Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 32 of 74)

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. Today we’re spotlighting Pawan Deshpande, Founder & CEO, Curata. You can see all Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference as well as last year’s event.

Pawan Deshpande

Founder & CEO, Curata

Follow Pawan @TweetsFromPawan

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?

Mobile forces simplicity and succinctness, for two reasons, limited screen real estate and limited attention spans, because content is often consumed in a casual setting with other interruptions. It’s forcing us to boil our content, and messages down to the minimum and shed all the excess.

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.

There is so much discussion about technology for marketing these days because marketing in many ways is the last one to resist technology. Other disciplines have already learned and rely heavily on technology. For example, sales has salesforce, customer support has well-adopted ticketing systems, engineering has source control and bug tracking systems. All of these provide in-depth accountability, management transparency and organization. Marketing is still, however, struggling to adopt CMSs and marketing automation largely because of diverse needs, and the resulting vendor fragmentation. If anything, marketing can learn about technology adoption from other disciplines.

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?

Content marketing and content strategy are different but often overlap. My diagram below is my perspective on where the responsibilities differ and are shared.

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

Working in B2B setting, it does not have an immediate impact on us. Just like we are setting website personalization have the first impact on B2C, I expect it to trickle down to B2B companies from a content standpoint years from now.

Catch up with Pawan at the Gilbane Conference:

Track C: Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience

C12: Content Marketing Panel
Wednesday, December 3: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

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

See our complete conference program for more details.

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.

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 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.

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/

CMS Wire
• http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/5-ways-marketers-can-improve-the-cms-experience-023410.php
• http://www.cmswire.com/cms/information-management/should-cios-report-to-marketing-ridiculous-its-beginning-to-happen-023396.php
• http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/notes-from-gilbane-business-model-first-customer-experience-second-023388.php
• http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/forrester-4-things-about-customer-experience-management-gilbane-023373.php
• http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/sap-says-link-revenue-to-social-media-to-show-roi-gilbane-023362.php
• http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/cio-reports-to-cmo-technology-under-marketing-gilbane-023356.php
• added 12/20/13:  http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/tips-from-an-industry-user-on-making-web-cms-work-023587.php
• added 3/4/14:  http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/should-the-cio-report-to-the-cmo-024370.php

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/

I was gratified to have the opportunity to do a presentation on the Global User Experience at the Gilbane Conference, as well as moderating several sessions in the technology track. For those that missed my presentation, I’ve posted a short recap here and a further exploration of the topic.

A common theme throughout the conference sessions was digital experiences and the role of mobile, web, content management, and other technologies in providing superior experiences to customers. That’s to be expected as creating superior customer experiences is a strategic imperative for most organizations, and also the current focus of most content software solutions in the marketplace, including content management systems. What is often overlooked (and the subject of my presentation) is that the CMS doesn’t just support delivery of the customer experience—it also has to support the behind the scenes players that create the customer experience.

Providing a compelling digital user experience is a complex undertaking no matter what the nature of the business or enterprise. It requires a range of talents including authoring, curation, story telling, design, and development, testing and deployment—and the tools to effectively support those diverse skill sets.

The heart of that experience is a modern CMS; in fact, delivering compelling digital user experiences is virtually impossible without one. But selecting the right CMS is challenging—after all, there are many to choose from and it can be difficult to differentiate products—most promise to deliver superior digital user experiences.

But one thing that is often overlooked is that creating great customer experiences requires an orchestrated approach by the “other users” of the CMS: editors and developers. It also requires the integration of tools and content that may reside outside of the CMS. In other words, the quality of the customer experience is directly related to the quality of the experience that a CMS provides to content creators, developers, and integrators.

Digging a bit deeper, content creators are actually a diverse collection of roles and skill sets, not just authors and editors. What’s common across those roles is that many are not full time professional content authors, which makes the quality of the content creator experience vitally important. Content creators want to use tools that are easy and familiar with a short learning curve. Most of all, they want to be able to focus on telling stories and creating great content, not mastering complex tools.

Developers, like content creators, also value ease of use and familiarity. They want to use tools, languages, and frameworks that they are familiar with and that work well in the technology environment in which they live. Most importantly, they want and need to be involved in the process of selecting a CMS—failure to include IT will lead to increased time to operation, and a risk that the chosen solution won’t work well in the enterprise’s IT environment.

The integrator experience involves the developers, partners, and vendors that have to integrate the CMS with enterprise systems and applications (the installed base), but also with solutions from other vendors that help provide the customer experience. If integration is difficult, it will take more time or, worse yet, not be done. Poorly done integration drains energy, productivity, and innovation leading to later, less desirable results.

The solution to providing the global user experience is a well-architected CMS that provides comfortable and easy-to-use core functionality while easily integrating with enterprise and third party tools and applications. The selection of that CMS requires a concerted and cooperative effort on the part of all stakeholders that will ultimately use the content management system. Selection of a CMS is not a technology decision, it’s a strategic business decision that warrants the time, effort, and participation of all business and technology stakeholders in order to render the best decision.