The Web Content Conference Series, brought to you by Duo Consulting and TheContentWrangler.com, is expanding its offerings, bringing three annual conferences to cities around the US during 2009. First stop is Clearwater, Florida, February 17-18, for Web Content 2009 Tampa Bay. Next stop, Chicago, IL, June 15-16, for Web Content 2009 Chicago. Additional event will be announced soon. The theme of the 2009 conference season is The Impact of Social Media on Web Marketing.

If you are interested in speaking, sponsoring, or volunteering at the event, contact conference program manager, Scott Abel.

As business units demand more from a web presence, IT has been asked to respond with web content management (WCM) systems that do more than deliver content. This webcast from Search CIO Midmarket examines the types of content management systems available, the differences between standard WCM products and persuasive WCM products that manage and deliver content.

Duo Consulting CEO Michael Silverman and Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, producers of the Web Content conference series, sift through the hype of certain features and discuss web delivery extras such as personalization, analytics, and multichannel delivery. They also offer specific advice and user examples on how you can set up a successful WCM system that meets the needs of both IT and the business.

Graham Tillotson didn’t invent the phrase “necessity is the mother of invention” but he might as well have. With a background in technical communication, he grew weary of creating redundant content in his online help system, and decided to automate the process of storing content so he could better manage it. With an Access database and some virtual duct tape, he fashioned a content management system that allowed him to re-use the content.

As any handyman will tell you, once the Do-It-Yourself bug has bitten, it’s hard to shake the fever. With his print publishing family tradition running ink through his veins, and his online help experience hard-wiring his brain for electronic publishing, Tillotson parlayed his background into a content management career with a logical twist. He headed for the open source fields, where all good DIY types can roll up their sleeves without feeling constrained by the shackles of proprietary systems.

He joined eZ Systems in 2008, where he is the Managing Director for North American operations, with offices in Vancouver, BC and Chicago, IL. However, he first encountered eZ Publish six years earlier, when he was consulting on a marketing intranet for a major Dutch bank. Since then, he used eZ Publish products for web publishing solutions, customer support, asset management, social networking, and even e-commerce sites.

Tillotson has taught the principles of structured content and content management at Northern Illinois University, to illustrate core skills such as information architecture, content modeling, and content embedding and reuse. He publishes a blog that combines his thoughts on the content management world as well as technical eZ Publish “eureka” moments at Northand KM.

The modest beginnings of open source content management systems gave them a certain allure, particularly to organizations with heavy development resources. For the average organization, however, open source content management systems were often more problematic than users bargained for. They were often unprepared for the effort associated with the ongoing care and maintenance of an open source system, and didn’t have the internal resources to understand and support such a system.

Even today, whatever images are conjured up by the term open-source content management system, they’re not likely to be images of easy-to-use, rich functionality, or modularized applications. And when thoughts turn to on-demand, enterprise web content management, open source systems rarely make the top of the SaaS list.

In the long-term development run, content management has moved from proprietary systems to standards-based, from monolithic to expandable, multi-component systems. Every so often, a trend comes along that makes the competitive industry players sprint to keep up, but over all, it’s the long view—the development marathon, if you will—that brings success.

eZ Systems is one of the systems that has kept pace with the long view in mind, combining the advantages of open source standards with the advanced functionality of a proprietary system. They began by creating an open source enterprise content management system that can be used as an out-of-the-box Web CMS. The CMS acts as a foundation for numerous components that can added, on an as-needed basis, from their component library to build out the functionality for exactly what’s needed to support business processes.

What this means is that organizations get exactly what they need, without taking on the bulk of unwanted functionality in some vendor’s idea of a features “package.” This building-block method adds services that covers the license model, software, development process, support and training and certification programs, for full service responsibility.

eZ Publish is available as a free Open Source distribution and serves as the foundation for the rest of the eZ Publish products. The application is also available as an “on demand” service, which now makes open source content management a viable option for organizations who may have shied away from this area before. With the industry move to SaaS (software as a service), eZ Publish on Demand has positioned itself at the front of the open source CMS race.  For a demonstration of the power of eZ Publish, read the Vogue case study.

To understand some of the differences between open source and proprietary software systems, read the article on the eZ Systems site.

If a single thread runs through the fabric of content management, it’s the principle of gaining control. Control comes in many forms. Gaining control can mean gaining control of content, gaining control of processes, gaining control of integration time, and overall, getting a grip on the return on investment of putting in a system that is bound to change the way content is handled, change the content production processes, upset the equilibrium of the staff who have to cope with the changes, and often costs a bundle before any return is seen on the investment.

Gaining control of content is an obvious business driver. From tracking where content is, where it gets re-used, when it gets posted and archived, to tracking translations, the need to know how content is being used is critical to responsible operations. This goes hand-in-hand with process control, which involves ensuring system adoption by users—always a sensitive issue. Gaining control of integration time is sometimes called “time to traction”—getting a grip on how long it takes to get up and running can eat through a tremendous amount of budget.

Often, this means mega-bucks for mega-systems, but Ektron provides an alternative. Since 1998, Ektron has provided an affordable Web content management and authoring solution that powers over 20,000 customer sites. These are only a few of the issues that factor into return on investment. For more information on how a CMS should be able to help an organization, read Ektron’s brief on rapid ROI, as well as their other briefs, freely available from Ektron website.

Organizations looking for ways to manage enterprise content often think about the content being created inside the content management system, but overlook the organization’s need to control the plethora of files—documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, and so on—that become part of the content management system. Some of the files may be intranet documents, some may be extranet documents, others may pertain to multiple sites, or have special permissions attached to them.

The need to manage files has become as great a need as the need to manage content, and the ability to locate a file within the system is an art. In a time when the amount of time searching for the right file - whether that be the latest document version, or the document with the appropriate content - has risen to extreme time-wasting levels, a content management system with a good search capability is worth its weight in ROI.

When the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) wanted to index over 100,000 documents in a variety of file formats, adding thousands of new documents each month, they needed a way for over 1,000 employees, and 2 million searchers annually to get reliable results when searching for business documents on their intranet and public sites. As NREL discovered, mere keyword searches were not enough to do the job that they had in mind. Features such as spelling suggestions for misspelled words (a must for sites with hard-to-spell technical terms), advanced query options, scoped searches, and browse-by-topic features were considered essential for their single-person search management department.

The NREL turned to TERMINALFOUR, a provider of enterprise content management solutions. Known for the ease of integration of their Site Manager CMS, the TERMINALFOUR reputation extended to the capabilities of its Ultraseek search engine software. Together, this product duet provided a powerful set of tools that NREL could put to use on an incredibly short timeline, giving them the efficiencies they needed well within the time frame they wanted.

Download the National Renewable Energy Laboratory case study from the TERMINALFOUR site.

Dick Costolo characterizes his role as Group Product Manager for Google Ads as being a lot of fun. The product team at Google really sets the direction for efforts within the company and there are a number of different initiatives going on within the group; his opportunity to get involved with new initiatives keeps his curiosity piqued and his inquiring mind expanding to find the next way that people want to receive media. Though Costolo keeps his lips firmly sealed on the new products he is working on, he does say that he will be discussing the future of media distribution, which is core to what he was doing at FeedBurner and now at Google.

When asked about hot industry topics, Costolo pointed to Net neutrality, and although he admits that it doesn’t seem to be as front and center as it was in 2007, he does not downplay its importance. He is keen not to see competition stifled, such that only those in existing positions of power can compete. He hopes that there is an increasing awareness that such a direction would be tragic, and it should be fairly obvious that this would stifle innovation.
Costolo has a significant take in keeping Web innovations flowing; after all, innovation is Costolo’s middle name. For a peek into his hypercreative mind to learn about hypersyndication and its effects on brands and business, check out his presentation,
The Next Content Wave: Hypersyndication, June 17, 2008 at Web Content 2008 Chicago. 

The Content Wrangler Community is the new social network dedicated to people who value content as a business asset, worthy of being effectively managed. This is the place where technical communicators, medical and science writers, content managers, marketing pros, online community managers, document engineers, information architects, localization and translation pros, taxonomists, bloggers, documentation and training managers, and content creators of all types hang out. It’s much more than a blog. It’s a place to join your peers, to share, to collaborate, to contribute, to find the information you need.

In the first three weeks of existence, the community has attracted more than 1,400 knowledge workers from all walks of life from all around the world. Members are congregating online and forming special interest groups focused on software tools, content standards, information modeling, job hunting, technical communication, web 2.0, marketing and more. In addition to allowing the formation of groups, the community provides members with online forums, a blog, keyword searchable member directory, video and photo sharing, discounts on upcoming conferences, event announcements, training sessions, webinars, and much more.

Take a look around the site. Become a member. Create a profile (and please include a photo). Start a blog. Join a group. You decide. There are many ways to interact with your peers.

Some of the features of the new community include:

• Members can invite new members, meet other members
• Full message center with address book importing from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail
• See which members of your network are online now
• Customizable profile pages
• Photo slideshows, video players, music players, and network badges, that can be embeded anywhere on the Internet, seamlessly funneling new people to your network
• Members can set different privacy settings for every photo, video, group, or blog post they contribute
• RSS feeds of your network’s features, such as members, discussions, photos, videos, music/podcasts, and blog posts

Photo Sharing

• Upload photos from a computer, mobile phone, or Flickr account
• Add photo comments, ratings, tags, locations, favorites, and share photos via email
• Create, organize, and view photo albums
• Create, view and “embed” photo slideshows
• View all photos across the social network

Video Sharing

• Upload videos from a computer, mobile phone, or any video service on the web
• Add video comments, ratings, tags, locations, favorites, and share via email
• Create, view and “embed” Flash video players
• View all videos across the social network

Discussion Forum

• Start and tag a discussion
• Add discussion posts and reply to those posts
• Organize discussions by categories
• Click through the personal profile pages of other members engaged in the discussion
• View all discussions across your social network

Groups

• Enable members of your network to create groups
• Enable members of your network to make groups public or private
• Add group descriptions, images, discussions, and members

Music Player - Music and Podcasting

• Create music and podcast playlists for both the network as well as for each individual member of your network
• Create, view and “embed” Flash music and podcast players

RSS Feedreader

• Pull in a RSS feed to your network from an external source of news, information, or content

Text Boxes for Widgets

• Copy and paste in widgets from around the web or from other parts of your network
• Add some HTML to a text box for further instructions or text on your network

What are you waiting for? Join The Content Wrangler Community today!

Amongst the mass of technologists discussing the pros and cons of the technologies and metrics, Joe Pulizzi talks about the substance rather than the vehicle: content. In his role of Chief Content Officer for Junta 42, he understands the value of content, that it is an asset that serves as the “good stuff” of marketing campaigns. Without content, the technology has nothing of interest to deliver. Customers and prospects will be drawn in by the quality and usefulness of the content, not the potential of the technology behind the scenes.

Joe discusses how content marketing plays out on a business and personal level in this interview for Business Networking Advice.

John Kreisa of Mark Logic wants organizations to unlock the full value from the content that gets created in the course of business. With semi-structured content—reports, email, and all that other business data that floats around our corporate networks—growing at an average of 30% per year, there is a lot of potential for re-use of existing content.

While Kreisa sees lots of room to improve how content is integrated and re-purposed to deliver new products and services, he recognizes that content, unlike data, doesn’t fit neatly into rows and columns of a database. That’s why Mark Logic focuses on an XML delivery system. Much like SQL allows queries against a relational database, Xquery allows queries against content.  XML allows the content to describe itself, and can be loaded, queried, manipulated, and rendered in a multitude of ways. Because XML allows content to describe itself, the content is available for structured and semi-structured content in ways that make sense for organizations to delivery content in business-savvy ways.

Listen to the John Kreisa interview with Dr. Claudia Imhoff at Business Intelligence magazine.

Understanding the effectiveness of online marketing is only as good as the metrics used to measure it. Gian Fulgoni has made this area his area of expertise, and shares it during Web Content 2008. His company, comScore, has invested a tremendous amount of resources to establish a world-class IT infrastructure, to lay the groundwork for measuring online marketing data. The strategy paid off, as the database is now one of world’s largest, and contains a plethora of data available to be analyzed in a myriad of ways.

Listen to an interview with Gian Fulgoni on the topic of internet measurement.

Wiki evangelist Stewart Mader may love the technology, but what he really loves is the productivity that the technology can bring about when properly implemented. The idea that wikis help organizations share information may be the primary reason that they want to adopt a wiki, but the side benefits - reduction in email and meetings, development of planned and spontaneous communities, and idea hatcheries - can be teased out when the implementation is done with due thought and care.

In addition to Mader’s wiki consulting blog, where he provides a wealth of information on the topic of enterprise wikis, Mader has also created:

• 25 Tips for a Better Wiki Deployment
• 21 Days of Wiki Adoption (text)
• 21 Days of Wiki Adoption (video)

John Lovett of Jupiter Research gets excited about website technologies that stoke the ROI fires, such as closed-loop marketing and web analytics. As a researcher and analyst, Lovett has learned to question from both sides of fence, from the perspective of users as well as business, and take the results into account when developing successful marketplace strategies.

Lovett’s observations are gathered into two blogs:

• Jupiter Research blog
• Musings on Web Site Technologies

Don’t miss John’s presentation, Adding Dynamite to Web Content during Web Content 2008 Chicago.

The age of social media is no longer “nearing” or “about to descend” - it is upon us. The new ways of using the Internet aren’t reserved for whatever arbitrary age we deem to be the “younger” generations. The new great divide is between those who are sharing, and those who don’t know what it’s about. Whatever generational gap may have existed has narrowed, and John Eckman embodies the executive who has embraced social media. It makes perfect sense, considering that this is his core practice area.

A prolific blogger, Eckman avails himself of an array of social media tools to amass information and disseminate information about himself and his whereabouts. The related shift from living separate public and private spheres now merge, allowing for information to span both spheres with more fluidity. Eckman is del.icio.us-ly open-Facebook-ed, a Twitter-ing Ma.gnolia, an Upcoming, Goatless Open Parenthesis, the Last Dopplr Flickr of his kind - and if that previous sentence didn’t make sense, visit www.johneckman.com to experience social media in full bloom.

Internet search engines have become the dominant force in driving traffic to a company’s Website. As a result, marketing executives and Website managers find themselves locked in a battle with their competitors to gain optimal placement on search engine results pages. The real winners are those companies that can maintain high search engine results consistently over time.

Many leading companies today are harnessing the power of emerging technologies to achieve search engine optimization, or SEO. In Search Engine Optimization Techniques and Technology to Automate and Grow Your Website Traffic, you’ll discover best practices and techniques for improving and sustaining SEO and maximizing your results for generating inbound traffic to your Website. The discussion focuses on modern and emerging technologies that provide specific tools and functionality so that you, the reader, can become competitive or take a leadership role with your own SEO program and processes.

Finally, you will view the next-generation technologies from Sitecore that optimize your search engine marketing. Sitecore provides a Web Content Management solution that enables marketing executives and website managers to organize and streamline their SEO efforts.

Anytime there are new options to the status quo, myths, like weeds, tend to spring up about new options and how they work. Software is no different in this regard, especially if you are evaluating installed software, open source or software as a service.

To this extent, the traditional world of software has been undergoing some radical changes. Some of those changes are a great benefit to users, like Software as a Service (SaaS). This is a radically different concept from a traditional software model because this model actually makes it easier, faster and cheaper to buy, use and maintain the software.

The 6 SaaS myths relative to Web Content Management Systems (CMS) are:

• Website security
• Control of when/where info appears on your website
• Loss of CMS features and functions
• Integration with other Web-oriented applications (like analytics or SFDC)
• Total cost of a CMS software system
• Suggesting a new software system that even IT will love

Whether you’re in a small business or a mid-sized company, if you want website updates and changes completed faster and easier, you definitely want to view this archived webinar from CrownPeak CEO Jim Howard. In it, he busts the top 6 myths surrounding software services including security, features and function, integration and total cost of ownership.

CrownPeak is a sponsor of Web Content 2008 Chicago.

ITtoolbox has introduced its new Vendor Research Directory. This interactive online directory for the information technology industry is the first resource of its kind to marry user-generated content with information from technology vendors to create a comprehensive and objective tool for evaluating IT purchasing decisions.

Test drive it today!

The big Clickability news for February 2008 is that the company has secured its second round of venture capital funding, and launched an on-demand web content management platform, with three new product editions:

• Clickability Express Edition for smaller enterprises
• Clickability Professional Edition for mid-range sites such as enterprise intranets and interactive marketing sites
• Clickability Enterprise Edition for global publishing and complex enterprise marketing sites

To extend the user community beyond their annual user conference, Clickability has also launched CMS Success, a social network for customers, partners, and employees where they can exchange ideas and best practices. The network uses Clickability’s own social media toolkit as its platform.

CMS Watch Research Analyst Jarrod Gingras spends his days looking at web content management systems and related content technologies, specifically those that affect usability and system adoption. His job is to be blunt and call it as he sees it, giving vendors credit when credit is due, and cautioning consumers about industry trends. Gingras also blogs on a wide range of topics, from correcting misinformation to editorializing on industry or marketplace events. Gingras insights are gathered on his own CMS Watch page or on the CMS Trendwatch blog.

Gingras also teaches Information Organization and Access Workshops, available to organizations wanting on-site training for 10 or more students. These workshops are available in 2-day Practitioner or 4-day Master Workshop versions, which lead to official AIIM designations.

In a world where the elevator pitch is considered the maximum attention span of the average listener, entrepreneur and marketing strategist Sonny Cohen thinks you should be able to explain your business in three words or less. That’s a pretty fast elevator, and it’s called keyword search. When your prospects enter their three magic words into the search engine, then praise their search engine for delivering up just what they needed on the first page, you want to be there.

With more than 25 years experience, Chief Marketing Officer for Duo Consulting, Sonny Cohen, educates web professionals about ways to drive business results, with his presentations such as Content is Marketing, So Market Your Content and the Content Matters workshops. Read the white paper by Sonny Cohen: Getting Noticed by Search Engines to learn about the new paradigm in positive attention-getting.

Don’t miss Sonny’s workshop, Drive Website Traffic with Effective Keywords, at Web Content 2008 Chicago, June 17.

As the content management industry matures, content management technologies are more widely adopted. Some organizations are on their second - if not third - system, as the need for functionality grows along with their business need. Alongside technology, processes mature, as well, and certain realizations sink in. One of those realizations is that implementing a web content management system is less about technology and more about web operations management. Consultant Lisa Welchman has been driving this message home for over a decade with some tough talk and lots of good practice. And finally, the industry is catching up to what has been obvious to Welchman all along.

Read Welchman’s Web Operations Management Primer to see how she helps organizations gain operational control of their web products so they can react more effectively to new, relevant technologies and market demands and opportunities as they arise.

What does a talent for improv, a knack for programming, and the ability to solve real-world Web problems have in common? We’re not sure either, but it seems to be a winning combination. Tim Yager and Jim Thaxton helped Duo Consulting migrate the American Library Association website to a new content management system. There were a number of unique challenges that required a careful, iterative process to ensure that all the content was accounted for, and called at the right time. The outcome was an unequivocal success.

Read the white paper, Replacing a Web CMS, to see how they did it.

Transferring responsibility for the management of content from the realm of IT practitioners into the hands of business professionals would seem like an obvious decision today. But five years ago, when MediaSurface‘s new CEO, Lawrence Flynn, made the decision to take a complex, technically-strong product and make it dead simple to use, it was considered a risky move in the content management world. However, with Gartner endorsing this strategy as “a work of art,” Morello, the company’s flagship product, is poised to keep MediaSurface in the CMS sweet spot for the foreseeable future. After all, with an estimated 80% of enterprises predicted to update their CMS technologies within the next five years, MediaSurface is right where they need to be.

It’s not often that a vendor comes along that can make content management look easy. Remember the horror stories of botched ERP implementations? Before shifting focus from IT and webmasters to the business sector, the pain of implementing—and using—the typical CMS became the stuff of urban legends.

To distance themselves from the rest of the CMS pack, Flynn and his team took an innovative approach to content management, one that allowed the business user to manage content themselves, without having to go through the technical gatekeepers, and it paid off. The consequences were felt immediately. The business units felt more in control of their content, and more responsive to changing market conditions. And IT, after adjusting to the new reality, was relieved not to be involved with operational activities on an ongoing basis.

This strategy definitely worked for one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. AstraZeneca decided on Morello to meet the needs of their massive, complex Web project. They were able to maintain over 300 distinct sites, with 27 languages, in over 40 geographic regions, and maintain overall branding guidelines. That’s quite the feat, considering they were also able to share content across those sites, add content, and even add microsites - all without returning to the implementation team for additional help. With no client software to install, Morello was accessible over the internet, and with a familiar Windows look and feel, many contributors simply started using it, without needing to be trained.

The magic doesn’t just happen by chance. Morello believes that success is a partnership between business and technology, and behind the scenes, the Professional Services group and their partners work closely with clients before a system is implemented. They make sure that the business requirements are solidly understood, and that the system controls are in place to ensure that the CMS is easy to use once it is rolled out.

MediaSurface may be ahead of the competition, but they are not resting on their laurels. Amongst other things on the development roadmap is a plan to open up Morello to the community of development partners so they can create components to enrich the application. By building the development community—potentially hundreds of partners worldwide contributing rich applications—Morello has the potential to become a CMS with an ultra-sophisticated array of plug-and-play, user-activated features. And for businesses who need to stay a step ahead of their competition, that is the cherry on top of the sundae.

In The Top Ten Mistakes of Web CMS Projects – and How to Avoid Them, Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting, shares what makes a project successful, and helps readers understand how to avoid the most common mistakes. Tips are provided to help you avoid the pitfalls and make the move to a WCMS less painful.

Content is the primary driver for organizational productivity and forms the core of external prospect- and customer-facing activities, internal employee productivity, and partner enablement via the Web. As nearly all business processes move online, organizations have a tremendous opportunity to move beyond basic Web Content Management (WCM) to derive greater value from their new and existing content by putting the right content into the hands of the right people at the exact time they need it.

In this whitepaper, you will learn how WCM with delivery capabilities can deliver valuable content to internal and external constituents to drive success. RedDot’s next-generation Web Content Management solution allows hundreds of organizations to streamline business processes and earn higher returns on their content, gaining significant competitive advantage and remaining highly relevant in the fast-changing information economy.

A joint venture of Louisiana Broadcasting and Capital City Publishing, The Advocate website is southern Louisiana’s largest metropolitan news website. Originally conceived as the online presence for Baton Rouge’s daily newspaper and WBRZ-TV, the site has transcended its local origins and technological limitations to become a model national news website, with explosive growth in site traffic and advertising revenues.

Read the case study

With all the hype that Web 2.0 has gotten, many companies are now looking at their existing Web CMS and wondering whether it meets the new paradigm’s needs or merely traps them in an earlier age of the Web, thereby missing new business opportunities and making them appear dated.

Companies currently looking to acquire a new CMS want their new software to be “Web 2.0 enabled.” But what does this mean in real terms?

In this article for CMS Wire (part one of three ), Seth Gottlieb and Brice Dunwoodie explore content management technologies in the context of a Web 2.0 world.

In How to Combine the Power of Variable Data Printing, Opt-in Marketing and the Web, James Michelson, Managing Partner at JFM Concepts, demystifies Variable Data Printing and makes the case for integrating direct mail campaigns with the web.

Variable Data Printing (VDP) is a new technology that is revolutionizing the way marketing organizations communicate with their customers. The goals are simple: drive explosive and profitable growth, reduce costs, and simplify marketing tasks. VDP marries direct mail marketing with the web to deliver highly targeted, personalized content, ensuring marketers are delivering the right message to the right prospects at the right time in the right format. The more targeted and personalized a campaign, the higher response rates and the return on investment.

One challenge with traditional campaigns featuring a website has been the inability to know which particular recipient looked online but never made additional contact. These potential customers remain anonymous unless there is a method to capture their interest. With a little more technology, each prospect in a marketing campaign can receive a unique URL (uniform resource locator) which is a personalized web address. With variable data printing, each piece is individually printed so every customer can receive their own URL. The system can easily report a visit to this page even if the prospect does not make a purchase, fill out a contact form, or respond in any other way to the offer. Sales forces can receive real time alerts that indicate which specific customer visited the web site, which campaign they are from, and current contact information.

Download the whitepaper.
Read the Caterpillar case study.

Adrian Sutton is Chief Technology Officer at Ephox. As a technology professional, Sutton blogs about a diverse range of topics—from Apache to XP (and many topics in between). Check out his blog, Symphonius, to keep tabs on what he’s thinking—and don’t forget to leave a comment.

In this Wallstrip video interview, videoblogger Lindsay Campbell interviews Dick Costolo, Group Product Manager, Google AdSense about Feedburner (where he previously served as CEO), the differences between email and Really Simple Syndication (RSS), and more. Watch the interview (below).

Wallstrip - Dick Costolo - The best bloopers are here

In the old days, marketers went looking for customers. we studied customers, figuring out where they lived, tracking their habits. But things have changed. In the new economy, customers are in charge - they look for us. And the number one way customers look online is with a search engine. Therefore, getting noticed by search engines is crucial to online success.

Not only do you want to appear in the search engine results pages, but you want to rank prominently, as high up on the page as possible. That way, the searchers who are looking for you can easily spot your site, click through and hopefully, convert – to a sale, a donation, a request for more information, a registration or whatever your goal is for the website.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a web page for search engines by carefully crafting the site’s content, structure and the behind-the-scenes coding. Of course, the intent of your website is to communicate clearly with human visitors. Search engine optimization is about making it easy for spiders to navigate and index your site – but without compromising content or clarity for human visitors.

Download Getting Noticed by Search Engines (96KB PDF) by Sonny Cohen, Director of Internet Marketing Strategy, Duo Consulting, you’ll learn how to ensure your website is optimized to be search engine-friendly.

If you are thinking about adopting a content management system for your organization’s website, you’re probably wondering how to ensure a successful outcome, considering the large investment at stake. Avoiding the common mistakes (like making decisions by committee or failing to create a project plan) can save you a lot of time, money and pain. In this whitepaper by Michael Silverman, Duo Consulting, you’ll learn about the ten top mistakes—the ones that you’ll definitely want to prevent—and you’ll discover real-world suggestions for making your web content management project a big success.

Download The Top Ten Mistakes of Web CMS Projects - and How to Avoid Them (86KB PDF).

Web Content 2008 featured speaker Darren Barefoot is the co-author of a new ebook, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, a “must-read” for any serious web marketing professional. The book will help you learn how to market products and services through social media channels like blogs, podcasts and social networking sites like Facebook.

Filled with tricks, tips and real world case studies, Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook will teach you how to:

• Bring more visitors to your website
• Increase your company’s visibility online
• Approach bloggers and other online influencers about your products and services
• Create compelling viral campaigns
• Tell remarkable stories about ordinary products
• Get your website social media ready
• Craft a potent social media pitch
• Market effectively inside Facebook
• Avoid campaign killers and online faux pas

“I can truthfully say that it it is the most comprehensive, up-to-date and well-written ebook on the subject of social media marketing that you’ll find anywhere.”—Jordan Behan, Web Marketing Expert

Read a sample chapter and then buy the ebook.

In this white paper (registration required) from Database Publishing Consultants, Inc. (DPCI), Conor McNamara explores software design tools and best practices for ensuring a smooth transition from vision to reality when working with website designers.

Read Best Practice Design Tools for Content Management Templating (registration required)

In order to stand out and captivate your audience, a website needs to have that certain je ne sais quoi. After all, you may only have a matter of seconds before your prospect is whisked away by another potential suitor online.

Before you even put yourself out there, you’ll need to properly prepare. A new design strategy, entourage and action plan will help you strut your stuff and have a polished site that truly connects with your visitors.

In this article from the folks at ISITE Design, you’ll get real-world advice and actionable suggestions designed to help you build meaningful online relationships with your website visitors.

Read “Captivate: How to Get Customers Attention at First Glance”

In “Managing Enterprise Content”, the authors, Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, and Steve Manning, make the case for their “Unified Content Strategy”—a practical and logical way of researching, planning, preparing, testing, implementing and selling content management across an enterprise. The lessons contained in this easy-to-read book are not lost on smaller organizations, however; departments, small work groups, even individuals, will also benefit from learning innovative ways to effectively create, use and manage content.

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy provides the concepts, strategies, guidelines, processes, and technological options that will prepare enterprise content managers and authors to meet the increasing demands of creating, managing, and distributing content. The book provides the successful methodology The Rockley Group has developed to help organizations to reduce the cost and effort of complex information creation and management ranging from marketing materials, through customer support materials, and regulatory documents.

Download a free chapter from the book: Fundamental Concepts of Reuse.

Popular blogger and technical communication professional Darren Barefoot is one of several featured presenters at the second annual Web Content 2008, June 17-18, 2008 in Chicago. Barefoot will deliver both a half-day workshop, “29 Web 2.0 Tools”, and a 60-minute presentation, “Social Media 101: Everyone’s a Technical Writer”, in addition to participating as a guest panelist during “Meet the Bloggers”, an hour-long discussion with some of the industry’s most popular technical communication bloggers (led by techcomm blogging guru, Anne Gentle).

Darren recently completed work on a new book, Getting To First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook, with co-author, Julia Szabo. This 100-page ebook offers advice on how to increase visibility on the web, attract new visitors, and gain the attention of (and interact with) influential bloggers and web publications. Read a sample chapter or two.

Darren also maintains a personal blog DarrenBarefoot.com (one of the most popular blogs on the planet), and, in his free time, manages to crank out some sound advice for travelers at The Geeky Traveler, maintain the Hall of Technical Communication Weirdness, help run the fourth annual Northern Voice conference, a non-profit personal blogging and social media conference (February 22-23, 2008, Vancouver, BC), and serve the clients of his web marketing firm, Capulet Communications.

Registration is now open for the second annual Web Content 2008 Chicago. When you register before April 18, 2008, you can save $100 off the regular price of $895. 

The Internet has created a “self-service” mindset. Employees (inside) and consumers (outside) expect to find information and complete tasks on their own. User-centered design makes it easy for them to do so.

Yet just because someone can do something, it doesn’t mean that they will.

So how can you create designs that are usable AND encourage conversion, contribution, uptake, and usage? Good user experience design makes this possible.

Jerome Nadel (featured speaker at Web Content 2008) and Jay More present a strategic roadmap for user experience design during this on-demand webcast. Combining usability with the science of persuasive design, viewers will learn how you can:
Impact online decision-making and user motivation

View archived webcast (system requirements)
Download podcast (26 MB – Audio only)