Year: 2013 (Page 2 of 7)

Speaker Spotlight: Frank Schneider – Multi-modal interface essential to mobile customer engagement

November 29, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Frank Schneider, VP of Customer Experience Solutions at Creative Virtual USA. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: Frank Schneider

VP Customer Experience Solutions

Creative Virtual USA

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

As technology becomes the backbone of every organization, it forces the cross pollination of roles, especially now between marketing and IT. With a shift towards data-based marketing and new relationships forming between marketing, sales and customer service, the advent of the “Marketing Technologist” is real. This shift is fueling the need for marketing automation, sales enablement, content management, knowledge management and even translation. Marketing Technologists have emerged as the perfect conduit between platform adoption and management, and the traditionally non-technical roles of sales, marketing and customer service.

With customer service becoming the new marketing and marketing’s ability to directly influence the sales pipeline, Chief Marketing Technologists are sprouting up as the perfect solution to balance a variety of needs including marketing and CRM software, content marketing, social and mobile, data and analytics, web and app development, ad networks and customer engagement programs. From social media monitoring to SEO analysis to translation management and ecommerce, Marketing Technologists are fast becoming the “must have” in every organization that is competing in a global economy.

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?

Content marketing is evolving to become the center of digital strategy. Consequently, every organization should endeavor to employ the new role of Chief Content Officer or some derivative thereof. Managing the ebb and flow of content and messaging via multiple channels has created the need for a more comprehensive content strategy across departments and media. Channel management between web, social, and mobile have not only created opportunities to deliver messaging, but an urgent need to provide fresh material for public consumption.

Organizations must take cues from traditional publications hiring copy editors, writers and reviews to constantly curate fresh content that furthers the company’s mission, corresponds to the marketing goals and satisfies the needs of their audience. However, you do need someone leading the charge – a person that understands the mission of the content team, rallies the resources and takes ownership of getting it done. Furthermore, they need the tools to get it done. Now more than ever, technology will play an ever increasing role in how content is aggregated, curated, manage and delivered.

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?

A proper macro level strategy for content delivery across multiple channels should be comprised of several key elements.

Consistency. Whether it be call center agents looking for an answer or policy or a customer checking a web page, the right answer, right messaging, and proper branding should be pervasive and consistent, no matter the medium or device. Nuanced variable can be in play in regards to format, UI, and design, but at the end of the journey, customers need to feel that your content delivery allowed for a seamless experience.
Correct and Compliant. Along the lines of the first element, “correct” can mean many things. First, the item must incorporate content that is not just correct in regards to the answer from a company perspective, but answer precisely the question the customer has (in regards to what began the content search or inquiry). Furthermore, this correct answer must incorporate personalization factors; in other words, the answer must be particularly right for that customer or that profile of customer. Lastly, content must be compliant… from HIPPA, to SEC guidelines, to CPNI… content delivery must adhere to compliance guidelines will protecting the interests of both consumer and business.
Automated and seamless. Content delivery across all channels must be deployed with a strategy towards, and enabled by technology and tools for, automated cross pollination and management of content. The idea of multi-channel strategy, that is, the ability to deliver in multiple channels (web, mobile/tablet, call center, IVR, social/community, branch), must mature from brainstorming strategy to refined omnichannel capability. An ominichannel content delivery system allows for authentic smart delivery of content, no matter the channel or modality.

Catch Up with Frank at Gilbane

Track T: Re-imagining the Future: Technology and the Postdigital Experience

T1: Are You Leveraging All the Mobile Technologies Required for Competitive Mobile Engagement?
“Come As You Are: Multi-Modal Interface is Essential to Mobile Customer Engagement”
Tuesday, December, 3: 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.

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Speaker Spotlight: John Felahi – Making content findable

November 29, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker John Felahi, Chief Strategy Officer at Content Analyst Company, LLC. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: John Felahi

Chief Strategy Officer

Content Analyst Company, LLC

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?

One of the biggest challenges to delivering content to the web is making it as findable as possible to potential interested viewers. While traditional, manual tagging and keyword search methods may have gotten us this far, and may be good enough for some use cases, they’re still not without limitations. The good news is, there are far more advanced, sophisticated – and automated – technologies available to remedy the numerous limitations of manual tagging content and keyword-based search. The limitations of manual tagging and keyword-based include:

Term creep – New terms constantly emerge, requiring taxonomies to be constantly updated.
Polysemy – Take Apple, for example. Is your user searching for the company, the Beatles’ record label, or the fruit?
Acronyms – Texting has introduced an entirely new language of acronyms (LOL, TTYL, WDYT). Manually tagging content requires the editor to consider possible acronyms the users will be searching for.
Abbreviations – Tagging content with long, scientific terms, geographies, etc. require editors to factor these in along with the long terms they represent.
Misspellings – Thanks to spellcheck and autocorrect, technology has become much more forgiving for those who never made it past the first round eliminations in their sixth grade spelling bee. Content search, unfortunately, needs to be equally accommodating, if you want your users to find your content – which means tagging it with common misspellings.
Language – The web has certainly made the world a much smaller place, but that doesn’t mean everyone speaks English. Making content findable in any language means it has to also be tagged in multiple languages.

On to the good news – there’s technology that’s been used for years in eDiscovery and the US Intelligence Community to overcome these very challenges, but for different reasons. Because the bad guys aren’t tagging their content to make it more findable, the intel community needs a better way to find what they’re looking for. And in eDiscovery, finding relevant content can make a multi-million dollar difference to the outcome of a particular litigation or other regulatory matter. That’s why tens of thousands of legal reviewers and countless analysts in the intel community use a technology known as concept-aware advanced analytics.

How concept-aware advanced analytics differs from manual tagging and keyword search

As its name implies, concept-aware understands the underlying concepts within the content. As such, it can tag content automatically. On the viewer’s side, content can be found by simply saying, “find more like this.” Categories are defined by taking examples that represent the concepts of a category. The system “learns” what that category is all about, and can then identify conceptually similar content and apply the same category. The process is the same on the search side. The user points to a piece of content and says, “find more like this.” Or as the content publisher, you present the viewer with conceptually similar content, i.e., “you may also be interested in these articles.”

While concept-aware advanced analytics doesn’t necessarily replace manual tagging and keyword search – which work very well in certain situations – the technology clearly overcomes many of the limitations of traditional tagging and search methods.

Catch Up with John at Gilbane

Track E: Content, Collaboration, and the Employee Experience

E7: Strategic Imperatives for Enterprise Search to Succeed
Wednesday, December, 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

Can Human Sensors Contribute to Improving Search Technology?

November 27, 2013 / Lynda Moulton / 0 Comments

Information Today fall meetings usually have me in the Enterprise Search Summit sessions but this year KM World was my focus. Social networking, social media and tools are clearly entering the mainstream of the enterprise domain as important means of intra-company communication, as many corporate case presentations revealed. But it was Dave Snowden’s Thursday keynote, Big Data vs. Human Data, which encouraged me because he conveyed a message of how we must synthesize good knowledge management practices out of both human and machine-based information. Set aside 52+ minutes and be prepared to be highly stimulated by his talk .

Snowden does the deep thinking and research on these topics; at present, my best option is to try to figure out how to apply concepts that he puts forth to my current work.

Having long tried to get enterprises to focus on what people need to do to make search work meaningfully in an organization, instead of a list of technology specifications, I welcome messages like Snowden’s. Martin White called for information specialists for search management roles earlier this year in a CMSWire piece. While it may be a stretch to call for “search specialists” to act as “human sensors,” it does merit consideration. Search specialists have a critical role to play in any enterprise where knowledge assets (content and human expertise), data retrieval and analysis , and understanding user needs must fit cohesively together to deliver a searchable corpus that really works for an organization. This is not typically an assignment for a single IT professional focused on installing software, hardware and network oversight.

One of the intangible capital assets defined by a recent start-up, Smarter-Companies, Inc., is human capital. Founder Mary Adams has devised a methodology to be used by a person she calls an Icountant. An Icountant establishes values for intangible capital and optimizing its use. Adam’s method is a new way of thinking about establishing asset value for organizations whose real worth has more to do with people and other intangibles than fixed assets like buildings and equipment.

Let’s consider the merit of assigning value to search specialists, those experts who can really make search technology work optimally for any given enterprise. How should we value them? For what competencies will we be assigning jobs to individuals who will own or manage search technology selection, implementation/tuning and administration?

Rather than defaulting to outside experts for an evaluation process, installation and basic training for a particular technology, we need internal people who are more astute about characteristics of and human needs of an organization. High value human sensors have deep experience in and knowledge of an enterprise; this knowledge would take the consultant off-the-street months or years to accrue. People with experience as searchers and researchers supporting the knowledge intensive units of a company, with library and information science training in electronic information retrieval methods must be on the front lines of search teams.

Knowledge of users, what searchable content is essential across all business units, and what is needed just for special cases is a human attribute that search teams must have. Consider the points in White’s article and the wisdom of placing humans in charge of algorithm-based solutions. What aptitudes and understanding will move the adoption of any technology forward? Then pick the humans with highly tuned sensitivity to what will or will not work for the technology selection and deployment situation at hand. Let them place search technology in the role of augmenting human work instead of making human workers slaves to technology adaptation.

If you are at the Gilbane Conference next week, and want to further this discussion, please look for me and let me know what you think. Session E7 will have a special focus on search, Strategic Imperatives for Enterprise Search to Succeed, a Panel Discussion. I will be moderating.

Gilbane Complimentary Technology Showcase Pass

November 27, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

Gilbane technology showcase ticket

Can’t make all three days of the Gilbane Conference? We’ve got plenty going on in the technology showcase too. Take advantage of our complimentary showcase pass today.

Your Showcase Pass Includes Access to:

Six Keynote Presentations
All Product Labs
Technology Showcase Area
Sponsor Networking Reception

Register for your free pass now

Opening Keynotes – December 3: 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

Moderator:
Frank Gilbane, CEO, Bluebill Advisors Inc and Founder & Chair, Gilbane Conferences

Speakers:
Gerry Moran, Head of Social Media, North America, SAP
How to Make Yourself a Content Stop on the New Buyer Journey
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?

Opening Keynotes – December 3: 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Moderator:
Frank Gilbane, CEO, Bluebill Advisors Inc and Founder & Chair, Gilbane Conferences

Speakers:
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

Product Labs

The Product Labs are open to conference attendees and visitors to the technology showcase free of charge, and are moderated and presented by conference sponsors. While the presentations are meant to be educational, they are typically focused on product technologies or customer case studies. They provide a good opportunity to learn more about specific products or vendors. See the schedule here.

Exhibitors

The Technology Showcase provides attendees with a central meeting place and the ability to speak one-on-one with industry-leading exhibitors while learning more about their products and services. See the exhibitors here.

Showcase Hours:

Tuesday, December 3 10:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Networking Reception 5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Wednesday, December 4 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

You can also still register for the full conference:

Register today and save $100. Plus, get a free Google Nexus 7 with your ConferencePlus pass

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Responsive Design and the Future of Digital Experiences

November 26, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Digital experience designers are familiar with the approach of responsive design even if they haven’t used it. If they have used it they know it is not quite as easy as it first sounds, and the popularity of responsive design courses suggests there is a still a lot of learning going on. But even if you don’t need to understand the code, if you are a marketing manager you need to know what you can expect responsive design to accomplish and what level of effort it entails.

C2. Responsive Design and the Future of Digital Experiences

Tuesday, December, 3: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m.

Responsive design has been around since the early days of the browser wars, but as mobile channels grew it became both more important and more complex. Gone are the days when new digital channels, form factors, and other device characteristics can be anticipated and digital strategies need to reflect this new reality. This session will provide multiple perspectives on what responsive design can do, what its limitations are, and what its future challenges are.

Moderator:
Tom Anderson, President, Anderson Digital

Speakers:
Scott Noonan, Chief Technology Officer, Boston Interactive
In Koo Kim, Senior Manager, MOBEX, NorthPoint Digital
Scrap the Big Launch, Fly a Kite: How to Create and Maintain Control of Smarter Mobile Apps with Real-Time UI Updates, A/B Testing, and Personalization
Christopher S Carter, General Manager, aLanguageBank
Are You Prepared to Create Content for the Internet of Things?

Speaker Spotlight: Pamela Kostur – Do you have a content control problem?

November 23, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Pamela Kostur, Partner at Parallax Communications. We’ve included her answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: Pamela Kostur

Partner

Parallax Communications

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?

For me, it’s always content first. Content should serve its audiences, yet too often, organizations put themselves first, basing their messaging on what they want to tell customers instead of on what customers want to know. So, regardless of the delivery mechanism—web, blog, video, webinar, tweet—I always start with the following questions:

What are you trying to say? To whom?
Why? What do you want them to know? What do you want them to do?
What content and delivery method will best serve audiences’ needs, based on your answers to these questions?

The biggest challenge I see in many of the organizations I work with is definitely content control. Many organizations don’t think beyond individual departments. So, Marketing may “own” one component of the content, but Customer Support owns another version that is different, and possibly inconsistent. I’ve even found inconsistent product descriptions throughout companies’ websites, saying different things about the same products, and providing inconsistent types of information about similar products.

Further adding to the content control problem is that many organizations don’t know what content they have, so instead of modifying/retiring existing content, they add new content to the mix, introducing more inconsistencies. A content strategy should consider all iterations of content, for all outputs, for all users, and bring them together into a unified message that serves the audience and promotes brand consistency.

Catch Up with Pamela at Gilbane

Track C: Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience

C10. Content Strategies: Customer Experience, Competition, Content Marketing and Curation
Wednesday, December, 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

Follow Pamela on Twitter – @Pamela_Kostur.

Multi-channel Publishing and Content Reuse

November 22, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

We’re big believers in the potential for learning from colleagues in other industries. There are many shared challenges crossing vertical boundaries not always obvious because of different vocabularies, and often a gem can be found in the variety of solutions, or an idea can be sparked by a slightly different lens on the problem. The publishing industry’s influence on computing and digital experiences goes way back and is especially applicable horizontally – markup languages, style sheets, electronic type – and of course multi-channel publishing. This is why we have usually included a publishing track in our conferences. This session looks at how a couple of publishers have dealt with some thorny multichannel publishing issues.

P2. Multi-channel Publishing and Content Reuse

Tuesday, December, 3: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m.

In this session two publishing organizations report on projects that involve moving publications and existing content from print to multi-channel digital. Business Insurance, part of Crain Communications, implemented a digital publishing strategy that supports interactive digital content and content reuse across print, Web, iOS, and Android, all based on HTML5. Wolters Kluwer Health now creates textbooks with versions for print, multiple eBook formats, and integration with Learning Management Systems and other advanced learning tools. As part of their multi year initiative they report on a recent project where they implemented round tripping between XML and author-editable Word documents, and discusses the technical and organizational problems they solved.

Moderator:
Tom Brown, VP, Multichannel Solutions, HP

Speakers:
Dave White, Chief Technology Officer, Quark Software Inc.
Case Study: Transforming Print Content into Mobile and Web Apps
Ken Golkin, Technical Project Manager, Wolters Kluwer Health
and
Niels Nielsen, Managing Director, Avalon Consulting, LLC
Long Cycle Reuse in Textbook Publishing: Cracking the XML–>Word–>XML Round Trip Nut

Speaker Spotlight: Scott Brinker – Technology is marketing’s interface to the world

November 21, 2013 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Scott Brinker, Founder & CTO, ion interactive, inc., and author of the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: Scott Brinker

Founder & CTO

ion interactive, inc.

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

Marketing has been sucked into a digital world.

In this world, the majority of interactions that marketing has with its audience happen through channels that are mediated by software. Software has become the eyes and ears by which marketers observe people in their market — through tools for analytics, attribution, and social media listening. Software has become the hands and mouth by which marketers touch and talk with their prospects and customers — through web content and experiences, mobile apps, and social media outposts.

Let’s face it: technology is now marketing’s interface to the world.

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.

To thrive in this environment, organizations absolutely need “marketing technologists” who understand how to select, configure, operate, and extend these marketing technologies that provide that interface. They need people who blend technical talents with marketing insights and ideas to produce compelling experiences throughout the buyer’s journey.

The titles don’t matter. Some call these folks creative technologists, or marketing IT, or growth hackers. What matters is that the organization is finding and nurturing this next generation of marketing talent. They’re integrating them with the broader marketing organizations. They’re giving them a seat at the table in defining marketing strategy and the operational roadmap to execute it.

Catch Up with Scott at Gilbane

Opening Keynotes
Tuesday, December, 3: 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

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 Scott on Twitter – @chiefmartec.

Year: 2013 (Page 2 of 7)

Speaker Spotlight: Frank Schneider – Multi-modal interface essential to mobile customer engagement

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

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?

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?

Catch Up with Frank at Gilbane

Speaker Spotlight: John Felahi – Making content findable

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?

Catch Up with John at Gilbane

Can Human Sensors Contribute to Improving Search Technology?

Gilbane Complimentary Technology Showcase Pass

Opening Keynotes – December 3: 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

Opening Keynotes – December 3: 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Product Labs

Exhibitors

Showcase Hours:

You can also still register for the full conference:

Responsive Design and the Future of Digital Experiences

C2. Responsive Design and the Future of Digital Experiences

Speaker Spotlight: Pamela Kostur – Do you have a content control problem?

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?

Catch Up with Pamela at Gilbane

Multi-channel Publishing and Content Reuse

P2. Multi-channel Publishing and Content Reuse

Speaker Spotlight: Scott Brinker – Technology is marketing’s interface to the world

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 Scott at Gilbane

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