Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Year: 2016 (Page 2 of 3)

Gilbane Conference Keynotes Announced


Gilbane Boston 2016

ConferenceNovember 29 – 30 and WorkshopsDecember 1
Boston Fairmont Copley Plaza

Join the digital marketers, technologists, and analysts leading the thinking and doing — making modern digital content and customer experience strategies a reality. Register and save your seat today

Keynote presentations

Wednesday, November 29, 8:30 – 10:00am

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Marissa Jarratt, Senior Director, Global Marketing, PepsiCo 
A New Age for Internal Communications: Measure, Manage and Influence The Employee Experience

tania-yuki-cropped60

Tania Yuki, CEO, Shareablee
Measuring What Matters in Social Media

jon-marks-sharp60

Jon Marks, Co-founder and CTO, Kaldor
Blood in the Streets – Reporting from the Content Technology Trenches

Keynote panel – Industry analysts

Wednesday, November 29, 11:00 – 12:00pm

Melissa Webster - Gilbane Conference

Melissa Webster, Program VP, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC

Scott Liewehr - Gilbane Conference
Scott Liewehr, Partner and Principal Analyst, Digital Clarity Group

Deanna Laufer - Gilbane Conference

Deanna Laufer, Senior Analyst, Customer Experience, Forrester Research

tony-byrne

Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group

Register today to save your seat!

Gilbane post-conference workshops


Gilbane Boston 2016

ConferenceNovember 29 – 30 and WorkshopsDecember 1
Boston Fairmont Copley Plaza

Join our highly-respected international experts for a deep dive following our two-day conference. Register and save your seat today!

Thursday, December 1: 9:00 – 12:00

Sara Redin | Gilbane Conference

Building a Business Case for a Modern Intranet – learn more
Sara Redin, Founder, Redin Consult

Tim Bourgeois | Gilbane Conference

An Anatomy of a Digital Audit learn more
Tim Bourgeois, Executive Editor, ChiefDigitalOfficer.net and East Coast Catalyst

Tony Byrne | Gilbane Conference
The Right Way to Select Digital Content Technology – learn more
Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group

Thursday, December, 1: 1:00 – 4:00

Cathy McKnight | Gilbane Conference
Mapping Customer Journeys and Managing Content: How to Align Practices for Great Customer Experience – learn more
Cathy McKnight, Vice President, Consulting, Digital Clarity Group

Heather Hedden | Gilbane Conference
Designing Taxonomies and Metadata for CMS Implementation – learn more

Heather Hedden, Senior Vocabulary Editor, Cengage Learning

Bruno Hermann | Gilbane Conference
Taking the Fast Track of Digital Globalization to Deliver Digital Experiences Globally – learn more

Bruno Herrmann, Director of Globalization and Localization, The Nielsen Company

Register today to save your seat!

Gilbane Advisor 9-14-16 – Next computing platform, FB, Google, and Daily Beast

Dear Readers: 

Hope you had a fantastic summer. We are back from vacation and our new school-year resolution is to publish more bite-sized issues more frequently – tougher curation and quicker delivery to you.

Beyond the iPhone

is the watch, as the next general purpose personal computer that is. I still think that has always been Apple’s plan, with fitness a viable commercial entry point and learning path to the much larger health care market and everything else. In this regard the AirPods were the most interesting of the recent announcements. As Ben Thompson points out…

… one of the devices that pairs with AirPods is the Apple Watch, which received its own update, including GPS. The GPS addition was part of a heavy focus on health-and-fitness, but it is also another step down the road towards a Watch that has its own cellular connection, and when that future arrives the iPhone will quite suddenly shift from indispensable to optional. Simply strap on your Watch, put in your AirPods, and, thanks to Siri, you have everything you need… just as the iPhone makes far more sense as a digital hub than the Mac, the Watch will one day be the best hub yet. Read More

Facebook’s Power Struggle Over App Links

This long slow cold war requires monitoring by marketers, developers, and publishers. The Information’s Cory Weinberg is watching.

Apps are caught in the middle of a power struggle between Apple, Google and Facebook to control mobile browsing habits. The fragmentation benefits Facebook, which keeps people inside its browser instead of supporting apps’ deep links on iPhones. Read More

Google’s AMP Viewer: the Tinder UX for content?

Google is also increasing its reach and control over the browsing experience. All marketers, not just news publishers, will be affected.

AMP links will no longer be limited to the Top Stories area of mobile results; instead, Google will link to the AMP version of a webpage any time a valid AMP is available. This “blue links” expansion will dramatically increase AMP traffic overall and enable discovery of a rapidly growing universe of non-news and long-tail AMP content. … Publishers might not realize that Google won’t just link to AMPs, but will present them in a Google-hosted viewer which is certain to alter user flow and engagement from mobile search. Read More

How The Daily Beast gets 40 percent of readers to visit its homepage

While the Beast gets its fair share of traffic from Google and Facebook, it focuses more on getting those readers back via email (its subscriber base has doubled in the past year) and its app than on maximizing the reach of content it publishes elsewhere. It has eschewed Google AMP and, after a brief dalliance with Facebook Instant Articles, has stopped using those too. Read More

Also…

“Basically, we have two problems with CX: complexity and perspective.”… The cash model of “customer experience” via Doc Searls

Handy… Introducing the Bots Landscape: 170+ companies, $4 billion in funding, thousands of bots via Venturebeat

NYT and WaPo just edged out Buzzfeed and Huffpost for the most digital readers… Revenge of the ‘legacy’ sector via Politico

The front-end needs the back-end… Digital Experience and Content Operations Need More Attention via EContent

Why are deep neural networks good at solving complex problems? Is the secret buried in the laws of physics? via Technology Review

gilbane16-logo-teal_outline_white

Main conference: November 29 – 30
Workshops: December 1, 2016
Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals. Subscribe to our newsletter, or our feed.

Are you focused on customer experience and digital marketing?

If Customer Experience and Digital Marketing is Your Game…

Have we got a track for you at this year’s Gilbane Conference. Track C: Content, Marketing, and Customer Experience is designed for marketers, marketing technologists, social marketers, content strategists, web content managers, content marketers, content creators and designers, and business and technology strategists focused on customer experience and digital marketing.

You’ll Learn How:

  • Adobe and Brightspot advise customers on managing a digital experience business
  • Campbell Soup and National Instruments are crafting modern customer experiences using iterative testing, measurement, and analysis to engage more deeply with customers
  • To create a plan to develop and deliver supporting and engaging content across multiple channels
  • Innovations in artificial intelligence will shape the future of content and commerce
  • Translation and localization technology will impact the future
  • To successfully map business and technology requirements

Register now to join us for the Gilbane Digital Content Conference’s Track C: Content, Marketing, and Customer Experience on November 29-30. Get a full description for all 14 sessions in this track, here.Gilbane conference attendees

Register with code F16G to save an extra $100 off the Early Bird rate of your conference pass.

Register Today 

The Venue

The Fairmont Copley Plaza is the official conference hotel for the Gilbane Digital Content Conference 2016. Discounted guest room rates (plus applicable taxes) have been arranged for attendees who book by November 11, 2016. Find out more…

Gilbane conference hotel 2016

You Have Content. Now What?

You’re running full-speed ahead with your content bucket full and your heart bursting with the need to share it with the world. But, you may need to hit the breaks for a moment and think about the tools needed to help you move forward in a way that will deliver the best digital experience to your customerGilbane conference attendeess.

Register now to join us for the Gilbane Digital Content Conference‘s Track T: Technologies for Content, Marketing, and Digital Experience, and make sure you’re on the path to success. This track is designed for technology strategists and executives focused on near-term and future software for creating, managing, and delivering compelling digital experiences across platforms, channels, and form factors.

Technology track sessions include:

  • Tag Team: Hot Topics in Marketing Technology & Strategy
  • Marketing Technology Expectations and Decisions
  • What’s All This Talk About Headless CMSs?
  • Single Source Content Management, and Taxonomy Development / Management: Big Projects with Benefits
  • Optimizing with Deep Linking, Hummingbird, and Rankbrain
  • Blockchain to Bots: a Look at Use Cases
  • Out Front with Real-Time Data & Analytics

Click each session for a detailed description and list of speakers, then, check out our site for even more!

Register with code F16G to save an extra $100 off the Early Bird rate of your conference pass.

Register Today

The Venue

Gilbane conference hotel 2016The Fairmont Copley Plaza is the official conference hotel for the Gilbane Digital Content Conference 2016.
Discounted guest room rates (plus applicable taxes) have been arranged for attendees who book by November 11, 2016.

Find out more…

Gilbane Advisor 7-26-16 – Bots, apps, stickers, video, web, product placement

In this issue we look at moderating perspectives on a few hot topics. First up, we follow up on our earlier coverage of bots and use cases. There are lots of good reasons to be excited about the growth and range of applications for bots, but the hype has been a bit much. We have chosen four short articles to get you current. Next up, Stickers as a serious content type, then thoughts on the utility of video, purposeful merging of web and mobile, and interesting ideas on product placement.

Wrong Narrative. Wrong Mindset. Wrong Solutions.

Don’t worry, this is about bots not politics, and Sar Haribhakti’s view is balanced.

If you even remotely follow tech news, it is very likely that you have read outlandish claims like “Bots are the new apps”. There are way too many misconceptions around conversational products. Read More

Bots in 2016: Mid-Year Check In

Sam Lessin is a big fan of bots because of the potential for developers in general, and in particular for the personal assistant his company, Fin, is building. His experience and thoughts on the challenges of bringing bot-based products to market will help developers and product managers tune expectations.

The past six months have shown that building compelling bots is very challenging. Completely automated bots aren’t ready for prime time and hybrid services with human involvement cost a lot to develop. How developers can make money from bots also hasn’t been clarified. But I’m still bullish on the shift to bots. Read More

Personal assistant bots like Siri and Cortana have a serious problem

Good general explanation of why Alexa et al struggle to meet user expectations. Read More

The Death of Apps has been Greatly Exaggerated

Analyst Jan Dawson looks at the numbers.

Bots are a fascinating new element of mobile user interfaces and have potential in certain well-defined use cases. However, as a threat to the app model, they’re fundamentally limited for a couple of reasons. First, bots are not a fit at all for the vast majority of apps. Put another way, for the apps that generate the vast majority of revenue. Read More

The Elements of Stickers

Stickers as a serious content type. Connie Chan should convince you there is more to Stickers than you probably thought.

Stickers aren’t just frivolous little punctuation marks to be inserted in text messages. They can be replacements for entire sentences, and help create a new medium for communicating and storytelling… And sometimes stickers can convey what words cannot! This form of visual communication has become so popular … in WeChat and LINE — that it is not uncommon to see a deep thread of multiple messages without a single word. They’re not just for those crazy young kids. More notably, stickers are commonly used in professional, not just personal, chats as well… Read More

Video and Speed

I’m sure you know the feel­ing  —  you see a link to some­thing that looks in­ter­est­ing, fol­low it, and when it turns out to be a video clip, you shake your head and kill the tab. The prob­lem with video is it’s just too slow.

Totally agree. Give me words to skim please. Tim Bray discusses watching (some) video faster and listening to sped-up audio. Read More

Building for a future mobile web

Paul Kinlan makes a case for progressive web apps as a way to combine the best of native mobile and mobile web apps. His discussion is useful beyond Google’s progressive web activity.

A new way of thinking about how we build apps and content experiences for the web is needed. One that is progressive in allowing us to build for the web at large, but takes inspiration from the deeper engagement that can be found in native app platforms. Read More

James Bond, Dunder Mifflin, and the Future of Product Placement

…my children shouted in annoyance. They rousted me from bed, complaining that something was wrong with the TV… Trying to explain that there are advertising breaks so people can sell them things was a deflating experience… Their incomprehension was total… If interruption-based advertising is no longer an option, and if traditional product placement is no longer the answer, how can brands reach consumers while not offending their sense of empowerment and leveraging their desire for immediate gratification?

Laurent Muzellec makes a case for “interactive product placement”, and “reverse product placement”… Read More

 

Gilbane Digital Content Conference
Main conference: November 29 – 30
Workshops: December 1, 2016
Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston

Short takes

The topic may be slightly scary but you need to know what’s coming… 2 terrific #MarTech talks on the rise of AI in marketing via chiefmartec.com

Lots of orgs will need to make a similar choice, but this is big one… Salesforce will only support Nexus and Samsung Galaxy phones to avoid Android fragmentation via recode

Yes, something like this… Why Wearables Will Replace Your Smartphone via ITNews

eBooks down, print up… U.S. Publishing Industry’s Annual Survey Reveals Nearly $28 Billion in Revenue in 2015 via AAP

An optimist’s view of Getting Google and Publishers to Share Love — and Data via Medium

Differences… AI, Apple and Google via Benedict Evans

The UK takes a stab at a Data Science Ethical Framework via gov.uk

Growing without video dependence… Bustle’s Slower but Steady Growth Path via The Information

Different levels of maturity… Enterprise MarTech Assessment: More Social Than Mobile via Medium

CMS, etc., corner

Should command a serious salary… The 6 skills every content strategist must have via Medium

Some good questions re What does a decoupled WCM architecture really mean? via Real Story Group

Digital Asset Management Round-up, June 2016 via Digital Clarity Group

Bright future or death spiral?…   via EContent

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals. Subscribe to our newsletter, or our feed.

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference: Content Management, Marketing, and Digital Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and technologies to produce superior digital experiences for customers, employees, and partners.

Gilbane Advisor 5-30-16 – Content, Commerce and Deep Links

Deep links and Android Instant Apps

Benedict Evans picks up on something important for Google. From his newsletter… Cartoon from xkcdxkcd - Content, Commerce Deep Links

… the new Instant Apps feature for Android is hugely important. If you tap on a deep link anywhere on Android, then that app itself will immediately be downloaded from the app store and start running, and show you the piece of content linked to … This effectively removes the ‘is the app installed or not when we link to it?’ problem, letting people experience an app seamlessly without bouncing out to the app store and opening up huge new opportunities for engagement (and advertising). It also challenges a major premise behind chat bots (they don’t require you to install a new app). Read More 

Content publishers underestimate the “shoppable content” challenge

You would think by now two of the major components in marketing technology stacks, content management and e-commerce systems, would be more widely and successfully integrated. In most cases the main roadblock remains organizational. But the combination of revenue requirements and competitive seamless buying experiences will eventually force change. This could be another capability led and controlled by social and computing platforms. Publishers and e-commerce sites need to get moving to at least influence the outcome. Read More

Facebook testing “shoppable” video ads

Facebook needs to prove to retail marketers that it can drive sales, not just provide brand exposure. One way to do that is by launching “shoppable” video ads next month so people can browse products without tapping out of a video ad. Read More

Google tests feature that lets media companies, marketers publish directly to search results

AMP pages may get preferential treatment because they are fast, but this experimental feature treats the search results page as a publishing channel – take that Facebook News Feed!

Google has built a Web-based interface through which posts can be formatted and uploaded directly to its systems. The posts can be up to 14,400 characters in length and can include links and up to 10 images or videos. The pages also include options to share them via Twitter, Facebook or email. Each post is hosted by Google itself on a dedicated page, and appears in a carousel in results pages for searches related to their authors for up to a week, … After seven days, the posts remain live but won’t be surfaced in search results. Rather, they can be accessed via a link. Read More

Google open sources SyntaxNet and English parser

… we spend a lot of time thinking about how computer systems can read and understand human language in order to process it in intelligent ways. Today, we are excited to share the fruits of our research with the broader community by releasing SyntaxNet, an open-source neural network framework implemented in TensorFlow that provides a foundation for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. Our release includes all the code needed to train new SyntaxNet models on your own data, as well as Parsey McParseface, an English parser that we have trained for you and that you can use to analyze English text. Read More

Despite stumbles, news outlets flock to Messenger

The Takeaway – News organizations looking for fresh ways to reach readers see big potential in Facebook’s Messenger “bots.” But early efforts have not done well, and news publishers are still experimenting with the platform to figure out what users want to see. Read More

End of the online advertising bubble

Kalkis Research are not the first to predict the end of the ad bubble, but their compelling report pulls no punches and has caused quite a stir with its dire predictions. They have been responding to some of the comments and the whole bit is useful. Read More

Gilbane Digital Content Conference
Main conference: November 29 – 30
Workshops: December 1, 2016
Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston

Short takes

Big step for Medium. Looks good but are they ready for the slippery slope of formatting support?… How to Make Your Publication Look Great via Medium

Watch out for the The Non-Monetizable Product Blind Spot via The Information

Very welcome feature… Tie your sites together with property sets in Search Console via Google webmaster blog

Good type design is worth the effort… How typography can save your life via Pro Publica

Probably good for EPUB… W3C and International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) explore combining via w3c.org

As it should be… 85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound via Digiday

HTTP/2 Server push rolling out… Get Ready to See Seconds Shaved Off Web Page Load Times via Technology Review

How many martec vendors does it take to…? Did Morgan Stanley just kill the single-vendor marketing suite? via chiefmartec.com

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals. Subscribe to our newsletter, or our feed.

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference: Content Management, Marketing, and Digital Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and technologies to produce superior digital experiences for customers, employees, and partners.

Gilbane Advisor 4-28-16 — Bots vs apps, content management news, media, more

Bots vs apps, conversational interfaces, AI — lots of hype, and lots of money. If all the coverage of these and how they relate have left you scratching your head our first three articles below will get you grounded in reality.

The first, a longish but enjoyable post by Dan Grover is my favorite. He uses the sneaky trick of measuring how many screen taps chat interfaces can take compared to app interfaces to sort of measure physical, mental effort, and time. As a product manager at WeChat Grover has a certain cred.

Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps

The thesis, then, is that users will engage more frequently, deeply, and efficiently with third-party services if they’re presented in a conversational UI instead of a separate native app. … messenger apps’ apparent success in fulfilling such a surprising array of tasks does not owe to the triumph of “conversational UI.” What they’ve achieved can be much more instructively framed as an adept exploitation of Silicon Valley phone OS makers’ growing failure to fully serve users’ needs, … Many of the platform-like aspects they’ve taken on to plaster over gaps in the OS actually have little to do with the core chat functionality. Not only is “conversational UI” a red herring, but as we look more closely, we’ll even see places where conversational UI has breached its limits and broken down. Read More

Chat bots, conversation and AI as an interface

Chat bots tap into two very current preoccupations. On one hand, the hope that they can actually work is a reflection of the ongoing explosion of AI, and on the other, they offer a way to reach users without having to get them to install an app.

Benedict Evans explores both, and asks many questions about how they relate to which “runtime”. Read more

When do bots beat apps? When context and convenience matter most

Investor Peter Rojas makes similar points and reminds us in case we forgot…

Facebook isn’t just wagering that the ease of interacting via a conversational interface will drive uptake of chatbots amongst its 800 million users. Ultimately they’re doing this because they believe that the convenience of chatbots will get people to live inside Messenger in the same way that WeChat users live inside that messaging app. It’s their way of making an end-run around both iOS and Android as app platforms by bringing all those services within Messenger as chatbots — and thus onto a platform which Facebook controls. Read More

Google search engine baffles public, Ofcom study shows

The Financial Times chose to highlight the gem below, no doubt because of the increased regulatory attention, but the free just-published, Adults’ media use and attitudes Report 2016has lots of other interesting findings.

In Ofcom’s research, adults who use search engines were shown a picture of the results returned by Google for an online search for “walking boots”. The first three results at the top of the list were distinguished by a small orange box with the word “Ad” written in it. … However, in spite of the labelling, 51 per cent of respondents were not aware that these results were adverts or sponsored links.

Imagine the results from some other other countries. Read More

Your media business will not be saved

The Verge’s Joshua Topolsky tells colleagues and competitors not to fool themselves with individual silver bullets. We’ll have to stay-tuned to see what he is working on.

Video will not save your media business. Nor will bots, newsletters, a “morning briefing” app, a “lean back” iPad experience, Slack integration, a Snapchat channel, or a great partnership with Twitter. … Compelling voices and stories, real and raw talent, new ideas that actually serve or delight an audience, brands that have meaning and ballast; these are things that matter in the next age of media. Thinking of your platform as an actual platform, not a delivery method. Knowing you’re more than just your words. Thinking of your business as a product and storytelling business, not a headline and body-copy business. Thinking of your audience as finite and building a sustainable business model around that audience — that’s going to matter. Thinking about your 10 year plan and not a billion dollar valuation — that’s going to matter. Read More

With new roadblocks for digital news sites, what happens next?

Newsonomics’ Ken Doctor, looking at the current recalibration, points out…

The Digital Dozen — those national/global companies I’ve identified, like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, AP, Reuters, The Guardian, Axel Springer, the BBC, and more — are most mindful and respecting of that heritage and mission, even as they struggle mightily. They, too, are testing more video, but they try not to let the new overwhelm their essential reasons for being. Read More

Making Medium more powerful for publishers

Aggressive…

new branding tools that will allow publications to customize color, layout, and navigation. … making it easier to migrate existing blogs and websites to Medium … two new ways that publishers can opt in to earn revenue on Medium … soon launch compatibility support for Facebook Instant Articles and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) … brought collections to the web. Read More

The open web is not going away

Hopefully not! Zack Rosen points out the giant discrepancy in the funding of walled gardens vs open web, but he only gets to “should not” instead of “is not”. If you are an optimist you’ll be happy to know that there was a similar scenario in the 80s where giant telecoms tried to force a walled garden on the world in the form of the ODA (Office Document Architecture) standard, but lost the war to the measly-funded open information standard SGML (parent of HTML and XML). Another similarity: some of the large computer companies at the time hedged their bets by supporting both sides to some degree, much like Google, Apple, Facebook do today. Read More

Gilbane Digital Content Conference

The call for speakers deadline is May 6!

Main conference: November 29 – 30 2016 ● Workshops: December 1 ● Fairmont Copley Plaza, Boston, MA

Short takes

It’s Mr. MR to you… The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup via Wired

Understand the Blockchain in Two Minutes Well, slightly over 2, but this really pretty good. via Institute for the Future

The web is Doom but there is reason for optimism. via mobiForge 

Not a short term problem but, hmmm… Facebook Struggles to Stop Decline in ‘Original’ Sharing via The Information

Are MarTech tools underperforming? Digital Marketing Technology Survey Results via Real Story Group

CMS, etc., corner

Details and puns but No Joke: Sitecore is (finally) acquired (sort of) via Digital Clarity Group

Adding to their extensive collection of CMSs OpenText acquires HP customer experience content management for $170 million via TechCrunch

New, and free, Research: From Web Publishing to Experience Management in Higher Education via Digital Clarity Group

CrownPeak merges with ActiveStandards and raises funding via Real Story Group

Digital Asset Management Round-up, April 2016 via Digital Clarity Group

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year. Subscribe to our email newsletter, or our feed.

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference – Content Management, Marketing, and Digital Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and technologies to produce superior digital experiences for customers, employees, and partners.

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