Month: October 2013

Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Delivery Digital Experiences – Gilbane Conference Spotlight

October 29, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

While not everybody agrees that web content management should be the hub of digital experience management implementations, there should be no doubt it is an essential core component. Certainly the WebCM / CustomerXM / DigitalXM, etc. vendors that started in web content management have an opinion, though there are many nuances in their positioning which are important to understand. Even more interesting is what they have all learned in the past few years while incorporating or integrating other technologies to help their customers build modern digital experiences for customers and employees. Vendor visions and expertise are at least as important as those of analysts, consultants, integrators, agencies, and even your peers.

C7. Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Delivery Digital Experiences – A Panel Discussion

Wednesday, December, 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

You probably need to attend every session in the conference to even learn all the questions to ask before embarking on a next generation digital experience strategy and design. In this session a panel of competing vendors will discuss what they see as the critical components and challenges based on their customer’s experiences and feedback, and on their own vision of what is possible. Vendors have lots of valuable experience and information and this is your chance to hear from knowledgeable representatives minus the PowerPoint pitch.

Moderator:
Melissa Webster, Program VP, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC
Panelists:
Arjé Cahn, CTO, Hippo
Robert Bredlau, COO, e-Spirit
Ron Person, Sr. Consultant, Business Optimization Services, Sitecore
Russ Danner, Vice President, Products, Crafter Software
Loni Stark, Director of Product, Solution & Industry Marketing, Adobe

Speaker Spotlight: Mayur Gupta – Web Content Management – Not the Only Cog in the Wheel

October 25, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Mayur Gupta, Global Head, Marketing Technology, Kimberly-Clark. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: Mayur Gupta

Global Head, Marketing Technology

Kimberly-Clark

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations? If so, should it have a new name to match an expanded role? If not, what should be at the center?

It’s a great question. Often as marketers and technologists, we get excited with naming conventions & terminologies and get swayed away by new, shiny objects. Back to the question though, I strongly believe that there is no CENTER or HUB for digital experience management anymore, the entire ecosystem is the center. What does that mean? The challenge as well as the opportunity in the marketing technology landscape lies in the inter connectivity (data & context) between the different technology layers and components. It’s like a bicycle wheel with many cogs, Web content management or Digital Experience Management is just one of them, if you move the wheel forward or backward, you’ll have another cog appearing to be the center. For instance, data analytics & CRM is equally central to driving personalized consumer experiences but either of them (WCMS or Analytics) in isolation is incomplete. The simultaneous diversification and consolidation of various technology providers and platforms is an effort to address this challenge — making the ecosystem as the center instead of a particular technology or platform.

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

I head the global marketing technology capability @ Kimberly Clark, so in that regard yes we do have the “marketing technologist” role in our organization and we are expanding it each day. We are one of the very few Fortune 500 companies that have acknowledged the massive transformation in business at the intersection of Marketing & Technology, so I have a lot of respect for my leadership for being one of the pioneers in this space. Having said that, “marketing technology” as a role is just a nomenclature, what is critical is the concept of “marketing technology” as a capability, regardless of organizational boundaries, titles and ownerships.

Marketing technology is a progressive outcome of the dramatic evolution in the digital landscape within the last decade, with an extremely demanding, strong and in-control consumer at the epicenter. This evolution and innovation has reduced the conventional gulf between consumer experiences, marketing strategies and technologies that enable them to the extent that technology itself is the experience now. We can no longer define brand strategies in isolation from technology or build technology roadmaps without connecting it to consumer experiences that enable brand strategies. And, that is the role of a “marketing technologist” – connecting & combining brand strategies, creative consumer experiences with emerging and innovative technologies. Besides the technology landscape itself, marketing technology demands a more agile, nimble and lean perspective to technology innovation and adoption and therefore it requires more of a behavioral, mindset and cultural shift as compared to the conventional ways of technology delivery.

Marketing technology is no longer an option but a necessity for brands that want to market in a digital world and engage with a digital consumer anytime anywhere & every time everywhere.

Catch Up with Mayur at Gilbane

Track C: Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience

C1. Q&A with Real Live Marketing Technologists
Tuesday, December, 3: 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Follow Mayur on Twitter – @inspiremartech.

Healthcare e-Commerce Search Lessons for the Enterprise

October 23, 2013 / Lynda Moulton / 1 Comment

Search Tools Wanting on Many Exchanges: This headline was too good to pass up even though stories about the failures of the Affordable Care Act web site are wearing a little thin right now. For those of us long involved in developing, delivering and supporting large software solutions, we can only imagine all the project places that have brought about this massive melt-down. Seeing this result: “many who get through the log-in process on the new health insurance exchanges then have trouble determining whether the offered policies will provide the coverage they need”, we who spend hours on external and internal web sites know the frustrations very well. It is not the “search tools” that are lacking but the approach to design and development.

This current event serves as a cautionary tale to any enterprise attempting its own self-service web-site, for employees’ in-house use, customer service extranets or direct sales on public facing sites.

Here are the basic necessary requirements, for anyone launching large-scale site search, internally or externally.

Leadership in an endeavor of this scale requires deep understanding of the scope of the goals. All the goals must be met in the short term (enrollment of both the neediest without insurance AND enrollment of the young procrastinators), and scalable for the long term. What this requires is a single authority with:

Experience on major projects, global in reach, size and complexity
Knowledge of how all the entities in the healthcare industry work and inter-relate
Maturity, enough to understand and manage software engineers (designers), coders, business operations managers, writers, user interface specialists and business analysts with their myriad of personality types that will be doing the work to bring millions of computing elements into synch
The authority and control to hire, fire, and prioritize project elements.

Simplicity of site design to begin a proof of concept, or several proofs of concept, rolled out to real prospects using a minimalist approach with small teams. This a surer path to understanding what works and what doesn’t. Think of the approach to the Manhattan Project where multiple parallel efforts were employed to get to the quickest and most practical deployment of an atomic weapon. Groves had the leadership authority to shift initiative priorities as each group progressed and made a case for its approach. This more technically complex endeavor was achieved over a 4 year period, only one year more than this government healthcare site development. Because the ability to find information is the first step for almost every shopper, it makes sense to get search and navigation working smoothly first, even as content targets and partner sites are being readied for access. Again, deep understanding of the audience, what it wants to know first and how that audience will go about finding it is imperative. Usability experts with knowledge of the healthcare industry would be critical in such an effort. The priority is to enable a search before requiring identity. Forcing enrollment of multitudes of people who just want to search, many of whom will never become buyers (e.g. counselors, children helping elderly parents find information, insurers wanting to verify their own linkages and site flow from the main site) is madness. No successful e-commerce site demands this from a new visitor and the government healthcare site has no business harvesting a huge amount of personal data that it has no use for (i.e. marketing).

Hundreds of major enterprises have failed at massive search implementations because the focus was on the technology instead of the business need, the user need and content preparation. Good to excellent search will always depend on an excellent level of organization and categorization for the audience and use intended. That is how excellent e-commerce sites flourish. Uniformity, normalization, and consistency models take time to build and maintain. They need smart people with time to think through logical paths to information to do this work. It is not a task for programmers or business managers. Content specialists and taxonomists who have dealt with content in healthcare areas for years are needed.

How a public project could fail so badly will eventually be examined and the results made known. I will wager that these three basic elements were missing from day one: a single strong leader, a simple, multi-track development approach with prototyping and attention to preparing searchable content for the target audience. Here is a lesson learned for your enterprise.

Speaker Spotlight: Arjé Cahn – What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels?

October 19, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed one of our frequently asked questions to speaker Arjé Cahn, CTO at Hippo. We’ve included his answer that question here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: Arjé Cahn

CTO

Hippo

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels? What is the biggest challenge?

One of the biggest challenges for delivering multichannel content is getting the people inside your organization to look past modes of distribution and think instead in terms of target audiences. It’s important to remember that ultimately, it’s the customer choosing the channel—be it web, mobile or any upcoming digital channel. You’ve got to abstract from the idea that you’re “managing a website” and think instead of managing content, and make sure the content created makes for an optimal experience for every channel.

The challenge, in other words, is understanding your audiences. It’s important to remember that they are plural and varied. You’ve got to know who they are, what their background is, what they want—and respond accordingly, with the best personalized content. This is a business challenge that Hippo helps to solve. We help discover and understand audiences—and engage these different audiences in an understandable fashion. Hippo provides real time visitor analysis—allowing you to monitor who is experiencing your site, and keep track of the content they engage with. With this analysis, you can see patterns over time, and turn them into personas. There’s no need to rush into targeting by applying preconceived personas to visitors. Hippo supports you in the process, providing the tools and analysis to discover personas and audiences that you might be missing out on. We help you discover and understand your audiences in an organic way—the first step to creating optimal content and customer experience.

Catch Up with Arjé at Gilbane

Track C: Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience

C7. Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Delivery Digital Experiences – A Panel Discussion
Wednesday, December, 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

Follow Arjé on Twitter – @arjecahn.

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Content and User Experience Design for the Internet of Smart Things – Gilbane Conference Spotlight

October 17, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

There are many reasons to be excited about the Internet of Things, a content channel is not usually considered one of them. In fact, the mere suggestion of a need to support one more digital channel is enough to cause many execs to consider a career change, never mind n additional channels, and n is the future.

Many internet things don’t and won’t need to prepare content for direct human consumption, but many will – cars and watches and glasses are just the beginning. The variety of form factors, display technologies, and application requirements will present challenges in user experience design, content strategies, content management and data integration. The session we are spotlighting today will focus on the user experience design challenges, of which there are many.

T7. Have You Talked To Your Refrigerator Today? Content and User Experience Design for the Internet of Smart Things

Wednesday, December, 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m. – The Westin Boston Waterfront

The web is dead. Or is it evolving into the Internet of things? If so, how can we harness the emergence of smart and app-enabled devices, appliances, homes, cars and offices into the digital gene pool? Four senior executives in experience planning and strategy, technology, creative and user experience will provide a point of view on the Internet of smart things and answer key questions, including the following, using real world examples:

How can your smart washing machine, refrigerator and dishwasher be mated with intelligent apps, CRM, and dynamic content management systems to create real-time marketing and ecommerce experiences?
What happens to content strategy and management as app-enabled “playthings” become essential to your work and family life?
What do we do as video baby monitors become digital caretaking, developmental tracking, medical monitoring, and product ordering parent-bots?
What is the optimal customer experience for using voice to simultaneously integrate and operate your car, your mechanic, your GPS, your iPod, your radio, your tablet and your smartphone?
What best practices are needed for creative designers, content strategists, marketers, and user experience designers to create engaging Internet of smart things experiences?

Moderator:
Doug Bolin, Associate Director, User Experience Design, Digitas

Panelists:
Michael Vessella, Vice President, Director, Experience Design, Digitas
Michael Daitch, Vice President, Group Creative Director, Digitas
Adam Buhler, Vice President, Creative Technology / Labs / Mobile, Digitas

Speaker Spotlight: Jake DiMare – Web Content Management Hub, Multiple Channels, and Marketing Technologists

October 11, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed three of our frequently asked questions to speaker Jake DiMare, Senior Project Manager at ISITE Design. We’ve included his answers to those questions here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Jake DiMare - Gilbane Conference

Speaker Spotlight: Jake DiMare

Senior Project Manager

ISITE Design

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations?

My personal perspective is the customer is at the center and everything else orbits around them. Thus, if I must use a label, customer experience management makes the most sense to me. That said, and to extend the metaphor, I do think content management is the hub of technology in the ‘low customer orbit’. I believe customers make decisions about where to focus their attention in the digital world based on the content available and so it stands to reason the technology that delivers your content must be rock solid.

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels?

To borrow an acronym from NPR (National Public Radio), in my humble opinion, the best strategy is COPE or “Create Once Publish Everywhere”.

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

Frankly, ‘Marketing Technologist’ has been an imperative, existing role within digital agencies and on the client side for over a decade. Whether the need is recognized and respected is the real question… And so the title and associated job description are laggards. Predictably, the result is many people within an organization will wear the marketing technologist hat.

In the most practical sense, if your organization engages with customers through any digital channels, whether you want it or not, somebody at some point will play the role of marketing technologist. The size of your organization will certainly dictate when this becomes a full time job or jobs, but the following responsibilities will always need attention:

Coordinating internal and external digital strategists, designers and engineers for the purpose of designing, building and maintaining digital properties.
Working with content strategists to ensure a seamless transition of content across channels.
Coordinating with traditional marketing to ensure digital channels are aligned with overall initiatives.
Measurement and optimization of customer engagement through existing digital channels using analytics and reporting.
Looking forward to determine how to engage audiences with emerging technology.
Understand and grow customer engagement management.
Work with brand strategists to ensure the overall digital customer experience is aligned with brand values.
Accountable for digital projects.

Catch Up With Jake at Gilbane

Track E- E5. Incorporating Content Strategy into Your Project: Why and How?
Wednesday, December, 4: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.

Hear more from Jake when you subscribe to his blog, The CMS Myth.

Press Release: Gilbane Conference Keynotes Share Strategies for Building Next-Generation Digital Experiences

October 10, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

The rapid-fire format allows attendees to get the most from their keynote experience

Boston — October 10, 2013 – BUSINESS WIRE – The Gilbane Conference 2013 (http://gilbaneconference.com), now in its 12th year, taking place December 3–5 at the Westin Boston Waterfront, features a stellar mix of leading industry practitioners and analysts in its two keynote sessions.

In the first keynote session, hear from two marketing executives at global organizations who have critical responsibilities for digital experience strategy and delivery. Our third speaker, a technologist who co-founded a company to help brands and agencies implement digital experiences, authors the well-known and highly Chief Marketing Technologist blog covering the intersection of marketing and technology.

The keynotes, scheduled on Tuesday, December 3 at 8:30 a.m., and 11:00, a.m., are moderated by conference founder and chair, Frank Gilbane. The first features the following speakers and topics:

Sara Larsen, Vice President, Digital Marketing, SAP
Squeeze Every Penny Out of Your Content Investment

Meghan Walsh, Senior Director, eCommerce Platform System Management, Marriott International
Rethinking Content Delivery: Moving Beyond a Traditional Web Content Management Approach

Scott Brinker, Founder & CTO, ion interactive, inc., and Author, Chief Marketing Technologist Blog
What Is a Marketing Technologist?

“One of the unique benefits of our conferences is that we always include industry analysts from multiple competing firms to ensure our conference attendees hear differing opinions so they can make better informed decisions” says Gilbane Conference founder and chair, Frank Gilbane. “In our second keynote session, we have senior analysts from Gartner, Forrester, and Real Story Group. Each will address a topic crucial to digital experience strategies for customers and employees.”

Speakers and topics include:

Jake Sorofman, Research Director, Marketing Leaders Research Team, Gartner
Move Over Big Data — Here Comes Big Content!

Stephen Powers, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester Research
The Context Conundrum?

Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group
ShakesPoint: What the Bard Could Teach Us About SharePoint — And the Digital World

To register to attend the Gilbane Conference 2013 go to ~~https://secure.infotoday.com/forms/default.aspx?form=gil2013~~ or phone 1-800-300-9868. For a limited time, those who sign up for the ConferencePlus Pass will receive a Google Nexus 7.

Media registration is open to working journalists and analysts with commercial news organizations and research firms. To register for free, please go to .

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About Bluebill Advisors and Gilbane.com
Gilbane.com was launched in 1996 by Frank Gilbane. Bluebill Advisors, Inc. is a technology analyst firm focused on disruptive information technologies and their potential for strategic application. The firm has advised hundreds of organizations representing a wide range of industries and has helped executives responsible for a variety of functions, including corporate strategy, marketing, investment, product development and support, engineering, and publishing. Bluebill has created the program and chaired the Gilbane Conferences since its inception in 2002.

About Information Today, Inc.
Information Today, Inc., (www.infotoday.com) is a leading publisher and conference organizer in the field of technology and technology applications in today’s enterprise. In addition to producing the KMWorld, CRM Evolution, and Customer Service Experience conferences, Information Today, Inc. publishes KMWorld, EContent, and CRM magazines and their corresponding websites (www.destinationCRM.com, www.econtentmag.com, and www.kmworld.com). The company also publishes Streaming Media and Speech Technology magazines and organizes several other technology conferences including the Gilbane Conference.

Contact:

Information Today
Misty Simms, 859-278-2223
msimms@infotoday.com

Month: October 2013

Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Delivery Digital Experiences – Gilbane Conference Spotlight

C7. Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Delivery Digital Experiences – A Panel Discussion

Speaker Spotlight: Mayur Gupta – Web Content Management – Not the Only Cog in the Wheel

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations? If so, should it have a new name to match an expanded role? If not, what should be at the center?

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

Catch Up with Mayur at Gilbane

Healthcare e-Commerce Search Lessons for the Enterprise

Speaker Spotlight: Arjé Cahn – What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels?

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels? What is the biggest challenge?

Catch Up with Arjé at Gilbane

Content and User Experience Design for the Internet of Smart Things – Gilbane Conference Spotlight

T7. Have You Talked To Your Refrigerator Today? Content and User Experience Design for the Internet of Smart Things

Speaker Spotlight: Jake DiMare – Web Content Management Hub, Multiple Channels, and Marketing Technologists

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations?

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels?

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

Catch Up With Jake at Gilbane

Press Release: Gilbane Conference Keynotes Share Strategies for Building Next-Generation Digital Experiences

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