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

Share your expertise and network with peers and digital content leaders…

Tracks include:

Content, Marketing, and Customer Experience

Designed for marketers, marketing technologists, social marketers, content strategists, web content managers, content marketers, content creators and designers, business and technology strategists focused on customer experience and digital marketing.

Focused on how to overcome challenges and implement successful strategies and practices to reach, engage, and retain customers with superior content and digital experiences.

Content, Collaboration, and Digital Workplace Experience

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

Focused on tools and practices for building agile, information rich, collaborative, and distributed digital workplaces to meet the demands of modern organizations and the changing workforce.

Technologies for Content, Marketing, and Digital Experience

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.

Focused on what you need to know about evolving, and potentially disrupting, content and digital experience technologies for marketing and the workplace.

Re-imagining Digital Strategies for Publishing and Media

Designed for publishing and information product managers, marketers, technologists, strategists, and executives focused on digital transformation, new channels and business models, and managing digital assets.

Focused on the business and technical challenges facing information, publishing, and media organizations creating, managing, and delivering content across the growing number of competing platforms and channels.

About

The Gilbane Conference on Content Management, Marketing, and Digital Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior digital experiences for all stakeholders.

Call for Speakers

Well-designed content is the core ingredient of competitive digital experiences. And the accelerating pace of technology allows us to dramatically improve content creation, content management, content delivery, and ultimately the customer experience. But this is far from easy, and depending on your goals can require pulling together many components, including web content management / web experience management, new development frameworks, analytics, tag management, social media, and advertising tools, as well as ecommerce, CRM, and other system integrations. The Gilbane Digital Content Conference brings together content strategists and managers, marketers, technologists, IT and business executives, as well as external service providers to learn and share how to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

The Gilbane Digital Content Conference 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 Digital Content Conference can be found in the Speaker Guidelines.

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
Focused on how to overcome challenges and implement successful strategies and practices to reach, engage, and retain customers with superior content and digital experiences.

Designed for marketers, marketing technologists, social marketers, content strategists, web content managers, content marketers, content creators and designers, business and technology strategists focused on customer experience and digital marketing.

• Customer experience management and engagement
• Content and the customer lifecycle
• 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
• Social marketing
• Personalization – what works, what doesn’t
• Growth hacking strategies
• Localization & multilingual content management an practices
• What function / system owns customer profiles?
• Marketing transformation
• Omnichannel strategies
• Working with agencies
• Working with IT
• Third party data and service integration

Track E: Content, Collaboration, and Digital Workplace Experience
Focused on tools and practices for building agile, information rich, collaborative, and distributed digital workplaces to meet the demands of modern organizations and the changing workforce.

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

• Collaboration tools & social platforms
• Practices for successful collaboration
• 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: Technologies for Content, Marketing, and Digital Experience
Focused on what you need to know about evolving, and potentially disrupting, content and digital experience technologies for marketing and the workplace.

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.

• APIs and customer experience stacks
• Mobile development frameworks and strategies
• Streaming apps and content
• HTML5
• Wearable computing and the web
• Hybrid cloud content management
• Natural language technologies
• Haptic and gesture interfaces
• 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: Re-imagining Digital Strategies for Publishing and Media
Focused on the business and technical challenges facing information, publishing, and media organizations creating, managing, and delivering content across the growing number of competing platforms and channels.

Designed for publishing and information product managers, marketers, technologists, strategists, and executives focused on digital transformation, new channels and business models, and managing digital assets.

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

Submit your speaking proposal

Join us at the Gilbane Conference in Boston December 1-3 and learn how your peers are building superior digital experiences for customers and employees. Personalization is a big, and complex, component of customer experiences. A successful strategy for your organization needs to consider all the stakeholders and lots of variables. This workshop will help you begin, or review, your personalization strategy.

Workshop A. Developing a Personalization Strategy: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

In this workshop, we will discuss the thinking necessary to build a strong personalization strategy for any organization. Illuminating a range of different types of strategy and effective scenarios for different organization types, we will pull back the details to understand the commonalities, decision paths, and frameworks for organizing these strategies.

The session will also ground the discussion in some operational complexity associated with personalization strategy, including:

• Assessing existing user behavior as a prerequisite of personalization strategy
• Audience segmentation and CRM
• The interaction between personalization strategy and UX planning

For attendees, the workshop will provide both an overview of this complex subject, and the chance to discuss their own challenges and align them with strategies that can work.

Instructor: John Berndt, CEO, TBG (The Berndt Group)
Tuesday, December, 1: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. • Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston

This workshop is included in the ConferencePlus package. Save $200 on the ConferencePlus and Conference Only options. To get your Bluebill discount use priority code 200BB when registering online.

I would like my $200 registration discount – code 200BB

Join us at the Gilbane Conference in Boston December 1-3 and learn how your peers are building superior digital experiences for customers and employees. If you have a website refresh project coming up, make sure you are prepared with the latest info on the web content management technology landscape by attending this in-depth workshop.

Workshop C. Insiders’ Guide to Selecting the Right WCM

If you are a website or intranet manager or architect, this year may well find you looking to implement new tools or refresh dated platforms. However, you face a wide and growing array of vendors willing to address your problems. Which ones offer the best fit for your particular circumstances?

This fast-paced workshop led by Real Story Group founder Tony Byrne will help you understand the broad but converging marketplaces for Web CMS technologies. Tony will sort out the key players and business models, and offer you a roadmap for deciding which types of technologies and vendors provide the best long-term fit for your needs. The workshop will answer several key questions:

• How can you quickly distinguish among the 120 major toolsets across these marketplaces?
• How are changes in the open source landscape impacting your options today and going forward?
• Where does Web Publishing intersect with emergent technologies?
• What should you expect to pay for these tools?
• What are the critical, can’t-ignore architectural distinctions you need to make?
• How mature are the vendors? – What are the strengths and weaknesses of some key players, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle
• How can you insure that your selection process meets your original business objectives?
• Which should you pick first: Agency, Integrator, Vendor, or…?
• What are some major pitfalls others have made that you can readily avoid?
• How are these marketplaces likely to evolve in the coming years, and how can you best align your firm to take advantage of future innovation?

Instructor: Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group
Tuesday, December, 1: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. • Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston

This workshop is included in the ConferencePlus package. Save $200 on the ConferencePlus and Conference Only options.

To get your Bluebill discount use priority code 200BB when registering online.

I would like my $200 registration discount – code 200BB

Join us at the Gilbane Conference in Boston December 1-3 and learn how your peers are building superior digital experiences for customers and employees. If you have a project coming up make sure you have the right service provider partners by attending this in-depth workshop.

Workshop D. How to Strategically Select a Service Provider Partner

Evaluating and selecting technology and service partners is intimidating. And without proper guidance, it’s easy to take the wrong path. This workshop focuses on selection readiness. It is designed to point your organization in the right direction before you even start the journey to either a roadmap and/or new solutions for web content and experience management. You will learn how to create a plan of action for getting your organization ready for a successful selection program – one that results in real business benefits as the direct result of partnering with the right service provider to help you set your customer experience path, and implement the right solutions. We explore the fundamentals of selection preparation, covering four key areas of readiness:

• Articulating the business case
• Identifying the stakeholder landscape
• Managing requirements gatherings
• Developing realistic budgets

We provide a step-by-step overview of an efficient, results-driven selection program, and we show you how to build a messaging and communications plan that will help you shape internal conversations about it. With this approach, you can set expectations, educate reluctant stakeholders, and get your company thinking about change management, which is often an afterthought but shouldn’t be. The selection process is all about aligning business goals with the “best-fit” partner for your organization’s needs. And finding that fit is about way more than just ticking the boxes of a procurement process checklist. Armed with the outcomes of this workshop, you will be ready to move forward with confidence and find the right service provide to partner with on your customer experience journey.

Instructor: Cathy McKnight, Partner and Principal Analyst, Digital Clarity Group
Tuesday, December, 1: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. • Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston

This workshop is included in the ConferencePlus package. Save $200 on the ConferencePlus and Conference Only options.

To get your Bluebill discount use priority code 200BB when registering online.

I would like my $200 registration discount – code 200BB

First of all, choosing a new CMS, or any other enterprise software, should only ever come after a critical and comprehensive analysis of business requirements, strategic objectives, current technology infrastructure, existing and expected operational processes, and a determination of service provider involvement. And once you’re ready to start looking at the options you need to pay attention to the employee, partner, and customer experience from the start if you want to ensure adoption and success. The whole process is less obvious and sure to involve way more effort than you anticipate.

Below are a selection of four conference sessions and two workshops at the upcoming Gilbane Conference that will be especially relevant to anyone considering a new CMS product, platform, or environment.

P2. Aligning Technology with Strategy – Harvard Business Review

The Harvard Business Review Group launched a redesigned site in November 2014, a big step forward for the company in terms of both strategy and technology. The team adopted new technologies for the both the front end and back end that were not only designed to push our capabilities forward, but chosen in close collaboration with business stakeholders with a deep understanding of where our business is heading. HBR’s goals are similar to any other magazine/publishing/media company, to grow the business by creating and retaining subscribers and simultaneously meet the changing needs of digital advertising as print revenues potentially decline. As the primary place where more and more people and clients engage with us, HBR.org has become the center of our strategy. The old site served us well for years but our new technology choices now allow us to form the direct relationships not only with our audience, but more importantly with each subscriber. Topics we’ll cover in our talk will include: advantages of modern UI frameworks and why we built our own, migrating from traditional relational databases to a big data/nosql database.

The presentation will consist of at least three parts: setting the stage for change, evaluating options for new technologies to meet the need, choices made with a retrospective on lessons learned.

Wednesday, December, 2: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m.
Moderator: Kevin Newman, Director of Technology, Harvard Business Publishing
Panelists:
Fred Lalande, Technical Production Manager, Harvard Business Publishing
Daigo Fujiwara, Web Developer, Harvard Business Publishing
Matt Wagner, Web Developer, Harvard Business Publishing

T4. Benchmark Your WCM Environment

Join Real Story Group for a fast-paced, hands-on session where you will assess your existing WCM environment in a series of structured Q&A exercises. Then find out how your situation stacks up against your peers’.

Thursday, December, 3: 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.
Speakers:
Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group
Jarrod Gingras, Senior Analyst and Managing Director, Real Story Group

T5. When and How to Move to a New CMS / Digital Platform

Replacing a content management system has always been a daunting task, but is now more difficult than it ever. As CMS’s have matured they have taken on more functionality, much of which overlaps with other systems thus forcing choices about which system should be responsible for which function. The marketing technology landscape and the variety of technology stacks it suggests are possible is scary indeed — even though your own existing environment provides some constraints. The speakers in this session are consultants who have been through this with many clients and have some great advice to share.

Thursday, December, 3: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.
Moderator: Barb Mosher Zinck, Content & Product Marketer, MarTech Analyst, Publisher, BMZ Content Strategies / Digital Tech Diary
Speakers:
Rob Martinez, Director of Professional Services, NorthPoint Digital
When to Abandon your Existing Technology and Start Afresh
William Thayer, Principal Consultant Technologist, Avalon Consulting, LLC.
Strategies for Migrating to a new Web Content Management System

T6. CMS Alternatives – Bespoke to WordPress

When you need a content management system you have lots of options. In this session our speakers advocate for two alternatives that have been controversial choices for “enterprise-class” requirements. At one end of the spectrum, WordPress, the most popular “content management” system, is often thought of as too lightweight a solution. At the other end of the spectrum, building your own custom system means it can do whatever you want, but the cost of development and maintenance required is considered too high a cost. Both speakers are Gilbane conference veterans and know our audience so will be well prepared for any challenging questions!

Thursday, December, 3: 11:40 p.m. – 12:40 p.m.
Moderator: Barb Mosher Zinck, Content & Product Marketer, MarTech Analyst, Publisher, BMZ Content Strategies / Digital Tech Diary
Speakers:
John Eckman, CEO, 10up
Building a Better Author Experience: WordPress as a CMS platform
John Petersen, Programmer, Sutro Software
Throw Away Your CMS

Also see these pre-conference workshops for deep dives:

Workshop C. Insiders’ Guide to Selecting the Right WCM

Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group: Tuesday, December, 1: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Workshop D. Foundations for Best-Fit WCM Service Provider Selections

Cathy McKnight, Partner and Principal Analyst, Digital Clarity Group: Tuesday, December, 1: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.