Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Month: March 2015

Gilbane Advisor 3.31.15 – Is a Mobile Deep Linking Standard Necessary?

Gilbane Conference 2015 call for papers

Share and network with your peers as a speaker at our next conference. Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston. December 1-3.  Learn more

How to Launch Your Digital Platform

…I draw from this research to offer a framework to help aspiring entrepreneurs make the right strategic decisions as they build their own platforms…

This is also for intrapreneurs. Read more

A Few Questions for Publishers Contemplating Facebook as a Platform

John Battelle…

Well, it’s happening. According to no less authoritative source than The New York TimesThe New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook. … But as testing beings, here are a few questions any publisher should ask before dipping a taproot into Facebook’s carefully cultivated soils… Read more

Does it matter?…

Facebook hosting doesn’t change things, the world already changed

A bit of a contrary view. Long but lots to chew on.

All this sound and fury, signifying nothing. … Let’s just list all the conditions that exist and won’t change one bit whether or not you let Facebook host your content… Read more

The Facebook Reckoning

And then there’s Ben Thompson’s analysis on why at least some publishers may not have a choice.

The problem is that online ads are inherently deflationary: just as content has zero marginal cost, so does ad inventory, which means it’s trivial to make more. A limited amount of total advertising dollars spread over more inventory, though, means any individual ad is worth less and less.

This resulted in a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma: the optimal action for any individual publication, particularly in the absence of differentiated ad placements or targeting capability, is to maximize ad placement opportunity (more content) and page views (more eyeballs), even though this action taken collectively only hastens the decline in the value of those ads. Perversely, the resultant cheaper ads only intensify the push to create more content and capture more eyeballs; quality is very quickly a casualty.

What is interesting is the particular impact that mobile has had on this dynamic… Read more

But who actually trusts Facebook, or any single walled garden for all their news? Many of course, but they are not necessarily the demographic you want. And then there’s the fact that…

Many Facebook users still don’t know that their news feeds are filtered by an algorithm

In the extreme case, it may be that whenever a software developer in Menlo Park adjusts a parameter, someone somewhere wrongly starts to believe themselves to be unloved

Accidental or intentional. This could be you, or it could be the New York Times. Read more

Ok, enough about Facebook…

How storytelling can enhance the effectiveness of your visualizations

What a great framework for marketer and data expert collaboration.

As the volume and complexity of data collection and storage scale exponentially, creating clear, communicative, and approachable visual representations of that data is an increasing challenge… Leveraging a story structure can help introduce complex visualizations to various audiences. Read more

News Media Should Drop Native Apps

One of the most shared statistics on mobile use is this one: Applications account for 86% of the time spend by users. This leaves a mere 14% for browser-based activities, i.e. sites designed for mobile, either especially coded for nomad consumption, built using responsive design techniques that adapt look and feel to screen size, or special WebApp designs such as FT.com.

This 86/14 split is completely misleading for two reasons: the weight of mobile gaming, and the importance of Facebook. Take a look at this chart … Read more

More on the 86/14…

Apple Watch Doesn’t Have Safari and You Didn’t Even Notice

Web lives, browser dies? The fact that there is no browser on the Apple watch does not mean the end of the web. It does raise the question of exactly what this means to hybrid or web content heavy iOS apps and watch integration though. Read more

I want to invest in your Apple watch app. Here’s why.

I agree, and also still agree with myself. However my initial investment will be in the watch rather than an app. Read more

Android taxonomies and users

Thinking about mobile platforms and demographics?

For reference, and, perhaps, discussion: ‘Android’ means lots of different things, and there’s a lot of confusion about forks, Xiaomi, China and AOSP, as well as ‘the next billion’. So this is how I try to think about this. First, there are actually (at least) six types of ‘Android’ in the market today… In parallel, it’s worth breaking down Android users in a similar way… Read more

Is a Mobile Deep Linking Standard Necessary?

This is not a useful question. It is reasonable to ask whether a successful standard will ever be developed. Standards don’t get created just because they are a good idea, but because they are forced by the market. And that takes time and painful politicking and negotiation between the big players, some influential small players, and more interested parties you would think possible.

We can also ask whether it will continue to be a reasonable expectation for developers to accommodate all the individual “guidelines” from Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Bitly, GE, and whoever else emerges with a reach large or unique enough to make their traffic worth adding to the list of APIs a developer needs to support. Read more

Links

Online vs IRL Retail: Content, Content, Content and… Retail Is NOT All About Selling Product via Medium

A Data-Driven Look at the Open Source E-Commerce Market via CMSWire

22 tips for better data science including helpful suggestion from the pointy haired boss and Dilbert via Data Science Central

And here is some useful advice for dealing with more political challenges… Overcome Your Company’s Resistance to Data via hbr.org

Web geeks: Uncle Sam made a tool that downloads Google Analytics reports & transforms data into JSON… U.S. government launches online traffic analytics dashboard for federal websites via E Pluribus Unum

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year.

Call for Papers now open – Gilbane Conference 2015

The Gilbane Conference 2015 helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.

Please review the conference and track topics below and submit your speaking proposal. Additionally, answers to the most common questions about speaking at the Gilbane Conference can be found in the Speaker Guidelines.

Deadline for proposals is May 1, 2015

Main Conference Tracks

The conference tracks are organized primarily by role/function as described below. The lists under each track are topic suggestions, and we encourage proposals on relevant topics not listed.

Track C: Content, Marketing, and Customer Experience

Designed for marketers, marketing technologists, social marketers, content marketers, growth hackers, web and mobile content managers, strategists and technologists focused on customer experience and digital marketing.

  • Customer experience management and engagement
  • Multichannel content management and marketing
  • Content strategies
  • Responsive design
  • Adaptive and agnostic content
  • Site optimization
  • Matching content to channels
  • Content marketing
  • Marketing technology landscape, architectures, and platforms
  • WCM and customer experience
  • Marketing technologist roles and practices
  • E-commerce and WCM / mobile app integration
  • Measuring and analytics: Web, mobile, social, big data
  • Avoiding social backlash
  • Personalization – what works, what doesn’t
  • Growth hacking strategies
  • Localization & multilingual content management
  • What function owns customer profiles?
  • What system owns customer profiles?
  • Working with agencies
  • Working with IT
  • Third party data and service integration

Track E: Content, Collaboration and Employee Experience

Designed for content, information, technical, and business managers focused on enterprise social, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and backend content applications.

  • Collaboration tools & social platforms
  • Enterprise social metrics
  • Employee experience management
  • Community building & knowledge sharing
  • Role of content management, intranets, portals, mobile apps
  • Employees are customers
  • Employees are part of the customer experience
  • Content and information integration
  • Enterprise search and information access
  • Taxonomies, metadata, tagging

Track T: Re-imagining the Future: Ubiquitous Computing and Digital Transformation

Designed for technology strategists, IT, and marketing / business executives focused on near-term and future software, content, and computing devices to support customer or employee experiences.

  • APIs and customer experience stacks
  • Mobile development frameworks and strategies
  • HTML5
  • Wearable computing and the web
  • Hybrid cloud content management
  • Natural language technologies
  • Haptic and gesture interfaces
  • Big data platforms, tools, analytics
  • Real time customer experiences & reality
  • Visualization
  • Open web vs. walled gardens
  • Deep linking and no linking
  • Future of mobile operating systems and platforms
  • Distributed data, distributed apps – mixing up code and data
  • Internet of things and customer experiences

Track P: Digital Strategies for Publishing and Media

Designed for publishing and information product managers, marketers, technologists, and business or channel managers focused on the transition to digital products and managing digital assets.

  • Digital transformation
  • Designing for digital products
  • Business models and monetization
  • Content marketing risks and benefits
  • Mixing owned, earned, and sponsored content
  • Ad technologies and strategies
  • App development strategies
  • Multichannel publishing
  • Web pages vs Cards
  • Tablets vs smartphones
  • Mobile publishing workflows
  • Matching content to channels and devices

Submit your speaking proposal

 

Gilbane Advisor 3.10.15 – We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly

Gilbane Conference 2015 dates & location

Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston, December 1 – 3. New web site and call for papers will be live in a few days.

We Need to Break the Mobile Duopoly. We Need a 3rd Mobile OS

Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine makes an interesting case. Note he is talking about an open OS – and what he doesn’t say is that right now the option is the mobile web, which is open, but also has difficulty replicating the same level of user experience of proprietary native apps. The historically dominant tension between open and proprietary is healthy, but proprietary is the natural lead in user experience.

It is an appealing idea that should be encouraged but who is going to create this mobile OS? How will it guarantee the openness described? Andreessen Horowitz could fund development, but how would it grow and survive in the wild? It would be competing with all open and and native OSes and fragments as well as the mobile web. Read more

Speaking of the difficulty of matching app experience on the web…

60fps on the mobile web

Flipboard engineers made some near-term compromises (including accessibility) to achieve 60fps on the web, and explain why and how. This article is a bit technical so you might want to skip if not a developer, but it may be useful just to know this can be done.

In the pursuit of 60fps we sometimes resort to extreme measures. Flipboard for mobile web is a case study in pushing the browser to its limits. While this approach may not be suitable for all applications, for us it’s enabled a level of interaction and performance that rivals native apps. … In a sense, Flipboard for mobile web is a hybrid application. Rather than blending native and web technologies, it’s all web content. It mixes DOM-based UI with canvas rendering where appropriate. Read more

​And because we obviously still have the web to kick around…

Building a better web: The bare necessities

As with CMS-level decoupling, avoiding content-presentation coupling in delivery makes redesigning and rebranding the channel a lot easier. It also facilitates repurposing across channels and platforms… Most people believe this has already been solved. After all, that is the purpose of CSS. But decoupling HTML content from presentational descriptions is a tricky process. Read more

64 ways to think of a homepage

The focus is on a news homepage but anyone thinking about a site redesign or some tweaking will get some new ideas either directly or provoked by this piece. Something to share with your team to get their design juices flowing. Read more

Internet to neural net – Google search

If search or machine translation are important to you this is a must read since they may provide your first interaction with neural nets or deep learning. Neural nets had a bad rep for a few years because there was not enough processing power to generate the (big) data necessary to prove their promise. Soon neural nets will be behind many products from Google and others. You don’t need a degree in math or science to read this post and understand why. Read more

Additional reading: Facebook AI Director Yann LeCun on His Quest to Unleash Deep Learning and Make Machines Smarter

Bringing Up #Babycore

Cool “avant-garde marketing” for those who get it, or don’t but are curious. Should make you think. Wonder though, whether the self-selected demographic is big enough for them – perhaps the NY segment.

The media architecture of hashtags has always seemed a bit like mom jeans, a botched attempt at fitting in that just doesn’t fit right. So when one of the marketing geniuses who was able to convince the world that mom jeans were a good idea puts a giant billboard in the center of New York City without any of the technologies used to bridge online and off, what are we to think? … There are no hand holds, no footnotes revealing the message for those who don’t get it, and no hashtags guiding your confused IRL self into the oracle of digital space. Read more

Speaking of modern marketing…

Gut instinct marketing at Google

Say what? Is your marketing organization struggling with debates over how much to focus on hard data science or soft gut instinct? Lorraine TwohillSVP Global Marketing at Google believes in both and what she has to say may help your internal discussions.

Google has a very data-led culture. But we care just as much about the storytelling and the brand… And with the use of the analytic tools we have, the storytelling becomes more important than ever. If anything, there’s too much talk about the science right now. I have a colleague who is writing a paper on the future of marketing: it’s data, data, science, science. I’m like, “It’s not!” Or rather, it is those things, yes. But if you fall down on the art, if you fail on the messaging and storytelling, all that those tools will get you are a lot of bad impressions. Read more

and now for something a little different…

Spurious correlations for fun and business meetings

Did you know that Apple iPhone sales correlate with people who died by falling down the stairs? or that total revenue generated by arcades (US) correlates with computer science doctorates awarded (US)?

Have a colleague who doesn’t quite get there is a difference between causation and correlation? Or maybe just forgets sometimes? Take them aside and show them some of the funny and nonsensical correlations on this site and have a laugh together – usually a better outcome than springing a few spurious correlations on them in a meeting. But hey, that’s your call. Read more

Links

WCM vs ecommerce platforms – it’s the integrations… The State of Content + Commerce via AlleyWatch

Not link bait… Spreading messages on Twitter: Research on best practices for wording and rhetorical craft via Journalist’s Resource

Is customer experience management a team sport? Is an integrated customer experience hub possible? via Gartner

When you don’t know what to do… Case Studies: Fixing Hacked Sites via Google Webmaster Central Blog

With some good examples… Data Scale – why big data trumps small data via Numeratechoir

The Marketing Tech Landscape isn’t as Scary as you Think via CMSWire

More nuanced views slowly emerging… People are finally worrying about online privacy—and tech firms are already cashing in via Quartz

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year.

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