Hats off to Brian for producing this cool trailer to our webinar Mob Marketing:  Manual Website Optimization FUGETABOUTIT!  If you’ve only got a minute, you’ll get the gist of the whole thesis of the webinar.

As we worked with Suresh Vittal of Forrester Research to put together the content, Jack, Suresh and I frequently hearkened back to a similar “sea change” that happened in the early days of content management.  In 1998, we spent much of our time talking to journalist, analysts and customers about unlocking the so-called webmaster bottleneck.  If you could only put web publishing in the hands of the internal content experts, then you could eliminate this delay created by having a “webmaster.”  By 1999 when we went public, everyone got it.

But unlocking this bottleneck created a new bottleneck - people finding the information they needed.  Now we suffered from content overload — because organizations kept producing more and more content and there was no efficient means to make sure that the content you showed was the content people needed or the products people wanted.  Organizations tried to fix it by investing in complex search engines or analytics or profile-based personalization.  None of this fixed the fundamental problem.

It’s time to get rid of the expert bottleneck.  In this economy, the timing is perfect.  There are some task that will always be manual but there are others that can and should be automated.   Automate for a better user experience.  Automate for efficiency. Turn what people see on your site over to the Mob.  It might make you feel a little uncomfortble now, but so was the idea of eliminating the webmaster bottleneck in 1999.  I say FUGETABOUTIT.