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

With the explosion of AJAX, widgets, and a host of social media sites and tools, it has become increasingly important for content providers to atomize and distribute media away from its originating site. In a world of hypersyndication, how do you build audience, what does it mean to be a publisher, what are the emerging business models, and how does content flow to the right people and places without cannibalizing the content provider’s brand?

Jaiku. Knol. Seesmic. They might be new models of minivans, or medalists at the 2008 Olympics. In fact, they’re just three of the many fresh social media projects emerging an increasingly complex online landscape.

The world of social media and user-generated content changes on a month-to-month basis. It’s critical for marketers and content creators to keep abreast of what’s new, what’s dead and what matters. This session discusses major social media trends of the past year, and looks ahead to what we can expect from 2008 and beyond.

Some of trends to be covered include:

• Who are the microbloggers, and should you be paying attention to services like Twitter and Jaiku?
• What is the state of virtual worlds like Second Life and Habbo Hotel?
• Is it wise to advertise on Facebook?
• Why organizations shouldn’t start their own social networks
• Who are the emerging competitors to Wikipedia, and do they even matter?

Attendees will leave this session chock full of fresh ideas to apply to upcoming campaigns.

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.

How your corporate website looks and functions has a powerful impact on your business. A content-rich site where customers can learn about your business is one of the best ways to show them how ready and willing you are to serve their needs. Attendees of this session will learn various methods and strategies to utilize the web to support business strategy and vision. Bachana will provide a detailed and in-depth presentation highlighting the best practices and typical struggles companies have while building and supporting their Web content management strategy.

While content management systems on the market today have similar functionality, it is often difficult for customers to differentiate which is the best solution for their needs. Bachana will offer real-world case studies showcasing both painful and successful examples alike. Through his intuitive knowledge of the industry he will offer how to properly maintain and streamline a web content solution. Additionally, he will share his thoughts on what is needed and what to avoid when selecting a Web content solution for your organization.

Bachana will also explore the impact of Web 2.0—the importance of understanding how to properly integrate blogs, wikis, podcasts, webinars, video, and other user-generated content. Attendees of this presentation will learn about these new interactive tools and how they can be leveraged to deliver personalized, one-to-one experiences as well as broader based communities. 

Topics to be covered:

• Business drivers for the site – site as ‘platform’ for a business, not just a collection of technologies or widgets
• Workflow considerations, including change management aspects
• Business and functional requirements, approaches to information architecture, wireframing, and taxonomies
• Platform considerations based on the organization’s particular requirements or constraints
• Procurement planning
• Implementation management including risk management strategies and project management

Knowing how to drive search engine-referred traffic to your website remains a mystery cloaked in myth. While many website administrators still ignore even the most basic steps to achieving prominence in search engines, some don’t know what role search engine referred traffic contributes to their overall website traffic. We’re going to help you fix that!

In this combination seminar and hands-on workshop, you will learn what makes an effective keyword and how you discover the ones that will work for you. With this understanding of keywords, we will then demonstrate how to deploy keywords in the website.

After this short tutorial, each seminar attendee will follow a step by step process using your data to uncover keywords that will help drive traffic to your site. Once each attendee has defined and evaluated an initial list of keywords, you will then have the opportunity to develop website content utilizing these words.

Attendees should bring a computer with wireless access capability. In anticipation of this session, prepare a list of 2 or 3 websites that are either competitors or who are gaining top search prominence for the words you think to be important.

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

While many businesses are updating firewall block lists to prevent their employees becoming FaceBook zombies, smart businesses are looking for ways to harness the interest in social networking to make their employees more productive. By going beyond building networks for the sake of it, businesses can increase collaboration and communication between employees with social networks that actually have a point.

Web content management systems often suffer because the people that use them are geographically-distributed and unfamiliar with each other. When employees go home at night, they regularly solve these same problems on FaceBook and MySpace – regularly finding and reconnecting with long lost friends. Bringing that technology and enthusiasm into business hours, can dramatically increase the number of weak ties between people within the business, making it easier to find the skills and knowledge that you need, when it’s needed.

With user adoption being one of the key concerns with any content management system roll-out, providing ways to make people feel more comfortable and welcome in the system is essential to success. This session will look at the techniques used in various social networks and other forms of collaboration software that can enhance user adoption and keep bringing users back to the CMS instead of reverting to emailing Word documents.

Despite the benefits, social networks can very easily become time sinks and distractions, hindering productive work. Finding the right balance between keeping users happy and keeping users on task requires a delicate hand and constant review and improvement. This session will look at what can be done to keep the vampires at bay and focus users on getting work done, without taking all the fun out of work.

Finally, the session will take a look at the various technologies and standards that can help you actually bring this new social world to reality and integrate it with existing systems.

Digg, Del.icio.us, RSS, Wikipedia, StumbleUpon...the list of emerging Web 2.0 or ‘social media’ tools is ever-lengthening. What are they? How do they work? How are people using them? How might they apply to the world of web content management? This workshop will demonstrate 29 of the most popular tools and services, and discuss their relevance to the attendees’ work.

Running a procurement and evaluation process for a CMS project can be resource intensive and stressful. On top of that, a typical CM professional may only conduct CMS process a few times during their career.

Based on lessons learned from over 350 evaluation processes, this very practical, vendor neutral session will provide hands on tips, insider knowledge and advice to make your life easier and select a CMS that most matches your needs.

Key areas covered are:

• How to efficiently gather your requirements without creating a monstrous requirements document
• How to structure your RFP/RFT so that it can be evaluated efficiently
• A look at examples of RFP/RFT documents, what makes them good, bad or ugly?
• How to pose the right questions to vendors
• How to evaluate a vendors’ answers and read between the lines
• Inside the mind of a vendor: how a vendor operates, prices and shows signs of genuine interest in your project
• How to structure vendor presentations and who to invite
• How of structure an efficient low risk / high reward “hands on” evaluation of a solution
• How to check a vendors references and credentials to make sure you’ve selected the right partner
• What is fair to ask of a vendor and what might be asking too much

Running evaluations can be inefficient and difficult to manage. At worst, your evaluation process, no matter how well intentioned and planed, may offer very little value to the selection process compared to just picking a system at random.

Given the time, money and effort involved, you and your career cannot afford to make the wrong choice. This unique session will provide you with the hands on tips and advice to conduct an efficient and effective selection process, even if it’s your first one.

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. 

Are you looking to re-design your site, but are afraid to look into a new CMS? This talk will address real-world solutions to move data from one CMS to another, including real-world problems such as link management, related content, and data import. Most current CMS solutions have methods to import data although they all have different strengths and weaknesses, knowing your business goals and your content will help you in deciding which CMS is right for your project.

Remember, size doesn’t matter, even if you’re building a large CMS project. You can learn how to leverage tools and processes to work more effectively on your own project.

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.

With many successful high profile implementations, open source web content technologies have changed from being too risky to consider to too risky to ignore.  Organizations looking to redirect licensing expenditures to web design and customization now have legitimate options that they need to understand.

There are a number of enterprise ready open source web content management solutions that deliver necessary functionality while creating opportunities to control costs. However, most companies know very little about open source software models and find their usual selection techniques ineffective to evaluate these technologies. Furthermore, open source is not a homogeneous class of software. There are many different open source business models and organizational structures that affect customer experience with the solution.

In this presentation, Seth Gottlieb will discuss the types of business needs that are well supported by the leading open source web content management technologies. He will also describe the different types of open source projects, how to evaluate them, and what types of companies tend to succeed with them.

As stewards of our online messaging—whether through a website, email campaigns, advertising, blogs, et cetera—we are faced with a seemingly endless barrage of new technologies. 

If you’re responsible for delivering the web site for your organization - you’re being bombarded with requests for all kinds of new Web 2.0 Features.  But, really, what the heck are Web 2.0 Features?

And, just as important is our ability to deliver on the promise of Web 2.0. Don’t forget the overarching lessons of Web 1.0 circa 1997 to 2000: Don’t build technology just because you can (in fact, you shouldn’t really “build” technology ever again, but that’s a different presentation).

In this presentation we’ll unwrap the hype of Web 2.0 and discuss the realities of what these capabilities will mean for your organization.  We’ll look specifically at a few Web 2.0 capabilities and some helpful safety tips as you decide when and how to deploy them.