Recently in Gilbane San Francisco 10 Category

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend Gilbane SF. The conference brought together some of the top content management people from the U.S. and internationally. Overall, one of the things I really enjoyed about the conference was the mix of people on each of the panels -- you had analysts, developers and content creators responsible for developing content and building web sites.

I focused on my time on the Customers and Engagement Track and also went to a few sessions in the Content Technology Track. As expected, there was a lot of talk of Web 2.0 and how to implement social into your content management strategy. There were also several sessions examining return on investment (ROI) for implementation. 

 [ The Deadline for Speaking Proposals for Gilbane Boston is June 14, 2010 - STT ]

We've been providing regular updates on Gilbane San Francisco over on our dedicated announcements and press release blog, as well as on Twitter, but since not everybody subscribes to either of those, here is a quick summary for both conference attendees and technology exhibit visitors, with links.

Open to all:

• Opening Keynote session with: Jeremiah Owyang, Partner, Customer Strategy, Altimeter Group & Daniel W. Rasmus, Strategist, Author, Listening to the Future
• Industry Analyst Debate: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and What’s Coming with: Forrester, Gilbane, IDC, The Real Story Group (CMS Watch)
• Technology showcase with 34 content management technology vendors
• Sponsor Reception, Wednesday May 19
• Access to Product Labs on Wednesday and Thursday

Conference options:

• Four different conference packages
• Four in-depth pre-conference workshops
• CM Pros (Content Management Professionals) Summit
• Thirty-one conference sessions with the industry's best, and most fun, speakers
• Register

Follow the conference Twitter stream. The main hashtag is #gilbanesf. You can join (dm @gilbanesf) or follow the list of twitterers at Gilbane San Francisco.

Hope to see you there.

Or collaboration, enterprise social software, search, analytics, market trends, customer engagement strategies, intranet architectures, multi-channel publishing ..., or a prediction one of us has previously made that was prescient or presumptuous.

To learn more about the analysts on the panel including links to their blogs and Twitter accounts click on their name below. 

K2. Industry Analyst Keynote Debate: Industry Analyst Debate - What's Real, What's Hype, and What's Coming - May 19th 4:00pm - 5pm, Westin Market St, San Francisco

We invite industry analysts from different firms to speak at all our events to make sure our conference attendees hear differing opinions from a wide variety of expert sources. A second, third, or fourth opinion will ensure you don't make ill-informed decisions about critical content and information technologies or strategies. This session will be a lively, interactive debate guaranteed to be both informative and fun.

Panelists:
Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Hadley Reynolds, Research Director, Search & Digital Marketplace Technologies, IDC
Tony Byrne, Founder, The Real Story Group & CMS Watch 
Scott Liewehr, Senior Consultant, Web Content Management, Gilbane Group 

How to submit questions:

• If they are short enough, DM @gilbanesf or tag a tweet with #gilbanesf
• Comment on this post
• Email me

http://gilbanesf.com

Hi, I'm Ian Truscott and as you may have seen I've recently joined our WCM practice (you can get a bit of introduction to me here) - I am pleased to say this is my first blog post (hopefully of many) for Gilbane.  

It's an exciting time for this segment of the CMS industry and to be joining Gilbane and I am looking forward to sharing my passion for web engagement - hence the unashamedly buzz word laden title.  

Depending on the commentator; we are either in a social media age, or we are post the social media revolution - in either case the Internet is no longer an extension of the traditional passive consumption media channels, it is a place where information and brand consumers get involved. 

In fact, folks are now arguing that it's no longer 'social' it's just 'media' - the way we create, consume and socialize content has changed forever and for everyone. And of course, there is so much of it - how do you make your message stick?  

This has mean't a shift in focus for our industry, we've seen the age of the IT developers platform, been through the focus on 'easy to use' for content contributors to now - where being audience centric has become mainstream thinking (and a business imperative).

This has spawned a number of descriptions for this extension of WCM and the tools and practices we need to apply to become audience centric, including Persuasive Content, Web Experience Management, Customer Engagement or Web Engagement.    

All of these have something in common; a cycle of listening to the audience, understanding their needs and behaviour, using that to create and optimize content and some form of relevance based delivery. 

At it's simplest, from a tools perspective - it's the intersection of WCM, web analytics and personalized delivery. But it gets more complex,  with the inclusion of social media, CRM, marketing automation, e-mail, mobile delivery, auto-categorization, search - this list can go on.  

Yes, you can throw the kitchen sink at this one - but software and industry best practices are being aligned, for sound business reasons and they are aligning behind the audience, the citizen, the consumer.. you in fact.  

I'm going to finish on a couple of quotes from Frank Gilbane - from the foreword to 'Web Engagement' by Bill Zoellick (a book I've enjoyed for a while): 

The most unique characteristic of the web is in the way that it changes the relationship between your business and it's customers.

You will not be able to take advantage ... and know your customers without engaging them in a way that encourages them to share information with you. 

Engaging your customers requires understanding the new tools and data that are available and applying them in a way that nurtures a new level of trust. 

Not just saying that to be nice to the boss (although it can't do any harm!), or to point out that the book was authored by a Gilbane alumnus - I think the most relevant part of the quote is the date that Frank wrote that foreword - it was February 2000. 

Hence my excitement in joining Gilbane, a firm that has a great, long standing pedigree as an authority on web engagement, which is, as I say, my passion and I look forward to the privilegeof contributing to that.  

Interested in reading more on Web Engagement? - I suggest reading this White Paper by Mary Laplante or check out our guide for marketers at Gilbane San Francisco - where our speakers will be discussing a lot of the subjects I touch on here.  

At the industry analyst session at Gilbane Boston last December, one of the points of discussion was how well spending on web content management systems had held up during the depths of the recession compared to other parts of IT budgets. Everyone on the panel agreed, and Forrester and IDC both mentioned research showing a healthy market for WCM and expected growth (if someone remembers the numbers please comment). This was a surprise to much of the audience, but obviously not to the vendors (well, at least to those reaping the benefit).

Why has/is web content management growing? The one word answer is 'marketing' - not vendor marketing, although they are mostly in tune with, and encouraging, the more aggressive pro-activeness of enterprise marketers. And why are marketing executives now better at demanding, and getting,  budgets for WCM? There are a number of reasons, including the paradoxical "to save money" (system costs have come down, large system service contracts costs have not, and SaaS solutions and open source solutions are growing). Most importantly however, is that most organizations have finally figured out that 'marketing' means 'multi-channel, digital, and interactive/social marketing'. This is fundamental. The companies who took advantage of the recession to invest in learning what this means, experimenting with tools, customer interactions, and system integrations, have gotten a bit of a head start, but nobody can ignore this - this is not a 'nice to have'.

Why is the focus on 'web content management' and not something else? All product categories are fluid, and eventually there will be a category, buzzword/phrase TBD, for multi-channel content management that includes tools for social, mobile, tablet, channels etc. But for the foreseeable future, the corporate website(s) will be the hub, however it is accessed.

Well, all I really meant to do in this post was point to the special guide to marketing-focused sessions at Gilbane San Francisco in May, but now you know why. These sessions will also be useful for those in IT (along with our technology track) who support marketing initiatives.

We are very pleased to have Jeremiah Owyang and Daniel W. Rasmus in our opening keynote session this year as we announced yesterday. Both have been very popular with our audiences is the past: Jeremiah, on last year's analyst panel in San Francisco, and Dan as an opening keynote a few years ago in Paris at our (since sold) Documation event. If you can join us this year in SF you won't want to miss them (8:30-10:00am, Wednesday, May 19th).

The conference program is mostly complete with just a few more speaker confirmations to go, so you can start planning your agenda anytime. The conference program tracks this year are largely role based, rather than technology based. This is a result of input from our attendees, as well as from our exhibitors. In both cases, this is a reflection of the ubiquity and maturity of many web and content technologies - attendees want to know which of these apply to their own specific requirements, and vendors continue to specialize to differentiate themselves in a very crowded market. One result, of our approach is that technology topics can be sprinkled across mutiple tracks - social software, for example. In order to build a relevant customized agenda, you will want to read about all of the conference sessions, but here is some role-based advice to get you started quickly:

If you are in marketing, or responsible for a public website, start with the Customers & Engagement track, and then fill in with sessions from the Content Technology and Content Publishing tracks.

If you are an Information Manager, Knowledge Manager, line of business manager or Project Manager, start with the Collaboration & Colleagues track and then fill in with sessions from the Customers & Engagement, Content Technology and Content Publishing tracks.

If you are a Technologist or in IT, focus on the Content Technology track, and then add sessions from the other three tracks to see what your customers are trying to accomplish with the technology.

If you're in corporate or commercial publishing, check out the Publishing track and build a program around the Content Technology and Customers & Engagement track.

And don't forget the in-depth pre-conference workshops.

We'll be posting the speakers over the next few days, but you can now see the program schedule as well as the conference session descriptions, and the pre-conference workshops. Also, registration is open.

Though we are still catching our breath from the Boston conference and the holidays, it is time to get moving on our annual San Francisco conference, which the 3rd week of May this year. The conference site is http://gilbanesf.com, is still mostly populated with 2009 information, but will be updated this week with a new site design and current information. Content from the 2009 event is at http://gilbanesf.com/09/ will be moved to a subdirectory and continue to be available.

In the meantime, The description below is taken from the draft site and will give you a good idea of the topics we'll be covering. If you are interested in submitting a speaking proposal, remember that the deadline for submissions is January 18. See http://gilbane.com/speaker_guidelines.html.

Oh, and the Twitter handle is http://twitter.com/gilbanesf and the hashtag we'll be using is #gilbanesf.

Gilbane San Francisco 2010
Web, content, and collaboration technology have reached a new level of maturity. This is true in terms of technology, but more importantly, it is true in terms of what businesses expect to be able to do with these tools. Web and enterprise content management permeate every aspect of an organization. Public facing internet sites are the front door to an organizations' products and services, and where customers, partners and investors engage with the corporate brand and develop perceptions. Internal websites, whether in the form of intranets, blogs, wikis, or portals, provide knowledge workers increasingly efficient ways to collaborate and share knowledge. Customer and internal-facing applications share requirements that call for a number of enterprise content, publishing and infrastructure technologies, such as multi-lingual, social media, search, and integration software.

Gilbane San Francisco is organized into four tracks so that whether you are responsible for marketing, IT, a business unit, or an internal function, you will be able to easily navigate among the conference sessions. If you are responsible for customer-facing business activities start with the Customers & Engagement track, and then add appropriate sessions from the Content Technology & Content Publishing tracks. If your role is focused on internal collaboration, knowledge sharing or support activities, start with the Colleagues & Collaboration track, and supplement it with sessions from the technology & publishing tracks.

Track 1: Customers & Engagement
Corporate websites are now the most important public face of an organization, and the best way to grow, and communicate with, a broader customer base. Successful sales and marketing now requires Web sites that can reach a global audience, a mobile audience, and an audience familiar with social media and used to richer media. Websites also need to be findable, accessible, engaging, real-time & responsive, and have accurate and timely information that is synchronized with other channels. This is a tall order, but it is what your customers expect, and what companies are building.

Attendees:
For anyone responsible for marketing, business, or technical aspects of public facing websites, including, sales & marketing, digital marketing, brand managers, business units with P&L, Web strategists, IT, Web managers, business managers, digital media, e-commerce managers, content managers and strategists.

Topics:
Web content management, analytics, web design and UI, social media, rich media, global reach, multilingual practices, personalization, information architecture, designing for mobile, e-commerce, search engine optimization. 

Track 2: Colleagues & Collaboration
Well-designed internal websites for collaboration on projects or operational activities, whether in the form of intranets, portals, blogs, or wikis are critical for supporting modern corporate missions. Social software has reignited interest in enhancing employee collaboration and knowledge sharing, and the right use of social software, alone or combined with an intranet or portal, is a competitive requirement. Employees already use it, and expect it, and can be much more productive with it. While some business use-cases are obvious, companies are a long way from having enough experience to know how best to integrate and deploy different types of social software to best support business requirements.

Attendees:
For anyone responsible for internal websites, portals, collaboration & knowledge sharing activities, including, knowledge managers, product managers, project managers, IT, and content managers.

Topics:
Collaborative authoring, intranets, knowledge management, search, wikis, micro-blogging and blogging, managing social and user-generated content, integrating social software into enterprise applications, SharePoint, portals, social software platforms, enterprise 2.0 strategies.

Track 3: Content Technology
There are many different technologies involved in building web and enterprise content applications. Some of them are simple and some complex, some are open source and some are commercial, some are available via license, some as a service, some are ready for prime time, some aren’t, and some might be ready, but are controversial.

Attendees:
For those who are either responsible for technology decisions, or those who need to keep up-to-speed with the latest technology for enterprise content applications of all types, including, central IT, departmental IT, strategists, and managers who need to know what's possible and what's coming.

Topics:
Multi-lingual technologies and applications, XML, standards, integration, content migration, mobile, search, open source, SaaS, semantic technologies, social software, SharePoint, XBRL, and relevant consumer technologies.

Track 4: Content Publishing
Multi-channel publishing has been a goal of many organizations for years, but it is now more important than ever - and not that much easier. In addition to more traditional print and web channels, smartphones, e-book readers, other mobile devices, and even “in-product” displays need to be considered. In addition to more channels, there are more media types to manage. Dynamic publishing is a key business requirement for both single and multi-channel delivery.

Attendees:
For those responsible for content creation, management, and multi-channel/multi-lingual publishing, IT and others that need to learn about publishing technology because of new multi-channel demands, including corporate or commercial publishers, content managers, digital asset managers, documentation managers, and information architects.

Topics:
Multi-channel publishing, multi-lingual publishing, e-books, tablets, mobile, digital rights, digital asset management, documentation, structured content, XML, dynamic publishing, and publishing business models.