Category: Content management & strategy (Page 96 of 468)

This category includes editorial and news blog posts related to content management and content strategy. For older, long form reports, papers, and research on these topics see our Resources page.

Content management is a broad topic that refers to the management of unstructured or semi-structured content as a standalone system or a component of another system. Varieties of content management systems (CMS) include: web content management (WCM), enterprise content management (ECM), component content management (CCM), and digital asset management (DAM) systems. Content management systems are also now widely marketed as Digital Experience Management (DEM or DXM, DXP), and Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM) systems or platforms, and may include additional marketing technology functions.

Content strategy topics include information architecture, content and information models, content globalization, and localization.

For some historical perspective see:

https://gilbane.com/gilbane-report-vol-8-num-8-what-is-content-management/

Speaker Spotlight: Rahel Anne Bailie – Content marketing and content strategy not the same

October 3, 2014 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

As we did last year we’ve posed some of our attendees’ most frequently asked questions to speakers who will be at this year’s Gilbane Conference and will be sharing their complete answers with you here. This week we’re spotlighting Rahel Anne Bailie, Founder and Senior Content Strategy Consultant of Intentional Design Inc. You can see all Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference as well as last year’s event.

Speaker Spotlight: Rahel Anne Bailie

Founder and Senior Content Strategy Consultant

Intentional Design Inc.

Follow Rahel: @rahelab

Given that there are more smartphones than PCs on the planet and both will be important for the foreseeable future, how should organization’s content delivery priorities and technologies change? How is yours changing?

The emphasis on having a proper strategy for content delivery is going to increase as we have more complex delivery needs – and I believe that smartphones are just the tip of the iceberg. Wearables will be the next challenge, and who knows what will come after that. So some of what we need to do is think “content first” and combine that with responsive design and adaptive content. That means changes to technology and infrastructure, changes to processes, and improvements to skill sets of both technologists and writers.

Does the ‘internet of things’ have an immediate or near-term impact on your organization’s information or collaboration infrastructure? How so?

The idea that the internet of things is going to be a walk-in-the-park is a little optimistic. There are lots of business drivers and user behaviors that need to be figured out before there will be adoption at any scale. If any information or collaboration infrastructure is affected, it needs to be between market analysts and technologists, who are usually at opposite ends of a project.

Marketing is the most talked about discipline that needs to take on more responsibility for technology to be effective. What can other departments learn from the discussion around marketing technology and marketing technologists?

Any department along the content delivery supply chain needs to develop basic literacy when it comes to marketing technologies. Each organization has its idiosyncrasies, but that doesn’t mean a particular department gets to take a pass. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and we’ve seen time and time again how weak links can sink an entire initiative, by being blockers.

Although sometimes used interchangeably ‘content strategy’ and ‘content marketing’ refer to very different though often connected disciplines. How and where should these activities be organized?

This is a particular irritation of mine. Content marketing and content strategy are two distinct disciplines. There are overlaps, sure, but the very names indicate the distinction. Content marketing is about just that, marketing, with a focus on acquiring and engaging target audiences, which in turns drives an increase in the bottom line. Content strategy keeps marketing in mind – after all, you don’t want to do anything to harm profitability – but the focus is on planning for the management of content throughout the entire content lifecycle, no matter what the input or output. Content strategy is the umbrella to any content marketing strategy because it does not confine itself to a single content silo or type; content strategy instead provides the glue that connects all sub-strategies together, including content marketing.

Catch up with Rahel at the Gilbane Conference:

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

T5: Multichannel Content Management – How do you do it?
Wednesday, December 3: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 p.m.

Register now to hear more from Rahel and all of our speakers.

See our complete conference program for more details.

Speaker Spotlight: Terena Bell – Multilingual challenges and the future

September 23, 2014 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

As we did last year we’ve posed some of our attendees’ most frequently asked questions to speakers who will be at this year’s Gilbane Conference, December 2 – 4, 2014, and will be sharing their complete answers with you here. You can see all Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference as well as last year’s event.

Speaker Spotlight: Terena Bell

CEO

In Every Language

Follow Terena: @ineverylanguage

Although sometimes used interchangeably ‘content strategy’ and ‘content marketing’ refer to very different though often connected disciplines. How and where should these activities be organized?

Marketing is part of strategy. Think about it like this: An orange is a fruit, but not all fruit are oranges. Marketing is part of strategy but not all content strategy is content marketing.

Marketing is the most talked about discipline that needs to take on more responsibility for technology to be effective. What can other departments learn from the discussion around marketing technology and marketing technologists?

Money. Basically everything not marketing is great, but you need marketing to funnel money to it all. Regulatory content, user-driven content, all of this is great, but it’s post-sale and needs to be paid for. If you’re not translating and working in a pre-sale environment, then translation and content are cost centers, not profit drivers. So drive profit and then everyone is funded and happy.

Given that there are more smartphones than PCs on the planet and both will be important for the foreseeable future, how should organization’s content delivery priorities and technologies change? How is yours changing?

I actually just wrote an article on this for MultiLingual Magazine, slated to publish right before the conference! In translation and multilingual content creation, we have been very focused on the what—what are we now translating or localizing because of mobile that we weren’t before, such as apps, mobile-optimized websites, etc. But instead, we should think long-term and focus on the how. How do we translate on a phone? This means shaping translation technology around the idea of a mobile as default environment instead of for a mobile environment. How do we create multilingual or multicultural content on a phone, as opposed to for use on one?

Does the ‘internet of things’ have an immediate or near-term impact on your organization’s information or collaboration infrastructure? How so?

Heck yes. In Every Language is a translation company. We already have connected things that talk to us—telephones, alarm clocks, cars. If you think those things should only talk in one language, you’re crazy.

Catch up with Terena at the Gilbane Conference:

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

T7: Multilingual Challenges – Current and Future
Wednesday, December 3: 11:40 a.m. – 12:40 p.m.

Register now to hear more from Terena and all of our speakers.

See our complete conference program for more details.

Additional Gilbane Conference workshops posted

July 22, 2014 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

We’ll be posting the complete program for this years’ Gilbane Conference over the next 2-3 weeks on the main conference website. The afternoon workshops are below.

Workshop D. Adaptive Content Modeling for Omnichannel UX

Speaker: Noz Urbina, Consultant and Founder, Urbina Consulting

Thursday, December, 4: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Your users need you to come to this session, even if they don’t know it. Multi-channel, or “COPE (create once, publish everywhere)”, content is a bit of a holy grail. Our trade is discussing content being freed from the browser, available for reuse, and accessible in apps, kiosks, responsive mobile deliverables, eBooks and syndication services to our partners – even in wearable technologies. All this should improve the experience of users, and benefit the organizations that serve them. Adaptive content is content that is nimble enough to realize all these ambitions. But making our content adaptive means addressing a topic that sends many running for the fire exit or nearest window: semantic modeling of structured content. This session will connect the dots between adaptive content, responsive design, multi-channel delivery and user experiences to show you why you want and even need to have semantic content structures. It will then go through a non-terrifying introduction to getting started with modeling your own content in a future-proof way. Learning objectives:

The knowledge that their content is already more structured than they realize.
A solid sense of what semantic, structured content actually is and its relationship to adaptive content, multichannel, and UX.

This workshop is designed for either intermediate or expert attendees. Bring your laptop and go home with samples and templates.

Workshop E. CMS Implementations: The View from the Implementor’s Side

Speaker: Deane Barker, Director of Business Development, Blend Interactive

Thursday, December, 4: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Ever wanted to know how CMS integration shops approach projects, and how you can better work with them or use their techniques in your own organization? In this workshop, Deane Barker will explain the ins and outs of CMS project work from the perspective of a veteran integrator, with the goal of helping you understand how best to find an integrator, work with your chosen integrator, or manage your project and team. Learn about how integrators:

Evaluate RFPs
Develop proposals
Scope projects
Schedule work
Manage client expectations
Plan implementations
Select software
Execute and manage development
Support existing implementations

Workshop F. What’s it Worth? Assessing the ROI of your Content

Speaker: Lindy Roux, VP, Content Marketing and Strategy, Rauxa

Thursday, December, 4: 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

No matter how well researched and deliberate your content strategy is, the proof lies in the pudding and the most successful content professionals continually evaluate the effectiveness of their content and adapt their strategies to improve the return. Too often, content is evaluated or audited only when a major digital shift is in play (a move to a new CMS, a new marketing automation tool, a new campaign launch.) In order to be truly successful, that evaluation should be ongoing, providing the opportunity to learn from past content marketing successes and failures. Lindy Roux will demonstrate an approach to content evaluation across multiple channels, based on qualitative and quantitative assessments, which has been used to help organizations understand the true ROI of a piece of content. The session will end with a practical exercise in content evaluation where participants will try their hand at developing assessment criteria and then applying these to real content. Participants in the session will learn:

How to establish content goals that are measurable and realistic
A way to evaluate content against these goals
How to establish a regular review workflow and process
An approach to optimization across all channels
The appropriate team structure for ongoing content performance

First three Gilbane Conference workshops posted

June 30, 2014 / Clea Durrell / 0 Comments

We’ll be posting the complete program for this years’ Gilbane Conference over the next 4-5 weeks on the main conference website. The first three of the six planned workshops are below.

Workshop A. Insiders Guide to Building Digital Marketing Technology Toolkit

Speaker: Theresa Regli, Principal Analyst and Managing Partner, Real Story Group

Thursday, December, 4: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Marketing practitioners multitask just about every minute of every day. There are ongoing email, web, mobile, and marketing strategies to organize, plan and execute. Each of these areas used to include a range of technologies that was purchased and implemented separately such as web content management, campaign management, analytics, digital asset management, and others. Now, there are new suites of tools that can manage all of these processes. But how do you select the right one that will help you to accomplish your marketing objectives?

Specifically, the session will provide a methodology for mapping business needs to technology alternatives, as well as a road map for evaluating digital marketing technology vendors. We will provide critical and hard-hitting reviews of the available digital marketing technologies. Don’t be surprised after-the-fact. Find out the real strengths and weaknesses of these tools before you purchase them.

Key Takeaways:

Digital marketing trends and emerging architectures
Hints and tips on selecting a digital marketing product for your organization
Overcoming the daunting prospect of selection – how to narrow down your list of vendors to evaluate.
A critical, high-level overview of digital marketing solution providers

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

Speaker: Cathy McKnight, Partner and Principal Analyst, Digital Clarity Group

Thursday, December, 4: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

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 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 implementing the right solutions with the right technology and service partners. We explore the fundamentals of selection preparation, covering four key areas of readiness:

Articulating the business case,
Identifying the stakeholder landscape,
Managing requirements gatherings, and
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” solution for your organization’s needs. And finding that fit is about way more than just matching features to requirements. Armed with the outcomes of this workshop, you will be ready to move forward with confidence.

Workshop C. Successful Social Intranets

Speaker: Rebecca Rodgers, Senior Consultant, Step Two Designs

Thursday, December, 4: 9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.

Modern intranets are steadily becoming more “social” and “collaborative”, but this can mean many things. Some recent intranets put social at the heart of everything (including the homepage), while others supplement existing sites with simpler features, such as commenting. While this is still a rapidly evolving space, intranet teams in the real world need to make concrete decisions with confidence.

This interactive workshop will cover four key steps for social intranets:

Explore the opportunities. Looking at social intranet examples around the globe, we will explore the reasons, benefits and business cases for social.
Understand your organisational landscape. Every organisation is different, and this has a big impact on the what, where, when and how of social intranets.
Choose what to launch. Where to start, what to launch and for who: there are multiple options to choose from, depending on your strategy and organisational context.
Make social a success. There are a growing list of best practices to draw on, relating to design, launch, adoption and governance.

This inspirational and practical workshop will mix plenty of screenshots and examples with discussions and workshop activities. While not every question will be answered, participants will walk away with a greater sense of confidence and knowledge about social intranets.

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.

Audio and Video: Metadata, Meta-tags, Meta-Understanding

March 27, 2014 / Lynda Moulton

2014 opened with a post about findability; that theme continues with some thoughts on what it means to build an enterprise digital asset management (DAM) repository and have it actually deliver findability for audio and video content.

Working on a project for an institution, which has experience using a DAM for image assets, I have become keenly aware of the heavy lift required for a similar system for audio and video files. Heavy lift means human resources with the knowledge to metatag assets manually. This metadata activity is necessary to establish text that describes the “aboutness” of an audio or video file. Search queries in a DAM are done using text and without text, finding an asset will be impossible.

Stephen Arnold raises many critical issues in the article Video Metadata: ripe for innovation in KMWorld, March, 2014. It articulates very well the challenge of indexing a video asset because, if any metadata exists, much of it will be transactional in nature, not descriptive of the content.

In any institution with limited content editorial or curatorial resources to catalog internally produced audio and video files, it will fall to the creator to describe with metadata what the essential elements are. Those elements might include, who is in the video, who is performing in an audio file, where did a performance take place, what are the major themes, what instruments were being featured, and so on. Software applications exist that can extract words from spoken or sung language, or from text images that are visible in a video. But when it comes to the “aboutness” or major themes being demonstrated, only the creator or creator’s surrogate will have the required meta-understanding.

Enterprises with a public face or commercial aspect will employ a metadata creation staff for images or files that go into their public web sites. However, justifying staffing to make audio and video a valuable asset for internal sharing and consumption is a tough sell. Commitment to building up an internal DAM that will be used and useful because its assets are easily found takes faith and almost religious fervor on the part of participating contributors. Technology can only go so far in making those assets findable. Attribute possibilities are voluminous and not easily codified.

On the arts frontier of searchability, one only has to look at the gold standard for controlled vocabulary, the Getty Museum, to see the breadth and depth of categories of their thesauri covering paintings, sculpture, drawing, crafts, woodworking, etc. In non-classical musicology no such universal standard of terminologies exists for public consumption. In the musical arts getting musicians to agree on how to label innovative and evolving genres will be a herculean human effort.

Building a DAM for internal audio and videos files is not to be undertaken without answering these questions:

How will findability be defined?
What is the audience?
Who is going to create the metadata for uploaded assets, particularly “locally created” content?
What are the technology tools that can index and search the assets?
What are the resources for establishing, modifying, and perpetually expanding taxonomies/controlled terminology?
When assets are found, how will they be displayed or played?
What is the on-going process for sustaining the repository, curating and expanding its scope?

This is a new frontier in content management. With so much investment in audio and video engineering, and the entertainment industry, it is time to innovate on the “findability” front, as well. In the meantime, a wise process for adoption is to start small and simple with the metadata development effort. Then hope that technology innovation will emerge to help your process before you retire.

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.

Category: Content management & strategy (Page 96 of 468)

Speaker Spotlight: Rahel Anne Bailie – Content marketing and content strategy not the same

Given that there are more smartphones than PCs on the planet and both will be important for the foreseeable future, how should organization’s content delivery priorities and technologies change? How is yours changing?

Does the ‘internet of things’ have an immediate or near-term impact on your organization’s information or collaboration infrastructure? How so?

Marketing is the most talked about discipline that needs to take on more responsibility for technology to be effective. What can other departments learn from the discussion around marketing technology and marketing technologists?

Although sometimes used interchangeably ‘content strategy’ and ‘content marketing’ refer to very different though often connected disciplines. How and where should these activities be organized?

Catch up with Rahel at the Gilbane Conference:

Speaker Spotlight: Terena Bell – Multilingual challenges and the future

Although sometimes used interchangeably ‘content strategy’ and ‘content marketing’ refer to very different though often connected disciplines. How and where should these activities be organized?

Marketing is the most talked about discipline that needs to take on more responsibility for technology to be effective. What can other departments learn from the discussion around marketing technology and marketing technologists?

Given that there are more smartphones than PCs on the planet and both will be important for the foreseeable future, how should organization’s content delivery priorities and technologies change? How is yours changing?

Does the ‘internet of things’ have an immediate or near-term impact on your organization’s information or collaboration infrastructure? How so?

Catch up with Terena at the Gilbane Conference:

Additional Gilbane Conference workshops posted

Workshop D. Adaptive Content Modeling for Omnichannel UX

Workshop E. CMS Implementations: The View from the Implementor’s Side

Workshop F. What’s it Worth? Assessing the ROI of your Content

First three Gilbane Conference workshops posted

Workshop A. Insiders Guide to Building Digital Marketing Technology Toolkit

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

Workshop C. Successful Social Intranets

Gilbane Conference speaker proposals – update

Miss the deadline?

Audio and Video: Metadata, Meta-tags, Meta-Understanding

Multichannel content management

Marketing strategy versus technology – should be a virtuous circle

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