Month: December 2013

Gilbane Conference resources and coverage

December 16, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Misty has been collecting posts about this year’s Gilbane Conference. If you see any we are missing please let us know via comment or email. You can also check tweets at #gilbane, or via Topsy, find conference presentations at http://gilbaneconference.com/Presentations.aspx, and see speaker spotlights.

Media Sponsors

CMS Myth
• http://www.cmsmyth.com/2013/12/best-bets-at-gilbane-2013-which-sessions-ill-be-attending/
• http://www.cmsmyth.com/2013/12/when-will-end-users-overwhelming-love-their-cms/
• http://www.cmsmyth.com/2013/12/how-marriott-is-rethinking-content-delivery-across-70-countries-and-3800-hotels/
• added 12/17/13: http://www.cmsmyth.com/2013/12/redefining-success-for-web-cms-project-teams/

eContent
• http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Context-at-Gilbane-93598.htm
• http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Content-Strategists-vs.-the-CMS-at-Gilbane-93615.htm
• http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Content-Management-and-Your-Mobile-Strategy-at-Gilbane-93637.htm
• http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/The-Internet-of-Things-Comes-to-Life-at-Gilbane-93641.htm
• added 1/13/14: http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/Column/Content-Throwdown/The-Rise-of-the-Marketing-Technologist-93907.htm

Fierce Content Management
• http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/marketing-technologist-could-act-bridge-between-cmo-cio/2013-12-03
• http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/multichannel-delivery-means-its-time-separate-content-creation-presentation/2013-12-03

Blogs

4 hoteliers
• http://www.4hoteliers.com/features/article/8056?awsb_c=rss&awsb_k=xfeed

Accidental Taxonomist
• http://accidental-taxonomist.blogspot.com/2013/12/taxonomy-governance.html

Bluebill Advisors
• added 1/9/14: http://bluebillinc.com/2014/01/findability-issues-impact-everything-work-related/
• http://bluebillinc.com/2013/12/beyond-customer-experience-management/

Chief Marketing Technologist
• http://chiefmartec.com/2013/12/marketing-technologist-neo-marketing-matrix/

Citeworld
• http://www.citeworld.com/social/22751/sap-social-media-streamlined
• http://www.citeworld.com/consumerization/22747/customer-attention-challenge

Creative Virtual
• http://www.creativevirtual.com/blog/?p=821

Curata
• http://www.curata.com/blog/content-marketing-event-gilbane-conference-2013-wrap-up/
• http://www.curata.com/blog/content-marketing-technology-wrap-up-gilbane-2013-video/

Globalization Partners
• added 12/19/13: http://blog.globalizationpartners.com/insights-into-gilbane-conference.aspx

Engaging Times
• http://engagingtimes.com/battle-ready-offer-global-customer-experience-notes-gilbane-frontline/

I-Cubed
• added 12/17/13:

Jeff Cutler
• http://jeffcutler.com/social-media-blogs/gilbane-conference-2013-content-marketing-track-qa-session-review/#.UqdJXvRDs8w
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6HyjzloD3U

Marketing Think
• http://marketingthink.com/sap-got-social-media-act-together/

The Parallax View – Winter 2014
• added 3/4/14: http://www.parallax.ca/?page_id=4665

Zia Consulting
• http://www.ziaconsulting.com/blog/gilbane-conference-2013-recap/

Other

Seen.co
• added 12/17/13: http://seen.co/event/gilbane-conference-2013-boston-ma-2013-527/

Creating the Global User Experience

December 12, 2013 / Marc Strohlein / 0 Comments

I was gratified to have the opportunity to do a presentation on the Global User Experience at the Gilbane Conference, as well as moderating several sessions in the technology track. For those that missed my presentation, I’ve posted a short recap here and a further exploration of the topic.

A common theme throughout the conference sessions was digital experiences and the role of mobile, web, content management, and other technologies in providing superior experiences to customers. That’s to be expected as creating superior customer experiences is a strategic imperative for most organizations, and also the current focus of most content software solutions in the marketplace, including content management systems. What is often overlooked (and the subject of my presentation) is that the CMS doesn’t just support delivery of the customer experience—it also has to support the behind the scenes players that create the customer experience.

Providing a compelling digital user experience is a complex undertaking no matter what the nature of the business or enterprise. It requires a range of talents including authoring, curation, story telling, design, and development, testing and deployment—and the tools to effectively support those diverse skill sets.

The heart of that experience is a modern CMS; in fact, delivering compelling digital user experiences is virtually impossible without one. But selecting the right CMS is challenging—after all, there are many to choose from and it can be difficult to differentiate products—most promise to deliver superior digital user experiences.

But one thing that is often overlooked is that creating great customer experiences requires an orchestrated approach by the “other users” of the CMS: editors and developers. It also requires the integration of tools and content that may reside outside of the CMS. In other words, the quality of the customer experience is directly related to the quality of the experience that a CMS provides to content creators, developers, and integrators.

Digging a bit deeper, content creators are actually a diverse collection of roles and skill sets, not just authors and editors. What’s common across those roles is that many are not full time professional content authors, which makes the quality of the content creator experience vitally important. Content creators want to use tools that are easy and familiar with a short learning curve. Most of all, they want to be able to focus on telling stories and creating great content, not mastering complex tools.

Developers, like content creators, also value ease of use and familiarity. They want to use tools, languages, and frameworks that they are familiar with and that work well in the technology environment in which they live. Most importantly, they want and need to be involved in the process of selecting a CMS—failure to include IT will lead to increased time to operation, and a risk that the chosen solution won’t work well in the enterprise’s IT environment.

The integrator experience involves the developers, partners, and vendors that have to integrate the CMS with enterprise systems and applications (the installed base), but also with solutions from other vendors that help provide the customer experience. If integration is difficult, it will take more time or, worse yet, not be done. Poorly done integration drains energy, productivity, and innovation leading to later, less desirable results.

The solution to providing the global user experience is a well-architected CMS that provides comfortable and easy-to-use core functionality while easily integrating with enterprise and third party tools and applications. The selection of that CMS requires a concerted and cooperative effort on the part of all stakeholders that will ultimately use the content management system. Selection of a CMS is not a technology decision, it’s a strategic business decision that warrants the time, effort, and participation of all business and technology stakeholders in order to render the best decision.

Beyond Customer Experience Management: What Your CMS Really Needs to Deliver

December 12, 2013 / Marc Strohlein / 1 Comment

Selecting a new or replacement content management system CMS is one of the most strategic technology decisions you can make. Why? Because customers and prospects expect personalized, engaging, dynamic, and high quality experiences and will leave if they don’t find them.

Selecting the right CMS is important because it is a primary tool in providing those experiences and the hub that connects and drives many of the components that make up customer experience management. This post is based on a white paper entitled “Beyond Customer Experience: What Your CMS Really Needs to Deliver, “ which was also the subject of a recent presentation I did at the Gilbane Conference. You can download the white paper here.

Providing a personalized and seamless experience to customers across myriad devices, touch points, and stages in the relationship is a big challenge; one with which many organizations struggle. A recent Bain & Company survey found that while 80% of surveyed executives believe their companies are delivering a great customer experience, only 8% of their customers agree.

One reason they struggle is that customer experience is only part of the equation, specifically, the goal. The other parts of the equation that achieve that goal are content creator experience, developer experience, and integrator experience-in total, the “global user experience.” While those are “behind the scenes players, they create and shape the customer experience.

Great customer experiences are predicated on the effectiveness with which a CMS provides those other experiences—in effect, a well-designed CMS inspires better performance on the part of content creators and developers, yielding customer experiences that deliver more business impact. It also allows integration of familiar and new tools to enhance the productivity and effectiveness of content creators and developers. Shown as an equation, the global user experience would look like the diagram below:

Key to achieving a superior customer experience is the ability for content creators, marketers, and developers to focus on the experience itself, not the mechanics of producing it. That requires a mature CMS solution that provides a balanced set of tools and capabilities for content creators, developers, and integrators. That, in turn, requires a coordinated CMS selection process amongst all of those stakeholders that emphasizes not only the individual experiences, but the collective experience as well.

As we noted at the top of this post, selecting a CMS is a strategic decision-the CMS solution that provides the right global user experience is a growth engine that helps power the success of any business or firm-the right strategic decision.

Speaker Spotlight: Karl Wirth – Real time and relevant content

December 6, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Karl Wirth, CEO and Co-Founder of Evergage. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: Karl Wirth

Co-Founder and CEO

Evergage

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels? What is the biggest challenge? Development and maintenance cost? Content control? Brand management? Technology expertise?

I believe the best overall strategy is delivering relevant content to audiences. Thanks to Big Data and technology, organizations now have the ability to serve their users and visitors dynamic, personalized content, based off of their behaviors and actions. Increasing relevancy and interacting with people in real time will capture attention, drive engagement, and ultimately increase conversions.

Real-time behavior-based personalization:

Is always relevant
Drives customer engagement
Compels action
Increases conversion rates

The biggest challenges that we have observed are:

Lack of resources – a customer success manager or marketer may not have the time to utilize a new technology
Budget constraints – organizations may not have budgeted for a new marketing tool
Content control – content may be managed by different departments creating inconsistencies and ownership confusion

The truth is that the days of static and irrelevant content are over. In our customer-driven world, organizations should invest to get to know their customers and tailor content to their actions.

Catch Up with Karl at Gilbane

Product Labs

K. From static to real-time web marketing in 45 minutes
Wednesday, December 4: 3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.

Find out more about this session and our other conference sessions here.

Be sure to follow Karl @Evergage

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What is Content, Context, and Educational Marketing?

December 2, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

You can see our series of speaker spotlights and general updates about our upcoming conference in Boston. Here, I’ll be highlighting a few conference sessions and why we have decided to include them.

You could say that our conference has assumed content marketing since our initial focus on web content management has always attracted marketers. But there is certainly a lot more attention now paid to the crafting of content, as well as to matching content to context whether that is channel context, customer context, buying-cycle context, or better, at least these three. In spite of the wise-cracky session description, you will hear thoughtful and reliable commentary on one of the biggest buzz terms of the year.

C5. Content, Context, and Educational Marketing

Wednesday, December, 4: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.

Content Marketing is certainly hot. But what is it? Is it new? Is it old? Was there ever a time when marketing was content-free? Has it always been content-free? Is there some new kind of content that makes marketing different? Is it a strategy, a methodology, a parallel universe? Snarkiness aside, it is easy to see that carefully created or chosen content can help improve success rates of different kinds of marketing objectives. This session takes a serious look at what content marketing is today, how you can use it, and how it is evolving.

Moderator:
Jose Castillo, President, thinkjose

Speakers:
Kipp Bodnar, Director of Marketing, Hubspot
WTF is Context Marketing?
Doug Bolin, Associate Director, User Experience Design, Creative, DigitasLBi, and Adjunct Professor, Mass Art
Beyond Content Marketing, The Emergence of Edumarketing