A lot of attention has been devoted to the subject of Web 2.0. Companies are exploring how to incorporate Web 2.0 concepts into both their internally and externally-facing systems. Some take an IT-centric approach, focusing on the underlying technology and its implementation. Others examine the potential business benefits through improved communication and collaboration. However, both perspectives frequently struggle to demonstrate ROI in the face of uncertain user adoption and control/security issues.

This session will examine Web 2.0 from a very specific angle: user experience in a business context, where “can do” meets “will do”.

The Web 2.0 paradigm is here to stay, giving users far more control to become content contributors and choose the types of interactions they want. Successful companies will have to design a useful, relevant, compelling user experience for both customers and employees.

In this keynote presentation Nadel will cover:

1. The evolution from Web-enabled self-service user control with Web 2.0


• Implications for design: navigation, search, content creation & publishing, page design, and brand experience
2. How businesses can profit from Web 2.0


• From customers (externally-facing sites)
• Openness & collaboration
• From employees (internal sites)—the hybrid intranet: structured social classification
• Knowledge management
3. The future: Pulling it all together

Everyone is excited about implementing Web 2.0 technologies and practices in their organization, but are you really ready to do that? One of the foundations of Web 2.0 is sound technology operations which allows rapid content and application development. Join Lisa Welchman as shows you how to measure your readiness for Web 2.0.

Specific topics include:

• Mapping Web 2.0 to business strategy
• Emplacing effective information governance
• Developing strong information product management practices
• And, measuring the effectivenss of your Web 2.0 products

Many organizations now rushing to adopt web content management systems (CMS) to support their online strategies think it’s the silver bullet to solve their website challenges and power content-rich applications. But web developers, online marketers and other front-line web pros speak of a fundamental disconnect in the promise of CMS vs. reality.

Industry research and harsh anecdotal evidence indicate that 50% or more CMS projects “fail” in some way: botched implementations, lack of user adoption, soaring project costs, launch delays, ruined SEO and more.

Therein lays the central tenet of The CMS Myth: When it comes to web content management success, it’s not just about the technology. In reality, CMS success hinges on your plan, your people, and your process behind your web content management initiative. CMS isn’t automatically a silver bullet.

This session is presented by two veteran web and CMS experts at interactive agency ISITE Design, and who also publish the blog CMS Myth. It’s designed to help individuals and their organizations understand the CMS Myth, overcome challenges, and learn key opportunities for content management success.

Attendees will walk away with concrete examples of CMS and website strategies to bring back to their organizations for immediate impact, ideas around web governance, information architecture, search engine optimization, social media, editorial process and more. And they’ll learn specific examples of how the Myth has played out in organizations, and how others have followed best practices to avoid common challenges. We’ll solicit best and worst practices from session participants, and use their experiences to illustrate key points of the Myth.

This session will benefit anyone whose job role touches the website, a CMS, or web marketing environment, whether they own a CMS or are planning a CMS deployment. We want to help you avoid those CMS landmines.

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’.

We read and hear so much about best practices for implementing and managing web content management systems in response to what we don’t read or speak about: projects that have gone horribly wrong. Bring your war stories for discussion and thoughtful analysis from our panelists on how to avoid projects that end with a plot twist.

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.

Attendees will gain an understanding of the 2008 Web Content Management marketplace. CMS Watch analyst, Jarrod Gingras, will lead a session explaining the categories of web content management system vendors and specific characteristics of vendors in each category. The session concludes with a look at the trends CMS Watch analysts have observed happening within the Web Content Management product landscape.

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.

Content administrators, those who are responsible for creating, editing, and publishing information in a content management system, are critical to the long-term success of any solution. This session highlights the core skills required for content administrators and presents a standard training outline for topics such as content modeling, publishing to multiple locations, version control, embedding and linking, date-sensitive publishing, and role-based content control. All skills will be illustrated in a live demonstration. The session will also cover best practices for training and organizational change management for content administrators.

The combination of XML and XQuery provided by XML Content Servers are helping organizations become more agile with their content and enabling them to dynamically deliver a wide range of content in context to the web. In this session you’ll learn about some of the key technical drivers behind XML Content Servers including a review of live customer deployments where agility was a key to success.

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.

Marketing dollars are moving rapidly from traditional media to the Internet. IDC estimates that $25 billion was spent on search and display advertising, in 2007, up 27% over 2006. However, the very nature of consumers’ online behavior dictates that marketers think in new ways if they are to maximize the return from their investments in online advertising. 

This presentation will examine how consumers are using the Internet and identify the ways in which advertisers can best market to them. This will also reveal the key metrics that marketers need to use as they plan and analyze their online marketing efforts so as to maximize their ROI.

The database used for this discussion will be comScore’s panel of 2 million people who have given comScore explicit permission to track the complete details of their online activities.