Category: Gilbane events (Page 9 of 44)

These posts are about the Gilbane conferences. To see the actual programs see https://gilbane.com/Conferences/. Information about our earlier Documation conferences see https://gilbane.com/entity/documation-conference/.

How to choose a new CMS

October 19, 2015 / Frank Gilbane

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.

Full Program

Schedule

Workshops

Register

Multichannel or omnichannel, you’ve got multi-challenges

October 12, 2015 / Frank Gilbane

Whether you prefer to focus your customer experience strategy on the “all” of “omnichannel” or the “more-than-one” of “multichannel”, you have a lot digital, physical, organizational, and operational decisions to deal with. Whatever your terminology preference, below are four relevant sessions with ten presentations at the upcoming Gilbane Conference that will provide you with plenty to think about.

C2. Making Omni-channel Work

“Omni-channel” is a succinct way to refer to the core problem of marketing transformation since it is typically used to include digital and non-digital channels as well as all their related support systems. Used in this way the term represents an ideal that may not often be attainable, but that is no reason it should not be a target to strive for. What does this mean in the real world? In this session our three presenters will look at: what is being done at an organization on the path to omni-channel, some common early mistakes organizations make when planning for omni-channel, and some ideas and strategies for dealing with the growing impact of connected devices.

Wednesday, December, 2: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m.
Moderator: Melissa Webster, Program VP, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC
Speakers:
Kevin Novak, CEO and Founder, 2040 Digital
Moving to Customer Centricity in the Omni-Channel
Jake DiMare, Digital Strategist, Agency Oasis
Successfully planning for Digital Transformation
Loni Stark, Senior Director of Strategy and Product Marketing, Digital Marketing Business, Adobe
Connected Experiences: From websites to wearables to wherever

C3. Holistic Customer Experiences Require Fundamental Change

As we say in this year’s conference description, “A modern customer experience must be holistic and seamless. Holistic in that customer communications be consistent within the company and across all touch points and channels, and seamless so that transitions between customer interactions are smooth and frictionless. This is a continuous process that requires an unprecedented amount of collaboration and integration between internal and external facing organizations and systems.” In this session two industry analysts look deeper into the fundamental changes required in the supply chain and internal business systems.

Wednesday, December, 2: 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Moderator: Jeff Cram, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder, Connective DX
Speakers:
Matt Mullen, Senior Analyst, Social Business, 451 Research
Beyond Engagement and Experience; The Converged Enterprise and the Dynamic Supply Chain
Connie Moore, Senior Vice President Research, Digital Clarity Group
The New Customer Experience Imperative: Moving From Digital Transformation to Business Transformation

T7. Modern Multichannel Strategies

Implementing COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere) is not easy, but for years organizations have built systems to accomplish or approximate multichannel publishing. Is this still the best approach? Or is there a newer model needed to support the more interactive web and mobile experiences? This session includes lessons-learned from COPE implementations as well as a proposal for an enhanced model of COPE for a modern customer experience.

Thursday, December, 3: 11:40 a.m. – 12:40 p.m.
Moderator: Jake DiMare, Digital Strategist, Agency Oasis
Speakers:
Chris Schagen, CMO, Contentful GmbH
Multi-channel content modeling: Learnings from 3 COPE projects
Andrew Blackmore, Solution Principal, National Customer Engagement, Slalom Consulting
CDSE – An Evolution of COPE for Maturing Brands

T8. How to Plan for Complex Multichannel Projects

Multichannel projects that aren’t complex are already rare, and the complexity is increasing. When planning for such projects it is helpful to look at successful results for repeatable patterns. This is not easy to do if you only have experience with one or two similar projects. All three presentations in this session provide some level of pattern analysis on relevant projects that will allow you to consider a much broader range of scenarios in your own complex project planning.

Thursday, December, 3: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.
Moderator: Barb Mosher Zinck, Content & Product Marketer, MarTech Analyst, Publisher, BMZ Content Strategies / Digital Tech Diary
Speakers:
Martin Coady, Managing Director, Technology, VML
Reusability – the Myth and the Reality
In Koo Kim, Senior Vice President, NorthPoint Digital
Patterns of Successful Digital Projects
Jeff Hansen, Content Solutions Lead, SingleStone
Designing a Flexible Content Architecture to Enhance both Customer Experience and Author Experience

Full Program

Schedule

Workshops

Register

Gilbane Conference Opening Keynote Presentations

October 5, 2015 / Frank Gilbane

Wednesday, December 2, 8:30 am – Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston

Moderator: Frank Gilbane, Founder, Bluebill Advisors, Gilbane Conference

Donna Tuths, Global Managing Director, Accenture Interactive, Accenture Digital
Global Marketers and Digital Transformation: What They are Doing and What They are Thinking

Scott Brinker, Founder, chiefmartec.com & Co-founder & CTO, ion interactive
Building an Infrastructure for Marketing Digital Transformation

Jon Marks, CTO and co-founder, Kaldor
Are Apps All They’re Cracked Up to Be? (Or Should We Just Embrace Mobile Web Instead?)

Scott Calderwood, Director, Digital Web Strategy, SAS Institute
Key Ingredients for Today’s Modern Web Experience

Michele J. Givens, Publisher and General Manager, Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.
Strategies for Improving Digital Outreach & Increasing Audience Engagement

The complete schedule, program and other details can be found at gilbaneconference.com.

Stay up-to-date between now and the conference with the Gilbane Advisor.

Gilbane Advisor 8-26-15 – Gilbane Program and ad-blocking update

August 26, 2015 / Frank Gilbane

Gilbane Conference 2015 program published

Join us in Boston December 1-3.
See the program, workshops, schedule, venue and register.

Maybe the backlash to intrusive web and mobile ads is finally coming. Maybe the combination of distraction, painfully slow page loads, and overly creepy tracking is about force a major change in how digital content is paid for. Then again, maybe most people will just put up with it — many may not even have noticed the gradual deterioration of the web experience. Either way, things are ramping up and this effects everybody. The use of ad-blocking is growing, and Apple’s imminent release of iOS 9 with support for ad-blocking could dramatically increase its use among a highly-prized demographic. We have chosen three of the many recent articles to get you up to speed quickly.

Ad Blockers and the Nuisance at the Heart of the Modern Web

First up, the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo does a nice job summarizing the major points of view.

Advertising sustains pretty much all the content you enjoy on the web … many of the world’s most useful technologies may never have come about without online advertising. But at the same time, ads and the vast, hidden, data-sucking machinery that they depend on to track and profile you are routinely the most terrible thing about the Internet. … Now, more and more web users are escaping the daily bombardment of online advertising by installing an ad blocker. Read more

The Ethics of Modern Web Ad-blocking

Next, Marco Arment takes a look at the ‘implied’ or ‘implicit’ contract between publishers / advertisers and content consumers.

There’s no opportunity for disclosure, negotiation, or reconsideration. By following any link, you unwittingly opt into whatever the target site, and any number of embedded scripts from other sites and tracking networks, wants to collect, track, analyze, and sell about you. … That’s why the implied-contract theory is invalid: people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price. Read more

Real-World Results of iOS 9 Safari Content Blocking

Even though iOS 9 is not released yet the beta versions have the content blocking feature and developers are building content blocking apps, so it is possible to see the effect on the user experience. Owen Williams has done just that with side-by-side tests of major publisher sites with and without one of the content blocking apps turned on. Note that iOS content blocking capability includes more than just ads. It will be interesting to see the final options for configuring, and how they end up being used.

Content blockers on iOS are a new type of app that’s able to block incoming content before it’s loaded by the system — it provides a list of sites and scripts to the operating system for blocking. Instead of requiring the browser to process what to block as the page loads, it’s performed on a system level before the page loads which increases speed significantly. … The effect of using a content blocker on iOS is, to be honest, something publishers should be deeply afraid of. I don’t really care about advertising actually appearing on sites, I just care about how fast the site itself loads over a constrained connection. Read more

6 Reasons Marketing is Moving In-House

Digital Agencies finds that in the past year there has been a dramatic spike in the number of companies who no longer work with outside marketing agencies — 27 percent, up from 13 percent in the previous year. This continues a trend The Association of National Advertisers first reported in 2013. … SoDA describes this trend as “alarming” … but stops short of fully explaining why it’s happening. After interviewing several ad agency executives and marketing leaders in a diverse group of businesses — pharmaceutical, high-tech, manufacturing, retail, sports, and others — I’ve found a few common themes that could help explain what is going on. Read more

Learning from PDFs

PDF seemed like a temporary diversion from the road to the future of electronic documents to many even when it was new in 1993. By then HTML and many other SGML based applications existed and the potential was clear but it wasn’t until the Mosaic browser was released, also in 1993, that the web revolution grew the legs for mainstream adoption.

In the 90s there was, largely uninformed, competition between PDF and HTML — there have always been important use cases for both. Our understanding and preferences for content consumption will continue to evolve as computing and information technologies change the landscape of options. Michael Andrews takes a thoughtful look at why PDF is still an important component of content strategy.

What can content strategy learn from PDFs? That some people want to interact with words, and HTML content doesn’t offer them good options to do that… The evolution of content experience is far from over, despite the proclamations that the future of content has arrived. Smart, flexible, modular content is powerful. But on the topics that matter most, people want to choose what’s important to them, and not have that decision made for them. Read more

A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

Just what it says it is and very nicely done. This is the opposite of a typical insipid infographic. See more

Sponsor

Thanks to our hosting provider LuxSci for sponsoring this issue, and for 15 years of great customer service.

Short takes

Google analyzed their own app interstitial ad and got rid of it. They explain why in Google+: A case study on App Download Interstitials via the Google Webmaster Central Blog

Mobile:2015 UI / UX Trends… A quick look at what and why. via Medium

Useful background info on the evolution of native ads… Native advertising and sponsored content: Research on audience, ethics, effectiveness via Journalist’s Resource

For a little more technical detail content and page load speed see Why Are Web Pages So Slow? via Medium

Without a doubt Companies Need an Option Between Contractor and Employee via HBR.org

As you might imagine this generated lots comments… Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video via Medium

DAM Industry Heat Maps – Market Share and Customer Satisfaction… a handy quick look. via Real Story Group

Web Content Management Round-Up… Summer news in the WCM space. via Digital Clarity Group

About

The Gilbane Advisor curates content for our conference community of content, computing, and digital experience professionals throughout the year. You can also subscribe via our feed.

The Gilbane Conference on Content, Technology, and Customer Experience helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.

Gilbane Conference program and speakers posted

August 20, 2015 / Clea Durrell

This year’s Gilbane Conference program with speakers and session descriptions is now available at http://gilbaneconference.com/2015/program.

Registration for the conference is also open.

The Gilbane Conference helps marketers, IT, and business managers integrate content strategies and computing technologies to produce superior customer experiences for all stakeholders.

A modern customer experience must be holistic and seamless. Holistic in that customer communications be consistent within the company and across all touch points and channels, and seamless so that transitions between customer interactions are smooth and frictionless. This is a continuous process that requires an unprecedented amount of collaboration and integration between internal and external facing organizations and systems.

This year the Gilbane Conference program focuses on how to integrate content, data, and software to support a superior multichannel digital customer experience. Whether you are just getting started with managing multichannel content, need to improve the consistency of the web and mobile discovery experience, or are ready to integrate with an ecommerce, content marketing, business intelligence or other marketing or data management platform, join us to learn what your peers are doing and what experts are recommending.

Gilbane Conference 2015 schedule posted

August 3, 2015 / Clea Durrell

This year’s Gilbane Conference 2015, December 1 – 3, takes place in Boston at the Fairmont Copley Place. The three day schedule of workshops and conference sessions is now live at: http://gilbaneconference.com/2015/Schedule.

Gilbane pre-conference workshops announced

June 25, 2015 / Clea Durrell

It’s only June but we’re already working hard on the 2015 conference program and want to share a bit of what you can look forward to.

We’ve got a great lineup of pre-conference workshops that will be held Tuesday, December 1, the day before the main conference, December 2 – 3.

Pre-conference workshops:

Developing a personalization strategy: one size doesn’t fit all
Instructor: John Berndt, CEO, The Berndt Group (TBG)

An anatomy of a digital audit
Instructor: Tim Bourgeois, Partner at East Coast Catalyst and Founder, ChiefDigitalOfficer.net

Insider’s guide to selecting the right WCM
Instructor: Tony Byrne, Founder, Real Story Group

Foundations for best-fit WCM service provider selections
Instructor: Cathy McKnight, Partner and Principal Analyst, Digital Clarity Group

Great ideas need the right metrics to flourish – building the analytics you need to monetize your innovation
Instructor: Jaime Fitzgerald, Founder and Managing Partner, Fitzgerald Analytics Inc.

Digital is global in nature, not by default: leveraging digital globalization to increase global customer experience
Instructor: Bruno Herrmann , Director of Globalization, Nielsen

Find out more and get detailed descriptions for these workshops.

Hotel now accepting reservations

The Fairmont Copley Plaza is the official conference hotel for Gilbane Conference 2015. Discounted room rates have been arranged for attendees and are available starting today. Find out more.

Know about deep linking?

June 25, 2015 / Frank Gilbane

We are close to completing the program for this year’s Gilbane Conference and have some topics we still need another speaker, or possibly panelist, for:

Mobile and web deep linking / app indexing. What do these do for customer experience? What do they mean for content apps? What do you need to do about deep linking and app indexing, why, and when?
Marketing technology stacks: strategies and experiences.
Digital multichannel strategies: mobile, web, responsive, social, IoT, pages vs cards, etc.

If you have a well-informed opinion to share on any of these email me at speaking@gilbane.com.

Keep in mind our audience is a combination of marketers, technologists, and content strategists and managers.

Of the almost 300 speaker proposals we will be able to include less than 100 so we welcome additional proposals on the topics above. Note that we will be notifying proposed speakers slowly over the next 2-3 weeks.