Conference Program

K1. Opening Keynotes

C1. Building a Case for Marketing Transformation

Even today, with the demands of digital transformation widely acknowledged across industries up to the board level, getting an initiative off the ground with all the people, process, content, and technology aspects involved can seem overwhelming. And once you have the transformation underway, you need to pull together a marketing operation that is flexible, agile, and able to maintain the necessary interaction across product and operational groups, and integration between systems. This session will provide insight into what other marketing executives have done and how.

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.

C4. Global Experience Management: Analyst Views on Trends and Practices

The journey from discovery to awareness to browsing to engagement to purchase must be supported by appropriate content at each step. Having that information available in the language of the visitor improves the customer experience by providing the right linguistic context for it.

No globally thinking business leader can argue with these statements. Yet many of their organizations still struggle to make the case for strategic approaches to multilingual content. How does content in the language of the customer really impact the top line? Who's making progress, how, and why?

Two leading research and advisory firms focused on global customer experience join forces to answer these critical questions with data and facts, not just theory. Common Sense Advisory has demonstrated the importance of language in enriching the global customer experience in consumer and business buyer surveys. Don DePalma reviews findings through the customer experience lens, using Digital Clarity Group's competency framework for customer experience management as the context. DePalma and Laplante present a facts-based view of current trends and practices and deliver important guidance to companies supporting the customer lifecycle for global markets.

C6. Personalization: The Advanced Crash Course

Digital teams are often frustrated with the difficulty of getting their personalization practice beyond adding a few targeted components in their digital ecosystem. This is partially because it seems that inroads to the more advanced aspects of the personalization practice have been closely held secrets. Many organizations have had to reinvent the wheel, for lack of access to best practices. In this panel presentation, we will address that gap directly, with three personalization experts discussing what they consider to be the most hard-won aspects of their practice. For digital teams trying to enhance their game, this session will give unusual visibility into the challenges--and successes--of running more serious personalization programs within their organizations. Attendees of this session will receive an overview of topics for the "advanced course" in personalization and to get inspiration to move personalization activities forward.

C7. Content Marketing - Strategies for Success

You would have to be living in a cave and under a rock sans smartphone not to be aware of the interest and investment in content marketing in companies of all sizes. Yet it is often difficult to know how successful your content marketing efforts are. In this session we have two presentations from marketers sharing their experiences on what to do and what not to do, followed by a presentation on how to track relevant metrics for measuring the success of your content marketing efforts.

C9. Reconfiguring Roles for Modern Marketing Organizations

Digital transformation forces all organizations to evaluate the skills and roles required and, inevitably, make some changes in personnel, processes, and perhaps even structure. For many, if not most companies, this is most obvious in marketing departments, but of course applies across functional areas. The three presentations in this session look in turn at three different roles: a "crossover" role of project manager, information architect, and user experience designer; the marketing technologist; and the Chief Digital Officer.

C11. How to Integrate the Content and Commerce Experience

Of all the different functions and systems that need to be integrated to provide a clean consistent customer experience, content management systems and commerce systems are the most obvious. Unfortunately, successful examples of an integrated content/commerce experience are still too rare. This is largely due to organizational / ownership issues which caused content management systems and commerce systems and vendors to evolve independently. This in turn fed the organization silos creating a vicious cycle. Something has to give. Based on experience and case studies, this session examines what companies are doing to create a more unified content and commerce experience.

E1. Strategies and Lessons from Successful Intranets

Intranets that work provide an invaluable resource. But too often intranet projects either never get off the ground, or struggle for months or even years before being put out of their misery. How do you know when intranets are working? There is only one metric that matters - adoption, at least voluntary, and ideally enthusiastic. Attend this session get inspired by the managers at two organizations responsible for building successful intranets tell you what they did and how.

E3. Achieving Successful Collaboration in Large Enterprises

Tools are one important component of a successful collaboration initiative, and the wrong choice can cause failure all on its own. But tools should not be the first consideration - there can be no right choice without a clear understanding of the needs of all the stakeholders, how they interact, and how the collaboration initiative aligns with current and foreseeable business goals. If you are involved in a large-scale collaboration project you'll want to hear what our two speakers in this session have learned from their experience.

E4. Growth without compromise: Using intranets to scale what makes you great

Growth organizations - those who are growing fast, from a few dozen to a few hundred or thousands, have a unique challenge. You're doing things right. But how can you maintain quality and momentum as you grow? How will you stay great when there are more and more newcomers?

Scaling organizational greatness means scaling a strong community, a strong culture, and a strong sense of belonging. How can culture, leadership and community expand to embrace people who don't work in the same place or have pre-existing relationships? With intranets or digital workplaces. This panel of HR and Communications leaders will talk about the challenges of scaling culture, and how a great intranet enables extended teams to remain powerful. No compromise.

E6. Building Modern Knowledge Management Implementations

What makes them modern? Both are enterprise wide and incorporated into the fabric of the digital workplace. These case studies also illustrate how knowledge management implementations go beyond a better experience for employees to improve external customer experiences. Note that these approaches also provide additional value to help justify a knowledge management initiative.

T1. Mobile App Development and Management

With mobile already outpacing desktop traffic it's time align product and development strategies and efforts accordingly, if you haven't already. This means way more than tacking on an app and checking off the mobile to-do item. In this session our speakers share scads of info on app design, development, and management that are relevant for both enterprise and consumer apps. The session is intended for both business and technical managers.

T3. New Web and Mobile Technologies: Web Components and Polymer; Deep Linking and App Indexing

This session looks at some technologies you should be aware of. You may have heard of them but they are not widely deployed or understood by non-developers. They are important because of their potential for significantly improving mobile and web experiences. Knowing what they do will also help you understand more about the strategic choices that Apple, Google, and others are making with regard to web and mobile, thus informing your own strategic decisions.

This session is meant for business managers as well as IT. The session includes case studies, and will address what web components are, how they relate to Google's Polymer, what deep linking is and why it is very different on the web and mobile, and what the key challenges and considerations are.

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'.

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!

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.

T9. Visualization Techniques for Text and Data

This session includes two very practical how-to presentations. Our first speaker looks at text analysis visualization, which has unique challenges, looks at software tools and analyzes the various ways to plot text analysis results for different applications. Our next speaker is both a comedian and a marketing consultant that specializes in creating infographics that are as "sharp and tight as jokes and stories". He will explain how and analyze some examples infographics using different presentation formats.

P1. New Frontiers in Digital Content Distribution

Publishers have been using social media as a means to extend their brands, drive traffic to web properties, and cultivate direct relationships with consumers. But the arrival of “off-site” digital media outlets—Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, Twitter Lightning, and whatever Google might dream up next—has publishers asking: will social media platforms usurp publisher’s own brand sites or be a lucrative extension? What are the results from those who are early participants? What are the business and technology issues to consider when deciding whether to take part? How can you prepare your organization, infrastructure and content to be ready if your CEO/CMO decides to take the plunge?

A panel of media technologists will report on their experiences and share their insights as we explore the latest trend in the evolution of digital media.

P3. Recurring Revenue: Why Subscription Models are the New Hot Business Model (Again)

There are those who have been “doing” subscriptions longer than many - newspapers, newsletters, journals, and magazines, to name a few. While traditional publishers are evolving and still thriving, today subscriptions are a hot "new" business model being used to sell anything and everything from information, data, software, music, services, articles, books, cars, make-up, and apps -- pretty much anything one can imagine being sold on a recurring basis. (Yes, even underwear.) In this session we will walk through the drivers and strategies businesses need to keep in mind launching and scaling subscription revenues. We will also walk through case studies and war stories direct from publishers, SaaS, data and other subscription-focused businesses.

P4. Executing Content Strategies

This session explores current practices for content planning, and the toolset and policies needed to support your multidimensional planning activities. Come learn how to support an integrated communications strategy on the ground and across borders and learn tactics for addressing the human factors required to put a content plan into practice.

Lunch & Technology Demonstrations