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Fifteen years ago, email was the newest hottest thing that was going to change our lives. And it has. But as any technology matures (read: becomes less new and cool, and more ever-present and old -faithful) bad usage habits start to creep in.

After that momentous cultural shift from not using technology at all to using email, we face a slightly less daunting, but far more important one today: Together, wikis, blogs, and email are a powerhouse for productivity and efficiency, but what’s the appropriate use for each?

How you deploy a wiki or blog platform for a large enterprise is very different from a small business, university, or non-profit. Each has a different structure, projects, and goals. But all share a need to work more efficiently, and reduce the time spent on tedious, uninteresting, and inefficient tasks.

Please Stop Talking about Yourself: Is Your Web Content Killing Your Brand and What to Do About It?

Speaker: Joe Pulizzi
Time: 9:15 AM - 10:00 AM Date: June 16

The majority of web content created by companies is extremely self-serving. We historically talk about our products, services and awards, and even create “educational” content that seems geared for the customer, but in reality, just continues the spin. As marketing communications become more personal and authentic, in hopes of establishing a relationship with customers, the rules that we apply to social relationships become just as crucial in establishing marketing-based relationships. Along those lines, if a company can compare its web site or other online offering to the proverbial “first impression,” it’s safe to assume that talking about itself the whole time is not going to elicit a second or third encounter.

As of late, online marketing industry luminaries and thought leaders have made it their mission to get companies thinking about their online presence in terms of the consumer, not in terms of what they want the consumer to know. The notion that the one-sided conversation is on the road to extinction is not a new one, but it’s worth repeating that the negative implications for companies’ using this aged tactic will manifest in profit loss and, worse, a waning consumer base.

Alas, despite industry warnings, the majority of companies continue to use traditional messaging techniques in an online world that no longer accepts them. Why? Many reasons: they’re afraid of change, they’re not aware of the shift, they disagree with the ideas fueling it, they’re hoping the fad will pass, etc. The list goes on. This creates a clear opportunity for smart companies who want to create long-term relationships with customers through the information they distribute online. (And which companies don’t?)

Joe Pulizzi will begin his presentation by define the problem at hand with several case studies and examples and will then share with the audience how they can overcome this problem at their own companies. Joe’s presentation will end with definitive take-home tactics the audience can begin applying immediately.

Please Stop Talking about Yourself - Joe Pulizzi Web Content 2009

View more OpenOffice presentations from Joe Pulizzi.

I Know This Guy Who…: How to Use Your Online Content to be Found and Referred

Speaker: Sonny Cohen
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Date: June 16

Everyone knows the guy who puts us in touch with our next job, our next home or apartment, a financial planner. Some might say he’s a walking Google. Or is he really just LinkedIn? If you are that provider of goods or services, you want to be on the receiving end of that referral. Only recently, that might have also meant being one of the top choices in a Google search. But now it also means having a presence in an online trust-based network such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Learn about the growing interplay between search and social. Find out how your online content is your passport to trust based networks and your ticket to search prominence.
In this session you will learn:

What are the building blocks to search prominence
How to own a SERP
How to model your blog –Twitter -LinkedIn – Facebook (etc.) circuit
Ways to measure your performance

I Know This Guy Who…: How to Use Your Online Content to be Found and Referred

View more documents from Scott Abel.

Adding Light to a Successful Brand: A Brightfuse Case Study

Speaker: Liz Harvey
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Date: June 16

How big a role did marketing play in propelling CareerBuilder from a virtual unknown to industry leader in just five years? How is CareerBuilder using social networking to strengthen their brand?

Liz Harvey, Sr. Director of Consumer Products for CareerBuilder will discuss the sales and marketing strategies that CareerBuilder.com continues to use as they outpace their industry as well as what changes have been made to their 2009 strategies in response to the economic downturn.

For CareerBuilder, maintaining the leadership position has taken on many different faces. Whether it is improving user experience, continuing to invest in technology that efficiently and effectively connects companies with their next great hires, and/or thinking outside the box, CareerBuilder continues to stay ahead of the competition through forward thinking.

In 2007, CareerBuilder identified a need for its clients to have a stronger presence amongst social networking sites and quickly did something about it by forming a partnership with Facebook which enabled its clients to gain access to the more than 100 million Facebook users. Through ads posted on Facebook, CareerBuilder clients interact and encourage users to interact with their brands and ultimately apply for their open positions. CareerBuilder identified the power of social networking and decided to take it one step further and gave birth to BrightFuse.com.

CareerBuilder launched BrightFuse in February 2008 to give professionals a tool with which they could network and interact easily with other professionals. The overall goal of BrightFuse is to help people as they move through their careers, not just when they are between positions. In this economy, networking can be the one tool that finds a job seeker’s next great opportunity. But, networking can be tricky and sometimes intimidating. BrightFuse is meant to be a resource and CareerBuilder strives to make it just that.

This discussion will use real examples from CareerBuilder, what we learned, expose the pitfalls, and describe best practices as we worked to move the site into the future.

Usability Matters ... Or, Why On Earth Did They Design It That Way?

Speaker: Joern Bodemann
Time: 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM Date: June 16

Modern content management systems offer a lot of functionality but only parts of it are used by the actual users. This is the same with almost all modern technological devices and software. This presentation shows the results of the e-Spirit usability research seen from a broad perspective. By using astonishing simple and very funny real word examples we show how the user expectation can be matched to software design. The results can be applied to all kinds of software.

Attendees will learn that:

Users are not looking for intelligent design of user interfaces but for “cool design” these days. What is “cool design” and why this has changed.
Users don’t have a usability “problem” with software, but with technology in general. That we as users have already accepted this in a lot of areas but not in the area of software.
What can be done about both.

Just Put That In The Zip Code Field…: The Ins and Outs of Content Modeling

Speaker: Deane Barker
Time: 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM Date: June 16

One of the things I’ve always been interested in that I find most critical to content management implementations, is the ability (or inability) of a CMS to accurately model your content. Systems vary widely in their ability to accurately reflect the real-world content that they’re intended to manage.

For example:

How well does a CMS allow you to structure content? Does it have any ability to manage different content types? Through configuration, or through custom module development?
Can it structure content at all, or is everything an amorphous “page”? What are some common datatypes you might use to model content? What datatypes are offered by various systems?
Can a system automatically generate input forms for your content? Can it validate these input forms? How usable are the forms?
How well does a system allow you relate content to other content, and in what ways?
Can you content pick up properties or attributes from context? Does the content object’s “place” in the content structure of the site allow you to derive information about it?
Can a system allow you to easily compose content from separate component content objects?
Can a system let you have repeating properties? Can you create “subcontent” to represent parent-child relationships between content objects?

Time spent on content modeling advance of a project is recouped many times over during the course of the project.

However, the real time-savings comes after implementations when you begin to modify the system. Model your content poorly and you can paint yourself into a corner when you find that 20,000 pages haven’t been structured in such a way that you can find all press releases issued in
October 2004 that mention your discontinued product line.

This session will discuss the theories and best practices behind structuring and modeling your content, an overview of how different CM systems handle this, and best practices to “future proof” your content and maximize its utility both now and into the future.

This session is non-technical – there will be no code samples or information on programming. It will be as practical as possible, full of real-world examples of content modeling problems, anecdotes about what has worked and what hasn’t, and a highly visual analysis of how different content management systems allow you to model content.

Just Put That In The Zip Code Field…: The Ins and Outs of Content Modeling

View more documents from Scott Abel.

What Makes Them Click?: 5 Paths to Member Engagement

Speaker: Sherry Budziak
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM Date: June 16

Information overload creates a struggle for associations trying to brand themselves as an expert in their industry. This session will provide information on how you can provide a personalized experience for your constituents.

Attend this session to find out how you can:

Build trust and community between your organization and your member
Enhance innovation through crowd sourcing and community collaboration
Fuel word of mouth marketing
Gain member understanding from user created content, user engagement, and continuous feedback
Improve member service and satisfaction by enabling a customized Web site experience

Building Social Media, Personalization and Relevancy into Open-Source Websites using eZ Publish

Speaker: Bård Farstad
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM Date: June 16

In this talk you will learn how to combine social features for your website with personalization and automatic relevancy, to make your site more “sticky”. We will review examples of ways to invite your visitors to contribute content while at the same time create more targeted information for your visitors as well.Examples on how you can convert these often debated features into revenue, or reaching the overall goal with the website will be provided. Case studies are based on the examples done in eZ Publish CMS, but the principles apply to any platform.

Situational Applications: Cost Effective Solutions to Immediate Business Challenges

Speaker: Jonathan Sapir
Time: 3:10 PM - 4:00 PM Date: June 16

A recent IBM study makes the argument that the health, competitive power, and even survival of an enterprise largely depends on its ability to harness the power of knowledge workers by enabling them to take responsibility for providing their own solutions to their business needs. These solutions, which IBM calls “situational applications” (SA’s), solve immediate business challenges in a cost-effective way by addressing the situation at hand. SA’s are usually created for a small group of users with specific needs, rather than for a generic set of “users”. The applications may have a short life span, or may continue to evolve to accommodate changes in the user’s environment. Significant changes in requirements may lead to an abandonment of the situational application altogether – in some cases it is just easier to develop a new one than to evolve the one in use.

These types of applications have been generally inaccessible because software has been too difficult to write, too costly to implement, and too brittle to customize and maintain once deployed. Cloud computing has spawned a new wave of tools that effectively address these problems. These tools empower business users closest to the problems being solved to quickly build full-featured collaborative business applications online and immediately deploy those applications to the appropriate people both inside and outside their organization. They significantly reduce or even eliminate the need to hire professional software developers, requisition (and wait for) a new software purchase or development project from IT, or piece together a messy and incomplete solution using tools like Excel and email. Far removed from the traditional controlled environment of corporate applications, this will address areas that were previously unaffordable or of low priority to the IT department, and lead to new opportunities for improving efficiency, effectiveness and innovation.

This presentation provides an introduction to understanding and leveraging this new technology, including a review of:

The situational mindset and methodology
Situational platforms and tools
The role of IT
New opportunities for businesses, consultants and entrepreneurs

The target audience includes:

Executive Management - How will SA’s reduce time to market for new solutions, improve the organizations overall productivity, and increase return on IT investment?
Departmental Managers - How will SA’s help me improve my departments productivity and effectiveness?
Business Professionals - How will SA’s provide me with better tools to do my job more effectively?
IT Management - How will SA’s reduce the amount of effort and risk required to build solutions, and how will it allow me to service my user base more effectively?
IT Professionals - How will SA’s make me a more productive and therefore more valuable member of the organization?
Business consultants - How can SA’s help me improve my client’s organizations, and allow me to expand my service offerings?
Systems Integrators - How can I take advantage of SA’s to help my clients and increase my revenue?
Entrepreneurs - How can SA’s help me build my new business, and what opportunities do they offer to create new business opportunities?

Globalizing a CMS-based Website from the Ground Up: How to Design, Develop and Deploy a Website for an International Audience

Speaker: Maxwell Hoffmann
Time: 3:10 PM - 4:00 PM Date: June 16

In our current economy, your enterprise may become more dependent on World Trade than ever before. How do you get the world to come to your doorstep to do business? That was the challenge facing the Montana World Trade Center (MWTC). They needed a web site that non-technical staff could update via CMS and also have content translated and globalized for international customers. Target languages included Chinese, Arabic and Spanish.

In such a project, there are locale and cultural issues to consider, as well as content translation. What colors and images are considered lucky or unlucky in China or many Arabic speaking nations? What are some of the seemingly innocent images that could alienate the specific international partners or customers you are seeking?

The primary requirements for MWTC’s site included:

Multilingual
Better lead generation
Better SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Ability for non-technical staff to easily add and edit content
Automated approval processes for content contributors
Automated translation workflow for language versions
Subscriptions, Web alerts & memberships
Schedule content to go live and expire
Internal search of content and library assets

Although there are many ways to organize a multilingual website project, there are some specific fundamental Phases, Steps and Tasks which should be integrated into every Web Design, Development and Deployment (W3D) plan.

Services in creation of this website included:

Website Design and Development
Glossary Development
Translation and Copy Writing
Localization of Graphics and Multimedia
CMS deployment, training and support
Global Search Engine Marketing (country-specific SEO)
Website training

This presentation shares lessons learned from a colorful case history and covers the proven ten-phase W3D process to ensure project success on a global basis. Processes will be explained in detail, including which process can occur concurrently:

Phase I: Discovery, analysis and Project Proposal
Phase II: Project Planning and Kick Off
Phase III: Information Architecture (IA): Content, Creative, Technologies aligned with Business Processes
Phase IV: Production: Content, Creative, Technologies
Phase V: QA and Testing
Phase VI: Globalization
Phase VII: QA and Testing
Phase VIII: Launch
Phase IX: Search Engine Optimization
Phase X: Updates and Content Management

“Information architecture is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint before you dive in and put the thing together. Information architecture (also known as IA) is the foundation for great Web design. It is the blueprint of the site upon which all other aspects are built—form, function, metaphor, navigation and interface, interaction and visual design. Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do when designing a site.”

Is He Crazy? The Printed Blog Story

Speaker: Joshua Karp
Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Date: June 16

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009: 5:00am. It’s 4 degrees without the wind chill. Joshua Karp, six unpaid interns, and a camera crew race between three CTA stations, handing out the very first issue of The Printed Blog, a brand new print newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and online, user-generated content. In the midst of the meltdown of the newspaper industry, this small, completely bootstrapped team, has successfully launched a new print newspaper. A few days later, Time Out Chicago asks, “Is he crazy?”

Later named one of American’s Most Promising Startups by BusinessWeek, The Printed Blog redefined the print industry and the nature of journalism by actually launching a newspaper based on a completely new business model. Going from idea, to launch, to internationally recognized newspaper brand in less than three months, The Printed Blog now publishes nearly 7,000 weekly papers in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and in four different communities in Chicago (Wicker Park, Lakeview, Loop, and Gold Coast Editions). In March, 2009, Editor & Publisher magazine asked its readers to consider: “Is this really the future of newspapers?”

Come join Joshua Karp as he tells the story of The Printed Blog; the ups and downs, the media frenzy, the business model, and the role of social media, and listen as gives his vision for the future of the newspaper industry. You can decide for yourself, “Is he crazy?” or is The Printed Blog what the future looks like… the newspaper for the next 100 years.