If you could live with your customer for a day, what would you learn - what would they learn? What about for two days? A week? Every day of the year? This isn’t a hypothetical scenario for Rachael Schwartz at Keurig Green Mountain. As the company’s VP of Product Management and GM for Keurig’s IoT undertaking Rachael oversees the company’s consumer beta testing of connected coffee makers, yielding over 5 million brews and counting. And what has her team learned? That most of us are looking at smart devices wrong. It’s not about the latest trick of technology - it’s about a two-way conversation that creates a dynamic loop between a company and its customers. Companies focus on data-collection alone when they should focus how that data can continually make the user’s experience that much better and stickier. By sharing beta test data and communications test results, Rachael will demonstrate how companies can deepen relationships with consumers and change habitual behaviors when day-to-day, connected interactions in the home meet dynamic marketing.

We live in a world full of advanced technology with massive cognitive capabilities. Our interactions with these systems are becoming more relational and conversational, but something is missing: they lack social and emotional skills, making for superficial and ineffective connections. This impacts how humans interact with technology, how we communicate with each other in digital contexts, even how businesses interact with their consumers.  Artificial Emotional Intelligence or Emotion AI bridges this gap. In this talk we will explore how Emotion AI works, where it’s being used today and where we see it going in the future.

With a dramatic decline in attention spans, the only way to get your message across to your customers is to tailor it to their context and persona. Adaptive content strategy enables you to deliver contextually appropriate messages for different audiences with less content. In this talk, we will explore how structured content can enable an adaptive content strategy for your organization and the benefits you can accrue from it.

“Content strategy” covers a lot of territory, within organizations, and across industries. While every business is unique, cross-pollinization of ideas often leads to some of the most valuable and unpredictable insights. In this session speakers from well-known brands, Starwood and Volvo, share content strategies that have worked for them, and might inspire you in surprising ways.

Large-scale knowledge sharing and collaboration projects are typically complex beasts involving multiple technology, process, data, and channel integrations across disparate organizations. These two case studies shed light on some ways to approach a range of challenges. 

COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere) has been a goal of organizations since the dawn of digital content delivery. It has never been easy to achieve, even in cases where there were only two delivery channels. With today’s need to keep up with the constant growth, and changes in relative importance, of different channels, the return on effort can be greater than ever. This session includes current examples both B2B and B2C organizations can learn from.

As critical as intranets are for medium to large organizations, many implementations are stale and suffer from incomplete adoption. Speakers in this session will look at what you should expect from a modern intranet – whether enhancing an existing, or planning for a new, corporate intranet.

Little is written these days about dramatic either/or decisions around native app versus mobile web app development, and with good reason. There was never a good argument that one would always be the right choice, and the difference in capabilities has narrowed considerably. But there are still many decisions to make about which components of each to use when. This session provides up-to-date information, use cases, and comparisons of web standards. You don’t need to be a developer to learn from this session – any marketers or managers involved in web projects or strategies will benefit.

Integration of front and back-end systems and applications is a never-ending effort that can easily overwhelm – focus can help. This session looks at a couple of specific applications and explores the different integration challenges and benefits.

Enterprise collaboration, at least as a goal, is not new, and in spite of a renewed interest and a growing number solutions offered, is still a challenge. In this session you’ll hear from two young companies with fresh ideas on how to make true enterprise collaboration achievable.

There is no doubt that all of these technologies will have a huge effect on digital experiences across all industries going forward. But their emergence is recent enough that understanding how they each differ and how the terms are actually used, what they can do today, where they fit in various stacks, how soon they will be a competitive necessity in your market, and how one or more of them might provide you with a disruptive advantage is vital. In any case, you need to be thinking about them now.

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. Speakers look at three areas: e-commerce and CMS integration, why content is so critical to e-commerce success, and strategies for optimal conversion.

Creating a superior and sustainable digital experience for internal and external customers isn’t possible without a lot of attention paid to the underlying content creation and collaborative processes that span multiple departments. This session looks at the challenges and how to overcome them.

It is just sooo easy to go wrong when choosing new technology – risk management of the scariest kind for both business and technical decision makers. Each of our three experts in this session focus on unique considerations for a different segment of solutions. They’ll help you reduce your risk and stress level.

Many companies, including media and publishing companies, are embarking on transformation initiatives. But are these really transformational? Are they really disrupting an industry? Are these companies and teams planning for their own possible demise? In this keynote session, Subrata will go over some experiences of how companies are wasting millions in doing last decade’s transformation and developing cold feet when it comes to thinking out of the box and large-scale disruption. He will go over his Disruption strategy framework which showcases the various options available to executives to guide them on what next steps it needs to undertake. He will also briefly talk through two Case studies from the publishing world where its been done wrong (a) Global print publisher trying to reinvent itself (b) Peer-to-Peer Scientific / Medical journals trying to adjust to a fast pace world. Then, he will showcase his Business model innovation framework showcasing 30 different business models that are disrupting traditional businesses in three categories (a) Offering, (b) Payment and (c) Consumption. A must see session if you are looking to drastically transform your business into the Digital world.

In 2017, the several dozen AI-enabled marketing applications will explode into the hundreds. And within a few short years, IDC says half of all companies will be using this new generation of computer intelligence. Digital marketers must experiment with this technology and build it into their roadmaps now. Don't be left behind! Cognitive marketing is a competitive imperative for all marketers this year. Join IDC digital marketing expert Gerry Murray to learn how cognitive marketing will be a game-changer for your business. In this session, he will teach you the fundamentals: What the heck is cognitive computing? What are the top 10 applications in marketing? How are content generation and content management applications affected? How should marketers get started?

Marketers have a lot to figure out these days. They need to navigate between decisions about how much to focus on personalization versus brand marketing, determine what data they need for each, and how it will be acquired, analyzed, and utilized, and decide which marketing technology components they need to choreograph to support their goals. And all the while they need to ensure they will be improving the customer experience. This session includes two presentations looking at the role of data in overall marketing strategy and customer experience.

Two critical components of digital transformation are a future-ready multichannel content management infrastructure, and the ability to track, measure, and predict the impact of published content across channels. The presentations are relevant to publishers, marketers, and all digital strategists.

Headless or de-coupled CMSs are more important than ever in today’s many-channel world. But all organizations have unique requirements and existing web and enterprise content management systems and workflows in place. This makes incorporating headless functionality complicated, to say the least. Business and customer experience requirements, technical difficulty, and costs, all need to be balanced. This session looks at the issues and includes an enlightening case study on a “mixed mode” approach presented by Capital One.

Site design is a continuous process with occasional major redesigns. This session includes a presentation focused on a structured process for analyzing your digital presence, creating a plan that includes clear objectives matching marketing and business goals, and procedures for ongoing measurement. The second presentation addresses user experience considerations necessary for accessibility, and to ensure you’re reaching your full growth potential.

While a few large news organizations have succeeded in growing their digital subscription revenue despite the commodification of the most popular news items freely available, continued growth requires deeper engagement with readers. Just being more trustworthy is unfortunately not enough. In this session you’ll hear about an effort at The Guardian’s US Mobile Innovation Lab to test new ways to engage mobile news consumers, followed by a presentation on research on content consumption habits and trends.

The most valuable content can be expensive to create and organize but has a long life-cycle of return if properly maintained. Part of the required maintenance is ensuring it remains easy to find and takes advantage of new methods and technologies for accessing more topical and relevant content. The two presentations in this session will explain how you can protect, enhance, and ensure your content keeps on giving.

A recurring theme at our event is that a great, or even acceptable, customer experience requires new ways of working with, or learning from, functions outside the marketing organization. This session looks at two of them.

In this session publishing technology experts describe two advanced technologies relevant to all industries. You’ll learn what Linked Open Data can do for you, as well as a new method for Named Entity Recognition that promises dramatic improvements.

As global content becomes more mainstream there is increasing pressure for broader and more efficient integration with corporate functions and strategies. Both presentations in this session address some ways to accomplish this: one focused on the multilingual content supply chain and API integration, and one focused on deeper integration with marketing and growth strategies.

This Digital Asset Management session could just as easily have fit into our publishing and media track where we have usually covered the topic. We’ve included it the technical track because these days most businesses need to manage ever-increasing volumes and types of media in more sophisticated ways. Our presentations will be helpful to anyone managing a large number of media assets.

Journey-driven engagement and content management go hand-in-hand. Once you understand the journey that your customer wants to take, you need to deliver the content that will advance him or her along the path. Many organizations are investing in developing journey maps - but they have yet to connect their maps to their content in ways that enable those journeys to be really effective and satisfying for customers, yet manageable and efficient for marketers and content managers.

Instructor Cathy McKnight leads this practical workshop that will show you how to overlay your journey maps onto your content management infrastructure and evolve your CMS as a true hub of engagement. Cathy starts the workshop with a brief journey mapping exercise, using a scenario developed in real time by attendees. After a brief review of the technology landscape for experience management solutions, attendees will learn the how to leverage their CMS and other marketing technology solutions to support the customer on his or her journey.

As a result of attending this workshop, you will understand the basics of the customer journey mapping process, and you'll be in a position to speak knowledgeably with colleagues, managers, technology partners, and service providers about your organization's infrastructure requirements for executing journey mapping strategies and tactics.

Enterprises around the world are deepening and diversifying their digital "stacks." If you are a customer engagement or digital workplace leader, 2018 may well find you looking to implement new tools or refresh dated platforms. Fortunately, you face a wide and growing array of vendors willing to address your problems. But which ones offer the best fit for your particular circumstances?

This fast-paced workshop led by Real Story Group founder Tony Byrne will explain the broad intersecting marketplaces for digital solutions. Tony will sort out the key players and business models, and offer you a roadmap for deciding which types of technologies and vendors provide the best long-term fit for your needs. Each participant will receive a free copy of Tony's new book, "The Right Way to Select Technology: Get the Real Story on Finding the Best Fit" (Rosenfeld Media).

The workshop will answer several key questions:

Bring your own strategic technology conundrum to this workshop, and come away with some practical advice for moving forward in a positive direction.

You know there is no great local experience without global excellence. However you may wonder where to start and where to go in order to do the right thing at the right time for the right people around the world. If you have doubts, issues or questions about the international expansion of your content or products this session is made for you. Whether you are in a globalizing startup or in a well-established multinational the fastest and safest way to be digitally attractive and competitive is to embrace diversity, automation and customer centricity upfront. You also need to translate these directions in your digital transformation plans and your acceleration efforts. Customers want to be understood, considered and delighted both individually and collectively. They require digital experiences reflecting who they are, what they do and where they want your business. They are in control and their power is borderless as they can switch to your competitors in one click or with one word if you do not speak to them linguistically, culturally and functionally. Therefore it is crucial to deliver digital experiences to make Global go together well with Growth. Join this session to take the fast track to unleash globalization value and build assets with:

A content management system (including WCM, ECM, and DAM systems) supports the categorizing or classification of content through the use of taxonomies or metadata, which can greatly enhance the ease of content retrieval. But simply importing an off-the-shelf taxonomy or metadata schema is not sufficient. Taxonomies and metadata need to be designed to best represent the unique content set and the particular users.

The workshop will begin with an introduction on basic principles and best practices in taxonomy design for hierarchical and faceted taxonomies, including term wording, hierarchical relationship rules, and the creation of synonyms/alternate labels, using real life examples. The workshop will then also cover these issues:

A recent blog post by the instructor introduces some of these issues:http://accidental-taxonomist.blogspot.com/2016/05/taxonomy-design-for-content-management.html

It all starts with progress. A new CMS platform that can do so much more - think reusable content, modular page designs, dynamic display, and personalization - in short, the answer to your content management woes. All that's left to do is to migrate all your content off the old platform and onto the new. Easy, right? As anyone who has ever gone through this process can attest, nope, not easy, not even a bit!

Join Lindy as she walks through the 4 steps you should go through to ensure your migration goes as smoothly as possible:

She'll spare you the house moving analogies and get into some real-life examples of content migration - the good the bad and the ugly. As part of the workshop, Lindy will also guide you through a hands-on content mapping exercise that has been used to streamline migrations for organizations large and small, B2B, B2C and non-profit.