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Web 2.0 technologies provide us with new ways of extending our marketing reach with little effort and cost. Blogs, wikis, and podcasts can help us spread our message 24 hours a day—and they can help us better understand our customers (their problems, needs, likes, dislikes, fears and opinions). Peer-to-peer networks like LimeWire, and online communities like YouTube and SlideShare (sites that support rich media and user-generated content) can quickly expose our brands to audiences we would otherwise have no way of reaching. Mobile messaging, micro-blogging sites like Twitter, and social networks can help us hone in on prospects and laser target our messages. Attend this session and discover ten Web 2.0 tools that you can use to improve your marketing efforts when you return to the office.

10 Web 2.0 Tools Marketers Can Use Today

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Marketing Survival Strategies for the Attention(less) Economy

Speaker: Jeremy Epstein
Time: 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM Date: June 15

One of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century, Herbert Simon, remarked that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon succinctly wraps up the challenges facing marketers in the Internet era. Inundated by information and media from all sides, prospects and clients continue to tune out and ignore traditional marketing tactics and message.

Firms of all sizes (with clients of all sizes) struggle with the central question: How do we effectively cut through all the noise to establish authentic dialogue and relationships and… make money?

Join Jeremy Epstein, a “Marketing Navigator for the Attention Economy,” in a lively, interactive (and remarkable!) presentation that will:

Help you understand the fundamental macro-societal shifts impacting marketers
Provide guidelines for how to thrive as a marketer in the new environment
Share the ground rules for the new marketing
Educate you on the key concepts of using Social Media as a marketing channel
Offer suggestions on the first steps on the road to a Word-of-Mouth/Social Media marketing strategy

The Anatomy of a Personalization System: Three Case Studies

Speaker: Derek Olson
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:50 PM Date: June 15

Is your website acting like it’s on a first date instead of a 10th wedding anniversary dinner?

This presentation is aimed at business owners, marketing professionals, user experience engineers, and content contributors who realize that the one-size fits all message of their website doesn’t quite fit anyone.

When does a personalized website add real value to the customer experience? How can you build measurement of this value into personalization systems?

In this presentation, we will:

Learn how to recognize situations where personalized website content, emails or application functionality might lead to customer delight
Take a tour of three real world examples, including a detailed look under the hood to see what makes them work
Hear about some road-tested methods for combining off-the-shelf software with custom development and freeware that won’t break the bank
Explore both explicit personalization (based on user-submitted data) and implicit personalization (based on “clickstream” info), and how they can be combined
See first-hand the importance of measurement. We’re talking about traffic, conversions, sales, user behavior, and more.

Instant Brand Messaging: Writing To Be Clicked

Speaker: Lisa Calhoun
Time: 3:10 PM - 4:00 PM Date: June 15

Business writing is undergoing a revolution. How do you write for results? In a complex messaging environment that includes evolving social media applications as well as more traditional channels, you need an approach to guide authoritative content across multiple message streams. Whether you’re talking Twitter, traditional RSS, Digg, or YouTube, combing the right approach to social media with a goal-driven approach to written content will help your copy deliver business results.

Attendees will learn:

How to define your online messaging strategy - Let’s demystify some of the newer social media outlets, and discuss how to make the best out of your options as well as clarify your goals (blog visibility, website visibility, news, etc). We’ll tour practical, real world examples of organizations of all sizes who are getting it right.
How to write tight - Learn the top four ways you can grab attention in small spaces while still communicating your brand message.
How to look at blogs - Social media doesn’t just have to be about short messages and announcements. Find out if there’s a role for blogging in your organization.
How to consider keywords - You might be wondering if keyword research is worth the time if you’re posting short, sweet headlines—but if your article finds its way to Digg or Stumbleupon, you’ll be glad you considered it.
How to Digg in - How Digg, Stumbleupon, and other bookmarking social media can boost your search engine rankings and deliver a powerful performance in knowledge leadership, as well as garner media attention if you’re lucky (including some specific examples of how this has worked).
How to give and take - Striking the balance between giving content and sharing content. Learn how to use this to your advantage.

Instant Brand Messaging: Writing To Be Clicked

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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

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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.

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

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.”