How do you get through to consumers bombarded by so many marketing messages? Hear Michael Silverman, CEO of Duo Consulting discuss Marketing in an Connected World - using content to drive results when the customer is in control.

In this cluttered world, people wait until they need information, and then search for it - putting the customer in control. Because of this new reality, you need to make it easy for the customer to find you, and provide a way for them to talk about you.  Learn why the best marketing involves a dialog with your customer and get tips on how to encourage such dialog to take place.

Silverman will discuss what to do, and not to do, when bringing your brand online, and he will explain why you should focus on solutions, not products. You will also learn how to be open and “share” your brand by interacting with clients to gain credibility online. You will come away from this session with an understanding of the new rules of Marketing in a Connected World.

This session is designed to give those responsible for delivering and maintaining web content a look at the best approaches to create and serve relevant and personal copy to visitors derived from any advertising channel. Discover how savvy marketers are using the latest tactics to coordinate cross media campaigns, track results, and generate follow up communications without needing support across multiple departments or firms. Real time data profiling can serve unique web content to visitors referred from static or variably printed pieces with amazing accuracy. Virtually any media (including TV, radio, billboards, magazine ads and more) can be used to drive web traffic to a site that captures both demographic and psychographic information that gets the right message, to the right customer, at the right time.

The topics to be covered in this session include:
Comparing traditional shotgun marketing (web, print, etc) to highly targeted methods

Marketing professionals have access to a variety of new tools and techniques to leverage a complete online sales process from web search to sale. Learn how marketers are generating more visitors, leads and revenue and most importantly tracking the metrics and constantly refining the process. 

The content management vendor community is doing its best to fuel the exodus from static to dynamic web pages across the web. However, many site operators surveyed by JupiterResearch indicated that they simply aren’t ready to deliver innovation and are incapable of change because their internal process and organizations are not in order. Inhibitors such as conflict between Marketing and IT plagued website decision makers; and managing content across organizational silos affected others. Decision makers are challenged to satisfy the needs of different visitor segments because they lack a deep knowledge of these customers and don’t have a method to alter their messaging or timing to deliver content in a relevant context.

Furthermore, 72 percent of sites are still delivering static pages in areas of their public-facing web properties. These same companies expressed their top two content management challenges as keeping content fresh, and keeping content relevant. Each of these challenges can be addressed as resource issues that can be resolved with proper allocation of staff and dynamic content automation and delivery, yet too few website decision makers are focused on effectively delivering dynamic content. These issues are compounded by the fact that many decision makers surveyed admit that their content management strategy is not well defined. Poor planning and ill-defined content management strategies often result in misguided technology selection, which results in heavy customization and retrofitting of tools to meet needs after purchases have been made.

The effectiveness of a web property can often be measured by the level of customer interaction with the site and the ability for site visitors to accomplish desired tasks online such as completing a transaction, generating a lead, or downloading information. These interactions are currently measured by 49 percent of website decision makers as a method to quantify user interaction and calculate an engagement metric. Engagement, while difficult to measure, is a key metric for next generation web properties because it is the method used to determine the effectiveness of interactive web pages, RIAs (like AJAX, Flex, Flash and Silverlight), dynamic content, user generated content (UGC) and social networking tools. As site operators look to the near-term future to identify features and functionality they wish to deliver on their sites, they must evaluate the capabilities of their content delivery technologies and establish processes for measuring effectiveness and quantifying the business value of next generation functions.

Not all web sites are created equal. Some look great, but are hard to use and frustrate the visitor. Others are complex, but are easy to use, while most fall somewhere in the middle.

There’s a lot at stake when designing a web site, after all, for many organizations, it’s the public face of the company - and the first contact that a potential customer will have with them. Some companies throw all the bells and whistles at the site - and then find that it’s just not doing the job. It may be ‘pretty’ but it’s not serving either them or their customers needs.

If a site is hard or frustrating to use, then visual appeal just isn’t enough.

Learn why it’s so important to get the underlying structure of a site right - and how getting it right paves the way for building a web site that works. It’s more than being ‘Just a Pretty Face’.

There is no ‘right’ way to use a wiki. The fantastic thing about wikis, and the reason they have been so successful, is that they are built from the ground up by the people who use them. That way, the structure of a wiki, and how it is used, comes to mirror how the people using the wiki want to structure it, how they want to use it.

On Wikipatterns.com, a growing community is using the wiki to document the patterns of wiki use present in their own wikis. The site contains a toolbox of patterns and anti-patterns, and a guide to major stages of wiki adoption that explores patterns to apply at each stage. Applying these patterns can help coordinate peoples’ efforts and guide the growth of content on a wiki, and recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder growth - can give a wiki the greatest chance of success.

This workshop/presentation will give an overview of Wikipatterns.com, explore some patterns from the site, give practical guidelines on how to apply patterns to a new or existing wiki.

Microsites, web portals, online communities, virtual trade shows, podcasts, webcasts, vodcasts, digital magazines and more. Changes in technology and customer behavior have created opportunities for businesses to communicate directly with customers like never before. This presentation will talk about some of these changes, how they will affect the future of the media landscape, and what great companies are doing to drive revenue through online content.

There is a saying, attributed to Lao-Tzu, that the value of a pitcher is not the physical material of the pitcher itself , but the empty space it creates to receive water.. Similarly, the value in a modern content management system is not the system itself but the occasions it creates for communities of interest to interact: content management and community management have become virtually interchangeable. 

Traditionally, content management systems were designed to be used only by the select few behind the scenes: authors created content, Editors filtered, approved, and often placed content, and users merely read it. Increasingly, however, users expect to take an active role in the creation, consumption, and distribution of content.

In this talk, we’ll look at a number mechanisms for engaging with communities of users and discuss how a number of content management platforms support such engagement. Specifically, we’ll look at user contributed content, user contributed meta-data (tagging, rating, and filtering), and mass syndication.

We’ll look at a number of example sites, built on open source content management systems like Drupal and Alfresco, in terms of the challenges and opportunities that engaging with communities create.

Enabling users to contribute content for example, shifts the burden of effort but does not eliminate it. Allowing users to rate, recommend, tag, and respond to content makes possible new mechanisms for discovery and personalization than human editorial control could provide.

We’ll also look at the increasing trend of mass syndication through Facebook applications, and widgets, including a discussion of the Open Social APIs recently released by Google, in the context of content distribution in particular.