developers an extended period of time to upgrade. Major releases will go one step further and remove the set of deprecated functionality to start the codebase off on a clean slate.
Climbing the Corporate Ladder
Drupal continues to gain traction in the large enterprise space with organizations and marketing teams looking to spend more of their budgets on content and campaigns rather than recurring subscription fees. This can be validated by the uptick in features and functionality that the community is providing for Drupal 8. As the market changes, so should the technology. The greatest thing about Drupal and the community around it is that we are the ones choosing the direction of the platform. We have thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people validating this platform in the market and pushing the direction of the platform forward.
Bluetext continues to grow its commitment to Drupal and the Drupal community. If you are considering Drupal for your digital platform, please contact us. We would be happy to help you think through your approach to ingesting this powerful platform to power your growing digital ecosystems.
So, you want to sell to the federal government?
Good. Every year, Uncle Sam and his army of acquisition specialists have money to spend to achieve the critical missions of the federal government. In 2014, the most recent data available, the federal government spent nearly half a trillion dollars on contractors.
But there’s still another question left.
Who are you selling to? And I don’t mean which agency or which department. I mean, who?
Every contract issued by the government has a signature on it, an actual person who has selected your company to provide a product or service. Behind the signature are a small group of influencers. So, of that half-trillion dollar enterprise, your opportunity probably has been shaped by fewer people than are on an NFL roster.
So we ask again, who are you marketing to? Are you marketing to The Government or are you marketing to those who matter?
Why Personas Matter
Federal contracting is its own subspecies of marketing. We don’t have the intense feedback cycles or as many point-of-sale validations.
At Bluetext, we’ve helped dozens of clients reach the right government customers with carefully designed strategy backed by creative that makes an impact. It’s not always the same as business-to-business marketing or business-to-consumer, but one area that never changes is persona creation.
Why?
The government is not a single entity. It comprises agencies and departments, which in turn comprise directorates and activities and program management offices and thousands of personnel who play a role in acquiring products and services on behalf of the government.
How you reach them all won’t be the same. The avenues available to market to a program manager in the access-controlled world of the Intelligence Community, for example, won’t be the same as those available to reaching a director at the National Institutes of Health. Their missions aren’t the same, their needs aren’t the same, and their pain points aren’t the same.
Even within your target opportunity, your approach must vary.
Unlike traditional commercial services marketing, where you may aim for a thousand buyers of a million dollar contract, in federal marketing you’re more frequently aiming for one sale of one 100 million contract influenced by a dozen people. Not only does the persona exercise of understanding who your buyer is matter in fed tech, it matters even more.
Government Personas, in Four Broad Strokes
Directors and Deputy Directors and High Ranking Government Executives
This is typically the big ideas crowd. They’re usually looking for what’s next. Their interest is less day-to-day and more focused on how to better achieve their agency’s mission. Major changes begin at this level, whether it’s a product like a weapon systems or the federal cloud-first mandate, which has reshaped federal IT since its issuance by the then Chief Technology Officer of the United States. In the Intelligence Community, the largest IT transformation in its history began as a plan issued from the Director of National Intelligence.
Be bold and be visionary. If you want to radically change the government’s mindset, this is where you enter the bloodstream. Personnel in these positions aren’t always technically savvy and often have a more generalist approach to their departments, but they’re always eager to find the next great idea. They’re intensely focused on mission achievement, so help them understand how your solutions helps them better achieve the department’s goals.
Contracting Officers & Program Managers
What is a contract for your company is a career decision for contracting officers (COs) and program managers. On most acquisitions, the PM and the CO (or KO, as it’s often abbreviated, particularly in defense) are the most important decision maker. The program manager will be responsible for oversight of all the requirements in the proposal and of its execution once underway. The CO/KO can later modify the contract to add scope.
While PMs and COs appreciate the big idea, they are also intensely interested in the nuts and bolts and your capability to deliver. Every contract is an act of trust between these two positions and your company. These are experienced government personnel with whom you’ll want to build a long-term brand relationship. Depending on the size of the contract, they may not be subject matter experts in all technologies involved, but will likely understand enough to separate contractor-speak from actual capability.
Acquisition Influencers
For competitive bids, acquisition is done through an evaluation board which helps advise the source selection authority on its choice. Acquisition influencers are often subject matter experts and will be interested in the details. While their interest is in the proposal before them, your marketing should include this group as well. Are there third-party validations you can include to bolster your technical credibility, such as CMMI appraisal or AWS or Microsoft organizational certifications? Is your accounting system approved by a government auditor? Can you demonstrate applied expertise in your area of work, through white papers and blog posts? The big idea is great, but this is the group that will pop your marketing balloon if your big idea is all hype and no substance.
End Users
The role of a federal contractor is never simply IT for IT’s sake or product for product’s sake. It’s about empowering the end-user to achieve agency mission. And while the end-user, be it a help desk technician, a service member or a scientist, won’t sign a contract, their opinion of your product or service, particularly once it’s in use, will heavily influence whether it continues to be in use. Prior to acquisition, a groundswell of support could be cause for a pilot program. Market to the end-user’s pain points, rather than a technology-first view.
Every contract is different and Bluetext has helped dozens of clients craft specific marketing strategies by agency and by opportunity.
But like all marketing, it doesn’t just start with the what, it starts with the who!
The visual elements of a brand’s identity are the most immediately recognizable form of brand expression – subconsciously communicating brand message, tone and personality – in less than an instant. After that – it’s all about the experience.
A modern brand presents itself visually across more environments than ever before – and unless you’re McDonald’s, the most dominant of those is its digital manifestation, which also happens to be the primary environment in which it is first experienced beyond its visual state.
Because your customer may be experiencing both your brand and digital presence simultaneously for the first time, simplifying the user experience – and by virtue of that your focus on the customer – will immediately reinforce that customer’s initial brand experience before they explore a single product or solution that you offer.
While most visual design principles for digital brand mirror those of its non-virtual counterpart’s – digital brand design presents some unique opportunities to more effectively shape your customers initial online brand experience.
Typography
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make the language it forms most appealing to the user’s overall experience. Wikipedia defines it as an art form that can manipulate the significance of what it communicates – a definition that most digital first branding agencies like Bluetext might consider the holy grail of developing a brand identity. You need to consider very carefully how typography will fit into your overall digital brand architecture – and iconography shouldn’t be too far behind.
Content Strategy
As it relates to customer experience, content strategy is broadly defined as the plan for the creation, delivery and governance of useful and usable digital content that is ultimately designed to meet the needs of – and therefore expressed by the voice of – your customer. Therefore, content and creative strategies need to be aligned to ensure the user experience supports the desired narrative for your brand story to play out online.
Mobile UX
This leads us right back to simplifying the brand experience by focusing on the customer. A mobile first strategy helps develops brands that communicate their core values rapidly, simply and without clutter. The result is a focused, cleaner, and more user-centric brand experience.
Simply introducing mobile to the initial stages of brand development empowers creative teams to concentrate on what is at the core of a brand and establish priorities in the context of the mobile experience.
Ultimately a brand is the holistic sum of customers’ experiences, composed of visual, tonal and behavioral brand components – all of which can now be shaped by interactive design and manifested perfectly in the digital expression of your brand.
User experience (UX) as defined by Wikipedia involves a person’s emotions about using a particular product, system or service. User experience highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system. User experience is subjective in nature because it is about individual perception and thought with respect to the system. User experience is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing circumstances and new innovations.
The two most critical points of Wiki’s definition are that users are individuals each with unique goals and behaviors – and that user experience is dynamic. In the name of user centered design principles, however; designers often segment users into personas based on similar (vs. individual) goals and behaviors that ultimately define a user experience that’s good for the masses some of the time rather than best for each individual user all of the time.
This definition of UX is also guided by the principle that there are real humans standing behind every brand or product. And while a great UX continuously learns from its users to deliver a more intuitive, human centered experience – thanks to AI – it no longer requires an actual human to deliver it.
And like AI – which ‘learns’ how to avoid design ‘mistakes’ by memorizing the experience of every user – UX is in itself a designer’s primary source of human intelligence that, if properly applied, will recognize patterns in human interaction to mitigate frustration and optimize usability.
What this means is that ideally, designers should continue to employ traditional user centered design principles to lay the groundwork for major design decisions, and at the same time, leverage AI to continuously calibrate incremental changes to that design in real time based on the individual goals and activities of every user.
The compound effect of applying AI to UX in this manner will empower designers to humanize the customer experience for each individual user and usher in a new age of a dynamic and truly utopian, user centered design methodology.
In its simplest form – content strategy is broadly defined as the plan for the creation, delivery and governance of useful and usable digital content that meets the business objectives of your company. User experience – on the other hand – is ultimately designed to meet the needs of – and therefore expressed by the voice of – the user.
The outcome of both of these business focused and user centered goals is the user experience – and core to that experience is content strategy. Having a plan that creates a bridge between user needs and business goals is essential – it is inherently impossible to design a great UX without it.
Content strategy creates a global framework for how digital content is prioritized, organized and presented based on its business purpose. UX strategy informs the information architecture – providing the structural context to bring the content to life based on the user persona it is designed to reach.
However – website design is often driven solely by UX teams who – absent a comprehensive digital upbringing – tend to overlook content early in the design phase of the project – or worse yet – after the templates have already been created. This is the point at which projects catch fire and timelines blow up – resulting in a large amount of rework later when the content doesn’t fit the templates and either the templates need to be redeveloped or the content reconfigured – not fun.
At Bluetext – we recommend identifying user needs and expressing them as user stories during the initial design phase. By gaining insights through the user stories – designers gain a better understanding of the content users need and therefore can apply more critical thinking around the templates they need to create to support that content.
With content becoming more critical to brand performance by the hour, designers have to work more closely than ever with content strategists to ensure the UX supports the desired narrative for the content play out without getting in the way. The more you can embed content strategy into each step of your design process, the better the user experience will be.
Google has done it again, quietly making a significant change to the way its algorithms process Google AdWords that could be significant challenge for digital marketing if not understood and managed. At Bluetext, we closely monitor all of updates to how the Google’s search engines returns query results, and we have posted a number of blogs to let our clients know about these changes and how to address them.
This time, it’s a little different because this change, which Google announced on March 17, addresses AdWords, the tool companies use to implement their keyword purchasing strategies, rather than a revision of its organic search functionality. With this change, marketers may need to adjust their spending programs for purchasing the keywords that drive traffic to their sites.
In the past with AdWords, marketers would select a set of short-tail search terms that would be part of their search advertising mix. For example, a hotel chain might include simple key phrases like “best hotels in Nashville,” mirroring the way customers search for a list of places to stay. Up until the latest change, that exact phrase would drive the Adwords results. But Google has decided that people don’t always type their searches as that exact phrase, dropping the “in” by mistake or even misspelling it as “on.” As a result, Google has decided to expand its close variant matching capabilities to include additional rewording and reordering for exact match keywords.
What does that mean? In layman’s terms, Google will now view what it calls “function words” – that is, prepositions (in, to), conjunctions (for, but), articles (a, the) and similar “connectors” as terms that do not actually impact the “intent” behind the query. Instead, it will ignore these function words in Adwords exact match campaigns so that that the intent of the query will be more important that the precise use of these words.
Sounds like a good move, because if you search for “best hotels in Nashville” or “Nashville best hotels,” the result will be the same in AdWords.
But what if the search is for “flights to Nashville,” which isn’t the same as “flights from Nashville”? Ignoring the function words “to” or “from” would change the purpose of the query. Google says not to worry, its algorithm will recognize the difference and not ignore those words since they do impact the intent.
Hopefully, Google will make good on that promise. But advertisers who have been briefed on this revision aren’t too certain. Their carefully constructed AdWords investments might take a hit if the function words are not managed precisely to meet this new approach.
We like the old adage of “Trust but verify.” While we take Google at its word, we know there are always growing pains with these types of revisions. For our clients, we are recommending that they carefully review the terms they are including in their AdWords mix. Our advice: Be as precise as you can and factor in how these functions words might be perceived before pulling the trigger. Losing traffic to your site because of placement of a simple word should be a real concern.