Conference Program

K1. Opening Keynotes

In our first keynote session we hear from two marketing executives from global organizations who have critical responsibilities for digital experience strategy and delivery. Our third speaker is a technologist who has a company that helps brands and agencies implement digital experiences, and authors the well-known and highly-regarded Chief Marketing Technologist blog covering the intersection of marketing and technology:

Gerry Moran leads Social Media at SAP Americas and is responsible for marketing’s social media strategy and campaign execution, social selling program, content creation and all customer touch points on social media. He is also the author of the social media and marketing coaching blog at http://MarketingThink.com. Gerry will discuss how to make your brand a content destination on the new buyer journey. He will demonstrate what organizations need to do manage and measure awareness, drive demand generation and accelerate sales conversion by leveraging content across multiple customer touch points.

Meghan Walsh leads Marriott International's efforts to define business managed capabilities for web content management, data accessibility and provisioning, translation management, personalization, and targeting. Meghan will discuss key aspects of how one of the largest eCommerce websites in the world is moving beyond a traditional website to a re-imagined, next generation multichannel content delivery platform with help from a partnership between marketing, technology, and analytics.

Scott Brinker as CTO of ion interactive, a software-as-a-service platform for marketers, and the author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog at http://chiefmartec.com, is a thought leader on the intersection of marketing and technology and the impact that is having on the management and culture of the marketing department. Scott will talk about the increasingly popular and necessary role of the Marketing Technologist; who they are, what they do, and where they fit. 

C1. Q&A with Real Live Marketing Technologists

It is no secret that marketing’s influence in IT spending has dramatically increased and according to some reports will surpass IT department spending in the next few years. While information technology competence is increasingly critical across all business functions, as the owner of the corporate public face and brand, marketing needs a deep understanding of a variety of technologies. At the very least, marketing needs their own technologist to advise, advocate, and collaborate with IT. All organizations are different and there are many ways to incorporate technology expertise. In this session you’ll meet senior marketing technologists who will provide insight on the rewards and challenges of their role.

C3. Stump the Web Content Management Consultant!

Did you come to the Gilbane Conference with a particular problem to solve? Here’s your chance! Bring your toughest, thorniest, most intractable digital marketing conundrum or content management project challenge to the session. A team of experienced consultants will compete to offer you the best advice in 2 minutes or less. The attendee whose problem most successfully stumps the consultants wins a prize!

C4. How Do You Implement Global Digital Experience Management?

‘Experience’ is a big word in technology vendor and analyst literature these days, and rightly so as it goes beyond a focus on individual products to an emphasis on what customers really care about. ‘Global’ is only slightly less popular, but no less important given the potential for market growth. But what constitutes a ‘global experience’ - what characteristics are critical in a global digital experience management system?

C6. How Digital Marketers Must Move Beyond Business as Usual to Succeed

Are you stuck trying to improve and grow your digital marketing? If so you are not alone. And even if you don't think you are stuck, you need to check to see whether you are ahead or behind your competitors. The first presentation in this session will help you compare your digital marketing with over 500 organizations across multiple industries, and learn about the five major barriers they face and some of the ways they have been overcome. 

The second presentation focuses on a particular challenge digital marketers face, analytics. Unfortunately, for many organizations analytics still means simple reports of visits and views to a subset of pages on their website that someone occasionally looks at. Other organizations are constantly connecting streaming data from multiple internal and external sources in real time, tying it to historical data, buying additional data, pumping it all through analytical tools, and funneling some to humans to further analyze, re-code, and repeat. There is a vast self-perpetuating chasm between the data-rich and data-poor. Not everyone needs to be part of the 1% big-data-rich, but all other things being equal, companies who utilize more customer data will win. This presentation will help you understand how quickly the options for utilizing larger and richer data are becoming available to even modest-sized marketing departments.

C8. Pardon the Digital Interruption

Inspired by ESPN’s popular talk show, join two analysts as they debate a variety of today’s most pressing digital workplace and marketing technology topics. They will engage in a rapid-fire, point-counterpoint discussion on many topics including, what to do with aging legacy platforms, “CXM,” open source, The Cloud, Agencies vs. Integrators, Staffing, and more.

C10. Content Strategies: Customer Experience, Competition, Content Marketing and Curation

There are many things to consider as part of your content marketing strategy. In this session we look at look at a number of them including: how to think about what content makes for a compelling customer experience, how to evaluate competitors' content, how curated content might fit into your strategy, and what types of content marketing tools are available. 

E1. Building an Intranet Strategy around Knowledge Assets

Applying appropriate communication and understanding enterprise culture are two intertwined elements that dictate the success of leveraged knowledge via an intranet. Two experts who have learned and applied what they understand will share their experiences, failures and successes in unique operating environments. You’ll hear how culture and communication are leveraged to make an intranet strategy a successful one.

E3. Metadata Enhancement for Improved Content Management - Taxonomies and Governance – a Panel Discussion

Regardless of the type of Electronic Content Management system, adding and enhancing metadata with vocabulary tags that match the language of the enterprise is a solid business practice. Retrieval systems and tools for finding repository content work better when stored information is categorized according to explicit business rules and terminology. That is why e-commerce vendor’s work so hard, at great expense, to label their products using language that buyers understand. They also embed any and all synonyms that searchers might use to retrieve their selections. Enterprises must get on board with similar methods and practices. Whether special applications for content management or SharePoint is being employed for controlling and storing primary source content, a team of subject experts and content specialists need a governing program to build the terms, and apply them. Our noted experts in this field will share their best guidance and insights in a panel discussion on the topic.

E4. Evaluating Collaboration and Social Software Options for Your Digital Workplace

Enterprises seeking to implement social and collaboration software find that competing technology alternatives can differ markedly in functionality, maturity, approach, and support. And recently, a market already roiled by fierce competition between major platform vendors and plucky best-of-breed players has seen the entrance of a new wave of suppliers promising to offer collaboration as a layer, to “socialize” your existing applications. As a customer, you have more choices than ever, in terms of architectures, delivery and license models, functional breadth, and integration alternatives. This fast-paced session will share customer research from noted evaluation firm Real Story Group on leading social software platforms, and provide a framework for customers to assess technology choices based on their particular needs.

E6. Knowledge Integration through Collaboration among Healthcare Stakeholders

Jane Frankel is recognized as a business change expert who specializes in leveraging knowledge to meet financial business goals. She will share best practices for creating a culture to engage employees in using their collective knowledge to identify data requirements for asking and answering critical questions needed for information technology planning. Healthcare institutions and partners face escalating pressures to control costs through streamlined operations while improving care. The Mayo Clinic has placed a premium on knowledge assets. These assets form the centerpiece for strategic business innovation across large scale implementations. Larry Chait, a management consultant and lead on a case with the Mayo clinic is currently teaching an executive management course for physicians at Brown University. He will moderate the session and lead the discussion following the speakers.

E8. Guidelines for Building Communities and the Role of Employees in Social Media

Even skeptics of the business benefits of social media will admit that the enhanced communication that comes from an active community is valuable and likely to add to productivity. However even with strong management support, overcoming resistance in entrenched hierarchical corporate cultures is a challenge. There is also often an organizational reluctance to build communities or even communication channels across constituent boundaries. A common example of this is a strict limiting of which employees can communicate with customers and what they can say. Clearly corporate messaging needs to be controlled to protect the brand, but the substantial benefits of increasing employee/customer communication should not have to be sacrificed.

T1. Are You Leveraging All the Mobile Technologies Required for Competitive Mobile Engagement?

Creating a compelling mobile experience for customers involves a lot more than simply squeezing appropriate content into smaller screens. Sometimes this means integration with backend data systems, sometimes it means using native device capabilities, sometimes it means both. This session looks at how you can use technologies currently available on mobile devices such as GPS, indoor positioning, speech recognition, and others to create engaging and competitive mobile experiences.

T3. How to Make Authors and Content Strategists Happy, and Content Creation Efficient

The age-old debate over separating form from content continues, though perhaps not with the passion it once had since it is a bit easier to move content around these days. Yet there is a new urgency for many organizations because there are not just two or three display channels, but a large and growing number. In addition, the core of the debate was never only about form, it was about proprietary device dependent behavior of which form is one example. Today, native mobile apps and walled gardens have in one respect taken us backward. This session has two well thought out presentations with a contemporary perspective on authoring approaches.

T4. When do You Really Need Big Data Technologies versus More Familiar Information Management Tools?

There is quite a bit of debate going on about when you should use big data technologies versus more traditional data management tools, and while much of it is self-serving overall it is healthy. There are lots of legitimate questions; some about suitability, but more about the cost and return on change over time. In this session we aim to provide a balanced perspective starting with a look at how Hadoop fits into the evolution of data management and the broader information technology landscape.

T6. How to Build an Enterprise Mobile Strategy for Content Applications

Many of us, perhaps most at this conference, are especially concerned with creating, managing, and deliverying content. So when building enterprise mobile strategies it is not hard to guess where we tend to focus. But we also need to pay careful attention to the business, infrastructure, and organizational issues that present themselves when adding mobile channels to our strategy. In this session two experienced consultants will layout how to go about preparing a more complete well-rounded strategy.

P1. Strategies for Updating and Managing Your Changing Digital Products (and teams!)

We have brought together not one, but four, product and digital publishing operations experts to help you understand not only What to plan for but How to manage it. In this rapid fire session you will learn the technologies you need to plan for now.  How to evolve your teams. And, much ,much more. What opportunities exist, and in which sectors is digital publishing expanding? In this session, experts who are wrestling with these issues every day will answer questions and share their opinions in an open discussion format.

P3. Content Optimization for Publishers – Two Under-appreciated Approaches

Content is expensive to create and market pressures mean publishers need to optimize the use and value of content as much as possible. The two presentations in this session each suggest ways to enhance content in ways you may not have thought of.

P4. Two Ways to Improve Content Monetization – Big Data Personalization and Long Tail Reuse

This session includes presentations on two strategies for more successful monetization. These are not new, but are significantly easier to implement than they have been in the past. They will also not make you rich overnight, but should allow for improvement in long-term revenue streams.