Content Strategy

C1. Track Keynote: What it Takes to Build a Modern Customer Experience

Everyone pays lip service to the power of today’s customers and the need to more fully and meaningfully engage with them, but not every organization follows through. The first step is to make sure you are truly listening to your customers, and not assuming you know what they want and need. AIA’s Kevin Novak takes a critical look at what it means to actively listen to your customers, why some organizations fail to do so, and why it is so important to crafting and maintaining a successful digital experience.

T4. Personalization, CMSs, and Content Strategy

Personalization is on everyone’s checklist – organizations “require” it, consultants recommend it, and vendors “provide” it. Even with a lot of technology available, it is hard, and even harder to do it right. In this session we have two “how to” presentations. One speaker covers what to expect from CMS systems as well as strategic and operational issues organizations need to work through. The other presenter describes a content strategy and technique for a managed implementation of personalization.

E4. Ways to Increase Reach and Collaboration

Sveta Kouznetsova: 8:30 – 9:00, Accessible Content: Quality Captioning and Transcription as Universal Design
To attract a wider audience, you need to make your aural information - audio, video, events - accessible via quality captioning and transcription. It is not necessarily for those with hearing difficulties. It also helps foreign language speakers, remedial readers, individuals with learning disabilities, those in noisy or quiet environments, and many more. Just being able to hear is not enough. Businesses would also benefit from captioning as it improves user experience and SEO of their aural information and attracts more loyal customers. Sveta will dispel common myths about deaf and hard of hearing people, share personal experiences, and discuss case studies of good quality captioning that goes beyond universal access and can be enjoyed by anyone and anywhere regardless of hearing abilities. Come and check the presentation signed by the deaf speaker, voiced by interpreters, and open captioned in real time. Let’s think outside of the ears! 

Donald DePalma: 9:00 – 9:30, Can't Read, Won't Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites
If you read English natively, you have enjoyed the best of the web since its creation. Content in this language has dominated the medium for nearly two decades while companies have catered to English-speaking markets and the enormous spending they generate. However, many corporations realize that billions of people don’t read English at all or well enough to make buying decisions, so they’re increasing the amount of information that they offer in other languages. As they reach out to global prospects, the big question is: If they localize their websites, will more buyers come? If they translate product literature, will they sell more? How much will localization help them grow? Common Sense Advisory surveyed consumers in 10 non-English-speaking countries to test the hypothesis that companies can increase their sales by localizing their products and websites. In this presentation, Dr. DePalma summarizes the results of this 2014 survey, analyzes the linguistic preferences of consumers, and discusses the impact on their online behavior.

P5. The Future of Advertising Panel

Advertising used to be simple - well you could always make bad choices - but keeping up with all the ways advertising technology and channels are changing is enough to make some marketers yearn for early retirement options. Last year we looked at Ad Exchanges, Data Exchanges, Real Time Bidding (RTB), Demand Side Platforms, and Supply Side Platforms. Our panel this year will look at a number of topics including the use of ethnography and digital anthropology to craft relationship-building ads, multiple ways to manage cross-platform advertising, and how content strategists can help create user-centric, not marketer-centric experiences.

T6. Big Data and Customer Engagement

In this session we focus on what it actually means to use huge amounts of data to better engage customers. Wesley Moore from Teradata explains what infrastructure components need to be in place for data-driven marketing. ShopAdvisor's Peter O'Kelly then takes us through the details of how they are currently using big data, what they’ve learned about interpreting the data, and how to guard against misinterpreting it.

T8. How to Improve Findability

Efficiency (speed), accuracy and comprehensive results have long been measuring units by which search engines and search within applications have been judged for findability. Human factors and design play into the efficiency of any search experience. Algorithms determine the validity (relevance) of items retrieved for a given query, and they also determine how complete results (recall) are against a given corpus of content. Search experts who seek to implement search engines for relevance or recall also need quality data to make tuning decisions.

Our speakers in this session will give us three views of what it takes to improve design and content for findability. They will speak to points of usability, as well as how high quality metadata supported by specialized taxonomies, contribute to those improvements.