Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 35 of 71)

Gilbane Conference speaker proposals – update

May 21, 2014 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Thank you all for the Gilbane Conference speaker proposals. We received a record number again this year. We are now busy evaluating, organizing, and mapping proposals to the topic areas our audience needs to hear the most about.

If you have submitted a proposal you can expect to hear from us over the next 6-7 weeks. With over 300 submissions we’ll have to make some difficult choices and we will be contacting many of you for further discussion.

Miss the deadline?

For all of you who missed the deadline to submit proposals for this year’s conference, our policy is that we always accept proposals – in fact we accept them all year long if you use our submission form – however, proposals received after the deadline for each conference miss the first review by the program committee and some of the early decisions. If we have two good proposals on the same topic the on-time proposal gets preference. Also, decisions are largely made on a rolling basis once the deadline passes, so if you have missed the deadline it is still a good idea to submit as soon as possible.

If there is a particular topic we need more proposals for we will post about it on this blog, so stay tuned.

The future of tablets

May 6, 2014 / Frank Gilbane

The future of tablets isn’t what analysts thought a year ago, or even last fall.

The market for PCs continues to decline (but at a slowing rate: IDC, Gartner), yet tablet growth is also slowing forcing many analysts to scale back their forecasts. Smartphone growth is slowing as well.

There is a lot of discussion, mainly from an investor point of view about why: saturation, price points, supplier market share, etc., that are relevant for both business and consumer markets. Recently the focus has been on iPads because of Apple’s earnings call but the trend is not limited to Apple.

Why aren’t tablets taking more share away from PCs?

Given the phenomenal growth of tablets the last few years, their computing power, and the large overlap of general use cases shared with PCs (email, browsing) it did seem that tablets were on track replace PCs in large numbers. But the use case overlap was not large enough to support the forecasts. Tablets are tweeners, fighting for space between the superior communications of smartphones and greater productivity of PCs. Being in the middle is not normally a desirable spot for a product, but tablets excel at information and entertainment consumption and this middle is a pretty big and happy place to be.

What do we use PCs for? For years we have been using PCs for some combination of productivity, information / entertainment consumption, and communication. PCs were largely designed and most useful for productivity, whether business or personal, and that’s why we bought them. As PCs evolved and became capable and appealing for information/entertainment consumption and communication we bought more of them. And at some point whatever motivated us to buy a PC, our actual use of them flipped – we now spend a higher percentage of time using our PCs for information / entertainment consumption and communication than we do for productivity. And of course this is the domain of tablets and why they have taken as much of the PC market as they have.

But tablets are simply not as good as PCs for a large number of productivity applications. Until they are this will act as a governor on tablet growth and allow for a shrinking but still large market for PCs.

In The iPad Is a Tease Jean-Louis Gassée points out that:

So far, Apple’s bet has been to keep the iPad simple, rigidly so perhaps, rather than creating a neither-nor product: No longer charmingly simple, but not powerful enough for real productivity tasks. But if the iPad wants to cannibalize more of the PC market, it will have to remove a few walls.

I would say Gassée’s post is from the point of view of a user who would like to replace his PC with an iPad but can’t, that this is a larger cohort than enterprise users or even power users, and that this is the best way to think about the productivity penalty portion of slowing iPad sales.

What would make a significant dent in the iPad’s productivity penalty? Microsoft Office support alone is necessary but not sufficient. A better solution for text entry than accessory keyboards, smooth and rapid app switching, and easy file access would each make a big difference. See below for links to other thoughts.

There is also a maddening and ironic side effect of using iPads for industry applications where they are productivity enhancers. For example, I used to be able to choose between an iPad (mostly research and entertainment) and a laptop (mostly work) for most trips, but a couple of my current projects include working with apps that only run on the iPad. I can’t be productive without having both an iPad and a laptop. Even in the office I often need both within reach. Unfortunately this situation is likely to get worse as more iOS, (and Android!) productivity apps appear.

Watch out for smartphones

Benedict Evans suggested another avenue for inquiry in a tweet:

.@asymco @gassee posit: slow iPad sales are worse news for the PC market: implies phones can take the greater share of PC use cases

— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) April 21, 2014

I don’t know Benedict, but I picture him smiling devilishly as he composed that tweet. As well he should have.

The more types of computing devices there are the more complicated figuring out use case fit is going to be.

The future of tablets

The future of tablets seems promising in the near term since neither PCs nor smartphones can match their information and entertainment consumption experience and tablets will get better at aiding productivity. The better they get the more market share they’ll take. And of course we haven’t seen all the new industry apps where the tablet form factor and interface is a net productivity advantage.

On the other hand, the right kind of user interface – perhaps a high resolution holographic interface not dependent on form factors for projection – would free us from our quaint categories of PCs, tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, glasses, and be truly disruptive. Once computing power and user interfaces become independent of physical size all bets are off.

Further reading on iPad growth:

The iPad’s Curse — Ben Bajarin

iPads and Tablet Growth – Benedict Evans

Don’t Give up on the iPad – Ben Thompson

How Apple Could Continue to Own the Enterprise Tablet Market — Tim Bajarin

The Astonishing, Disappointing iPad – MG Siegler

A New Brand of Marketing – a must read for executives

March 11, 2014 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Those of you who appreciated Scott Brinker’s Gilbane Conference keynote What is a Marketing Technologist?, and even more importantly those who missed it, should check out Scott’s short new book, A New Brand of Marketing – The 7 Meta-Trends of Modern Marketing as a Technology-Powered Discipline. The book is free to download and share and doesn’t require registration.

A New Brand of Marketing “… frames the epic collaboration underway between marketers and technologists…” – note the use of ‘collaboration’ rather than ‘battle’. Scott is not only a supreme example of a marketing technologist who knows the details, but may be the most facile communicator (and diplomat, in the most positive sense) of the marketing technology big picture.

A New Brand of Marketing is a must read for CMOs and CIOs, but all senior executives should read it to understand the dramatic changes underway in marketing or to get some pointers on how to communicate the changes to colleagues.

Just a few of my favorite quotes from the book:

Fact: everything digital is powered by software.

Companies don’t just compete for who can provide the most helpful content. They compete for who can provide the most helpful services.

When you’re skydiving, you should know how to pull your parachute.

Multichannel content management

February 18, 2014 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

In Marketing technology landscape explosion and CMS evolution we looked at two of the major themes of December’s Gilbane Conference. The third major theme that we asked speakers to respond to in our spotlight series was the challenge of multichannel delivery:

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?

The best overall strategy and the biggest challenge are the same: creating and managing content that can be optimized for each channel and device including those not anticipated. In short, true Multichannel Content Management, or MCM if we can deal with yet another acronym (Yaa!). Of course the “multichannel” is only necessary for emphasis because “web” content management has been dominant for a few years, and “enterprise” content management was hijacked by the document management interests early on. Perhaps soon, “multichannel” will be redundant and just plain old “content management” will suffice.

Multichannel content management is really hard. Organizations have been implementing such “single source publishing” or “create once, publish everywhere” systems for many years, but the difficulty and cost prevented most from taking it on and forced others to give up even knowing it was the right thing to do.

Multichannel content management is still hard, but it was one thing to hesitate when there was only one extra channel – now there are n+1 channels, the cost equation has changed, and you can’t build a sustainable digital experience without solving this problem.

Organizations who successfully built multichannel content management systems in the past were largely those with direct access to technologists, for example technical documentation, product support, engineering, and R&D. Marketing organizations, aside from a few with large global presences and big brand asset management problems, mostly stayed away – technology and cost were fearsome, and organizational structures and agency dependencies also created barriers. Staying away is no longer an option. Reaching today’s consumers requires an n+1 distribution strategy.

In her keynote presentation, Marriott’s Meg Walsh inspired the audience with her discussion of their distribution and scale challenges and the necessity for a strategy based on adaptive content that is device agnostic – in other words, a multichannel content management capability. She shared a wonderful quote from Jonathan Perelman, VP, Agency Strategy @Buzzfeed, “Content is King, but Distribution is Queen, and She wears the pants.”

Note that Meg’s role is very much that of a marketing technologist. She ran the content management practice in Marriott’s sales and marketing group before moving to Marriott’s IT organization to take responsibility for technology platforms to support the sales and marketing activity.

We’ll be covering much more of what one attendee called “Real Multichannel Content Management and publishing” at this year’s conference, and would love to hear from more marketing organizations that are making the Distribution Queen happy.

Marketing strategy versus technology – should be a virtuous circle

January 30, 2014 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Scott Brinker has another must-read post. I excerpt parts of his post below so I can expand on it a bit but you should read his full post along with the comments.

In his post Scott explains he is responding to statements made in a podcast by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. After linking to the podcast and agreeing with much of what they say Scott makes three points:

“Marketing technology is not just about efficiency — it’s about experiences.

The relationship between strategy and technology is circular, not linear.

Marketers cannot abdicate their responsibility to understand technology.”

and mentions the one quote he really disagrees with (emphasis is Scott’s):

“Figure out your process first. And then get aligned with your internal IT guys to figure out what it is you exactly need to facilitate. Because that’s the only thing that technology will ever, ever do. The only thing technology will ever do is facilitate a process that you have more efficiently. That’s all it’s ever going to do.”

That is a pretty strong recommendation for option A in Scott’s illustration below.

I want to make three points:

The fact that the relationship between technology and strategy is circular – that they have to inform, influence, and advance with each other – is true of all enterprise applications and for all functions and has always been true.

If you replace “technology” with “data” or “big data” or “analytics” the points that Scott makes are equally valid. (For a different take on this see Big data and decision making: data vs intuition.)
Technology is not just a set of product features. The features are possible because of creative combinations of underlying software concepts, programming languages, data structures, and architectures. Without some understanding of the underlying fundamentals it is natural to think product features define software capabilities and thus to limit insight into strategy possibilities. Marketers (or other professionals) with little to no technical background can compare feature sets and build strategies that match, or build strategies and look for the set of already existing product features to match.
Each of these illustrate what we might call the bad kind of circularity (as we mean when we call an argument circular) and they handicap innovation. The good kind of circularity is a strategy/technology dialog of what ifs, informed by what might be possible, not by what is already known.

It is both natural and common for consultants to overemphasize option A, because way too often option B is overemphasized at the expense of option A by both their customers and technology vendors. Good consultants spend a lot of time and effort helping customers overcome an under-appreciation or political deprecation of the importance of strategy. But all of us need to be careful not to suggest either linear false choice.

Marketing technology landscape explosion and CMS evolution

January 19, 2014 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

The most popular and pervasive meme at the recent Gilbane Conference on Content and the Digital Experience was certainly “marketing technologist”. There were many other topic streams but none quite so critical to marketings’, and marketers’, future (and not only marketers, but that’s another story).

One of the three questions we posed to our speakers prior to the conference was, Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be? A number of speakers, including Scott Brinker, provided answers in our speaker spotlight series. Scott also delivered the keynote What is a Marketing Technologist? where he shared a graphic he had created of the marketing technology landscape that illustrates what a marketing technologist has to deal with. Last week he published the new substantially enhanced version below that is now a must-have reference tool.

What makes Scott’s latest version dramatically more valuable for marketers and IT, or anyone involved in digital experience strategies and architectures is the organizational structure he added. As Scott says this is not perfect or the final word. But the six technology categories and structure are certainly a courageous stake in the ground.

Be sure to read Scott’s full post, where he explains what he has done in more detail, provides links to high resolution .png and .pdf versions of the marketing technology landscape super graphic 3.0, links to additional resources, and answers the many comments he has received.

Web content management

Scott’s new landscape also provides some food for thought regarding a second major theme at the conference, which we included in another of the three questions for the speaker spotlights: 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? A slightly different way to think about this is to ask where the center of gravity is in marketing technology architectures.

Scott places WCM and all its variations (CEM, CXM, DXM, etc.) in the Marketing Backbone Platform category. This is surely where it belongs, but it raises lots of questions about just how it ties in with or ties together all the other categories and the variety of technologies within them. And of course there is overlap and competition for the center-of-gravity crown between e-commerce, CRM, and marketing automation platforms, though some of them may not realize it yet. This will be a very interesting game to watch in 2014 (and certainly one we’ll be addressing in this year’s conference). See Scott’s thoughts on this in his CMS Wire post on 9 Key Facts about Web CMS in the Marketing Technology Landscape.

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/

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