Recently by Mary Laplante

January 19, 1:00 pm ET

Marketing to customers is fundamentally different than marketing to prospects. The difference is data. Savvy marketers know that they’re sitting on a treasure trove of information about customers – products and services purchased, shopping habits, buying patterns, support history. They’re learning to tap into that data and connect it with content management systems to drive sales, improve targeting and conversion rates, and take engagement to the next level.

Register for this webinar, and get a pre-release version of a new Outsell Gilbane Beacon publication entitled Customer Experience Management: the New "New" of Digital Marketing and the Role of Web Content Management. Sponsored by Ektron.

Updated November 17, 2011

Magazine publishers are facing a “do or die” mandate. Every aspect of their business is undergoing profound and permanent change. Subscription models, advertising, and publishing practices that worked well in a print-centric world are no longer viable, at least in their current state or on their own. To succeed with sustainable revenue models via digital subscriptions, publishers must work quickly—and intentionally—to identify new dimensions of customer value, develop new services vs. product-only offerings, and quickly measure the results so as to refine their overall offering. 

September 22
14:30 CEST (Europe)
2:00 pm ET (North America)

Forget what you think you know about personalization.

• Defining marketing pressures: business factors that demand a fresh look at personalization
• Understanding what’s new with personalization: advances in data (what marketers can capture and use), processes (how they execute), and applications (how they leverage content for engagement)
• Adopting contemporary practices: how companies are taking engagement to new levels with solutions for profiling, personalizing, and targeting

September 13, 2011, 11:00 am ET

Understanding the Business Value of Automated Online Data Collection and Monitoring

Concerned with the cost of online data aggregation? Unsure of the data quality? Struggling with timeliness of monitoring and collecting web data? Burdened with IT bottlenecks when scripted processes break? Don’t know how to take advantage of the data?

July 19, 11:00 am ET

Core capabilities for WCM matter more than ever.

Audience engagement and customer experience are among the primary motivators for investment in web content management technologies and practices. As a result, features and functions enabling these applications have naturally moved to the forefront of buyer checklists and vendor roadmaps. As many companies move into adoption, however, they are discovering a powerful little secret: foundational WCM capabilities are equally important – if not more so.

Registration is open. Sponsored by Ektron.

May 18, 11:00 am ET

Automated translation -- both the technology and the practice -- has evolved signficantly in recent years. It's now a permanent part of the landscape of content globalization solutions. But even as software applications became more powerful and more reliable, and even as we learned where and how to use them appropriately, many types of content remained on the fringe. They weren't a good fit for machine translation. The volume was unpredictable. The velocity at which content came in was too fast. Rapid turnaround time on translation was impossible. The user of the MT tool needed to be a business manager, not a language specialist. For most companies, this meant that dynamic content and social media were outside the best-fit application space for most machine translation tools.

The next generation of MT technologies is designed to address this gap in the MT applications space. Vince Emery, analyst in Gilbane's content globalization, and Claude Walton, director of product marketing at SDL, show you how MT solutions can handle high-quality dynamic content such as continually changing online catalogs, personalized customer support text, and customer-facing social media. Vince and Claude outline the steps to establishing a dynamic translation practice and help you avoid common pitfalls to publishing dynamic content in the languages of your customers.

Registration is open. Sponsored by SDL.

Updated May 9, 2011

May 12, 10:00 am ET
Second date added May 25, 2:00 pm ET

 Successful digital engagement on a global scale is a hugely complex practice. Each transaction with each individual has dozens – even hundreds – of factors that influence the ability to make a connection that clicks. It is no wonder that for many marketing executives and managers, engagement success is akin to solving Rubik’s Cube. There are billions of ways to arrange the tiny pieces, but only a handful of configurations solve the puzzle.

• Bringing stability to the variables that create complexity, one interaction at a time.
• Influencing engagement impace with channelization, optimization, localization, individualization, and socialization.
• Supporting business goals that include time to market, efficiency, consistency, and relevancy.
• Leveraging technology to remove complexity and increase engagement impact.

Updated April 21, 2011

Please note new date: May 17, 11:00 am ET

Do you ever wish you could quickly and easily synchronize your content management systems the way you synchoronize your smartphone and your desktop? Make sure that documents changed and updated in one system are automatically, securely replicated in another system where that document might also live?

Where there are multiple content repositories, there are most likely document and content management challenges that arise from the need to share documents and content across those systems. How are updates and changes to documents coordinated across repositories easily and cost-effectively? How can enterprises deploy a mix of cloud-based and on-premise solutions and ensure that content is available within multiple business processes, regardless of where they are executed? How can content be reliably distributed between easy-to-use front-end systems and back-end systems that meet rigorous enterprise IT requirements?

This webinar will be of value to anyone who uses or manages heterogeneous CMS environments, and sees value in value in distributing the same content in multiple repositories. We discuss repository synchronization with Nicolas Maquaire, CEO of EntropySoft. Topics include business benefits, scenarios with SharePoint and cloud deployments, and a brief overview of the technology.

Regisration is open. Sponsored by EntropySoft. 

Why Product Managers and Marketers Care About Content Quality
 March 16, 12:00 pm ET

Corporate brand is the experience we deliver -- not just the logo on the products and serivces we sell. High-quality content is part of that experience.  

Dealing with the negative impact of bad content often falls to brand, product, and marketing managers who must address problems such as:

• Poor product documentation that leaves a decidedly negative impression of the company and the product.
• Customer confusion when descriptions of product features are inconsistent across marketing collateral, interactive datasheets, and product documentation.
• Compromised global revenue potential due to content that is poorly translated and localized because the source content is of poor quality.

February 10, 12:00 pm ET

Updated February 9: We just did the dry run for this webinar. We're including a great case study that reports ROI on marketing portals. The content will be of interest to digital marketers who aren't sure about how creating or revitalizing a marketing-oriented portal will impact their business.

Corporate portals are enterprise entryways, customer service channels, ecommerce platforms, engagement mechanisms, employee and citizen resources -- just to name a few of their value propositions. These applications are characterized by a need to link the back office with the audience-facing web property. Portal technology is designed for this purpose.

Unfortunately, a portal often comes at the expense of good content. Content publishing capability is often in the hands of a small group of IT or specialist users. This results in poor business user adoption, a lack of devolved portal management, and difficulty related to content contribution. Content authors complain about a lack of functionality offered in other content authoring tools, office products or social media web applications.

Learn how to bring your company's portals back to life. In this webinar, Gilbane's Ian Truscott and Robert Bredlau from e-Spirit discuss the benefits of integrating web content management and a portal delivery infrastructure. The result: fresh, relevant next-generation portal experiences without the IT bottlenecks.

Register for the webinar. Download the Gilbane Beacon on CMS and portal integration. Sponsored by e-Spirit.