Conference Program

K1. Opening Keynotes: Building Digital Experiences - Industry leaders Share their Stories

In our opening keynote session executives from multiple industries that are deeply involved in strategy and responsible for implementing major initiatives will share their front line experiences, views on what’s important, and perspectives on the future of digital experiences. Join us for some well-grounded straight talk from some of those making it happen.

C1. Track Keynote: What it Takes to Build a Modern Customer Experience

Everyone pays lip service to the power of today’s customers and the need to more fully and meaningfully engage with them, but not every organization follows through. The first step is to make sure you are truly listening to your customers, and not assuming you know what they want and need. AIA’s Kevin Novak takes a critical look at what it means to actively listen to your customers, why some organizations fail to do so, and why it is so important to crafting and maintaining a successful digital experience.

C3. Panel - Stump the Web Content Management Consultant

For those of you unfamiliar with this format, the concept is simple: Bring your toughest, thorniest, most intractable Web Content Management conundrum or challenge and a team of experienced Web Content Management consultants will compete to offer you the best advice in 2 minutes or less. But there’s a twist… we’ll use noise-canceling headphones to make sure the gurus can’t hear the answers that the other panelists give. Come and get insightful, likely controversial, and sometimes entertaining answers to your most pressing questions. The person deemed to have stumped the consultants the most will go home with their own noise-canceling headphones!

C4. How to Manage Multichannel Content Marketing

Content is certainly the unifying element of a brands’ marketing across physical as well as digital channels. Once you have created your killer content how do you maximize its reach? How do you push out your content beyond your own channels in ways that are manageable? This session includes presentations by two organizations that have built marketing strategies based on the centrality of content and the power of effective distribution.

C6. Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Digital Experiences – Agency/Integrator Panel Discussion

There’s no such thing as a “customer experience management solution,” ready to buy, off the shelf. Solutions are built from multiple components that suit the unique needs of an organization. As a result, more and more companies are beginning to realize that the starting point for solution design and development must be the services firm, not the technology provider. This means that understanding the service provider landscape is becoming critically important to successful solution deployment. In this panel, Digital Clarity Group presents the key findings from its original primary research covering more than 80 agencies and integrators in Europe and North America. We look at how the providers are transforming their services, practices, and approaches to meet emerging client demands for holistic CEM solutions. Then we lead an interactive discussion with senior representatives from agencies and integrators who fill out the picture painted by the research with real-world examples and commentary.

C8. Responsive Design Practices and Options

Responsive design is trickier than you might think. Evolving web standards, multiple mobile operating systems and development frameworks, and rapidly proliferating types of devices with unpredictable display characteristics, processing capabilities, and features all conspire to force tradeoffs, and mean ongoing development and maintenance. This session looks at a number of the constraints, including performance issues, reliability of user agent detection, and utility of available device information.

C10. Globalization and Localization Panel

Organizations, at least of a certain size, are becoming more sophisticated and adept at creating, managing, and delivering multilingual and localized content. But needs are changing too. Social media, accelerated delivery expectations, and machine translation improvements, are just some of the issues that impact strategies as well as operations. This interactive panel of experts will be covering a range of topics and is suitable for attendees whether new or experienced with managing multilingual content.

C12. Content Marketing Panel

Content Marketing is certainly a popular topic, but what it means and how organizations are implementing it varies widely – as does its success. We’ve all seen good and bad examples. This lively interactive panel has a wealth of advice about what works, what doesn’t, and how to put together the operational pieces and stay on track.

E1. Track Keynote: Implementing Large Scale Intranets

Delivering a great customer experience depends on employees having the tools, information, and motivation to provide it. This means ensuring employees are engaged, collaborative, and also having a rewarding experience. In this session Ernst & Young and Marriott International share their strategies and experiences building large-scale intranets that create engaging digital experiences for employees.

E3. Digital Workplace Strategies for Knowledge Sharing

It has been seven years since David Weinberger shared his insights about “digital disorder” in Everything is Miscellaneous. He championed user control of information, methods of discovery, organization and application. The value of information is enhanced when the user is driving how they will find it, where they will seek it and for what it will be used. This session will further the notion that internal, narrowly bounded intranets do not meet Weinberger’s standard of information management to meet user needs. On the other hand, role-based applications, when modeled for specific user needs can deliver high value, when monitored and governed to adapt to changing business needs. Our two speakers will offer their perspectives on how an initiative involving content management technologies must first be human need-based in its focus.

E4. Ways to Increase Reach and Collaboration

Sveta Kouznetsova: 8:30 – 9:00, Accessible Content: Quality Captioning and Transcription as Universal Design
To attract a wider audience, you need to make your aural information - audio, video, events - accessible via quality captioning and transcription. It is not necessarily for those with hearing difficulties. It also helps foreign language speakers, remedial readers, individuals with learning disabilities, those in noisy or quiet environments, and many more. Just being able to hear is not enough. Businesses would also benefit from captioning as it improves user experience and SEO of their aural information and attracts more loyal customers. Sveta will dispel common myths about deaf and hard of hearing people, share personal experiences, and discuss case studies of good quality captioning that goes beyond universal access and can be enjoyed by anyone and anywhere regardless of hearing abilities. Come and check the presentation signed by the deaf speaker, voiced by interpreters, and open captioned in real time. Let’s think outside of the ears! 

Donald DePalma: 9:00 – 9:30, Can't Read, Won't Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites
If you read English natively, you have enjoyed the best of the web since its creation. Content in this language has dominated the medium for nearly two decades while companies have catered to English-speaking markets and the enormous spending they generate. However, many corporations realize that billions of people don’t read English at all or well enough to make buying decisions, so they’re increasing the amount of information that they offer in other languages. As they reach out to global prospects, the big question is: If they localize their websites, will more buyers come? If they translate product literature, will they sell more? How much will localization help them grow? Common Sense Advisory surveyed consumers in 10 non-English-speaking countries to test the hypothesis that companies can increase their sales by localizing their products and websites. In this presentation, Dr. DePalma summarizes the results of this 2014 survey, analyzes the linguistic preferences of consumers, and discusses the impact on their online behavior.

T1. Track Keynote Panel: Marketing Technologists Discuss Multichannel and Enterprise Integration Challenges

Marketing technologists are no longer rare birds, though they are often found in unfamiliar environments with less than obvious plumage. There are marketing technologists in many of our sessions this year, but we have selected a few to look at the two toughest challenges they, and their organizations, face in building modern digital strategies: support for consistent current and future multichannel experiences, and the necessary integration of data from multiple enterprise systems.

T3. Marketing Automation, Data, and Multichannel Marketing

The term “marketing automation” has grown from referring to simple workflow tools to help companies and their partners manage campaigns to being used to cover a much broader and more amorphous set of capabilities. Both of the presentations in this session cover the use of data in marketing automation, one from an analytical perspective, and one from a case study.

T4. Personalization, CMSs, and Content Strategy

Personalization is on everyone’s checklist – organizations “require” it, consultants recommend it, and vendors “provide” it. Even with a lot of technology available, it is hard, and even harder to do it right. In this session we have two “how to” presentations. One speaker covers what to expect from CMS systems as well as strategic and operational issues organizations need to work through. The other presenter describes a content strategy and technique for a managed implementation of personalization.

T6. Big Data and Customer Engagement

In this session we focus on what it actually means to use huge amounts of data to better engage customers. Wesley Moore from Teradata explains what infrastructure components need to be in place for data-driven marketing. ShopAdvisor's Peter O'Kelly then takes us through the details of how they are currently using big data, what they’ve learned about interpreting the data, and how to guard against misinterpreting it.

T8. How to Improve Findability

Efficiency (speed), accuracy and comprehensive results have long been measuring units by which search engines and search within applications have been judged for findability. Human factors and design play into the efficiency of any search experience. Algorithms determine the validity (relevance) of items retrieved for a given query, and they also determine how complete results (recall) are against a given corpus of content. Search experts who seek to implement search engines for relevance or recall also need quality data to make tuning decisions.

Our speakers in this session will give us three views of what it takes to improve design and content for findability. They will speak to points of usability, as well as how high quality metadata supported by specialized taxonomies, contribute to those improvements.

P1. Track Keynote: Hear how Harvard Business Review and WGBH have Transformed Digital Engagement

Engaging customers and online audiences requires the right mix of technology, content, and tools, orchestrated in a way that leverages deep customer knowledge to deliver the right content at the right time in the right fashion. That’s a tall order, yet it is a “do or die” imperative for organizations that use content to make a living. In this session, you’ll learn how to transform and optimize customer digital engagement from presentations by two leading-edge organizations that are paving the way to the future using a blend of customer-centric design, dynamic and targeted content, big data and analytics, agile technologies and processes, and a vision for the future. These presentations will inspire you to kick-start your own digital engagement transformation initiatives!

You'll also meet the HBR.org development team: Daigo Fujiwara, Kevin Davis, Matt Wagner, Fred Lalande, and Ismail Ozyigit.

P3. Update on Multichannel Publishing Technologies

The phrase “multi-channel publishing” sounds innocuous, but for those charged will delivering content over a plethora of digital channels while continuing to support print publishing, it is anything but. If you are responsible for delivering digital content to many different channels, devices, and audiences, you are faced with a large and growing number of complex, risky decisions. This session will help you craft a “content and media neutral” publishing strategy and also get you up to date on HTML5, responsive design, emerging frameworks, and other developments in multichannel publishing—in short, the one stop shop for what you need to know about multi-channel publishing.

P4. How Publishers and Marketers are Dealing with Today's Digital Asset Management Challenges

Creating engaging digital customer experiences has become both a mantra and competitive imperative for many publishers. Digital asset management is a core part of creating those experiences, providing the ability to create, manage, and deploy the rich content that drives engagement. While DAM technology has been around for a while, it continues to evolve and systems that are even a few years old may be behind the times. Whether you’re newly in the market or disenchanted with an existing DAM solution, this session will provide the knowledge of the market, the vendors and solutions, and how to select the best possible solution for your needs.