Documentum Brand Management 2.0 a la Chuck Hollis' theory in practice

EMC's Chuck Hollis says that Twitter can be both a "collective brain hum" and a place where "real-world brand management" and "corporate brand marketing" can happen. He writes that through tweets:

"Many thousands of people are continually forming impressions around you and your company, and it's done in an entirely unstructured and organic manner."

What are people saying about Documentum on Twitter? Here's are the tweets I collected a few weeks back (job postings, press release announcements, and analyst coverage have been omitted.)

"Documentum is sooo slow that it is not funny......how is this attributable to productivity at work???"

"Having written an EDRMS from scratch, Documentum makes me want to cry its so bad"

"'I've also get a couple of XML Databases at my beck and call (eXist and MarkLogic) and may get the upcoming Documentum XDB9"

"I cannot figure out why Adobe Captivate keeps crashing her Vista machine. Is it Documentum/VPN or WHAT??"

"Corporate websites are there to give Documentum something to do ."

"Installed new version (9) of #EMC #Documentum #xDB on my MacBookPro. Up and running in less than 90 secs (incl. 30 secs finding license key)"

"Because Documentum's a royal PITA?"

"Hey Alfrescans, where I can find some material to include in a ppt to a company that wants to use Alfresco as an alternative to Documentum?"

"At an enterprise level fixing a bug in the next version is not an acceptable outcome. I'm looking at you EMC/Documentum"

So, I ask, "How are we doing?" I actually don't think it's as bad as the tweets suggest. It could be that, like with athletic injuries and adverse drug reactions, people only post to bulletin boards or tweet about software when there's a problem.

Is that a problem for brand managers/marketers? You tell me.

Comments

[kominetz]

I love the disconnect between Hollis's desire to use the Twitter buzzword and the actual buzz on Twitter about the product. I'll add two points to consider beyond relishing a call of shenanigans on the whole thing.

(1) People in the Twitterverse are probably skewed towards developers and maybe users, not the people that write the checks to EMC. That separation of people with money, people who do projects, and people who do work has always worked in Documentum's favor. Also, how many EMC software engineers working on Documentum are using Twitter and are open about their affiliation?

(2) It's probably true that people tweet more negative than positive, especially when talking a product in the third person. If you're actually having a conversation on Twitter with the software maker, like @Omnifocus or @Tweetie, things are usually a little more civil. Usually. What happens if you choose another Big Software product like Microsoft Office or SAP and do a sampling? Oracle may be the best choice being a huge back-end success and dominating its market, like Documentum.

[shiningarts]

Being a developer over three decades, I have seen a lot of transformation within various environments including mainframe, unix, and micro processing. However, my luck may be running out as far as experiencing the emergent nano techonology finally. I have noticed that there is a common thread of themes between these no matter what platform you happen to be working on. The only surviving applications in the long run are those that learn from nature and apply its principles to themselves. Any software that is unnatural and artificial is getting to be obsolete eventually. I bet this is the nature's way selecting the winner and discarding the other.

Speaking of Twitter, I believe, it is one of the natural progressions of software engineering. If it is true, then the halcyon days of the thick client juggernaut such as Microsoft's Sharepoint may be already behind even before it gets started. We surely have witnessed this phenomenon in the political arena last year where massive throngs of the "Yes We Can" generation altered the political landscape forever.

What I want to stress here is that software in general needs to mimick nature's course. I believe that utilizing Twitter as a front-end user interface would be more natural than employing the formidable thick client interface. Web 2.0 framework is more dynamic than endless customizations such as JSP for the front-end user interface, although it is processed within the back-end (what a strange concept). If you are talking about user interface, then configuration is much more natural and effective than customization. If you are talking about the business logic, then customization is viable. How many customers are screaming about the difficulty of upgrading their user interface layer applications due to extreme customization such as Webtop or WebPublisher? It's because they are going against the nature's way. I am glad to see that Documentum 6.5 is employing Web 2.0 technology for its user interface.

I know there are sizable criticisms about Twitter and ILM as far as EMC is concerned. Although I am not an EMC evangelist by any means, there is some good thinking behind of the architecture. A heavily configurable Web 2.0 Twitter front-end, scaleable and customizable Documentum in the middle, and the proven industry strength storage infrasturcture in the back-end would be much more flexible than other alternatives. How about the Open Source softwares in relation to this? I would say, if you are in college, then use Open Source. Whereas, if you are running business, then you have to take enterprise strength application because you don't have either the time or the energy to squabble academically when you are trying to run your business.