Session Details

Attend this informative keynote address to hear Salim Ismail, Head of the Brickhouse at Yahoo! demystify the third phase of the internet (after email and the web) and explore how Content Management will play a key role in this next generation of the web as as a platform for information and service delivery.

Rather than sending around links and HTML, this next phase of the internet will be all about routing relevant, device- and platform-independent, structured content to the right people, in the right places, in the right format, at the right time. Content Management combined with Consumer Generated Media (CGM) and lower latency provided by XML syndication promises to revolutionize how the internet works, with the biggest impact being within enterprises. Examples and case studies will be used to highlight the points made.

Content Management professionals need to understand this next generation of the internet as the web becomes a platform for content routing.

Is your company looking to undertake a major content migration project in order to implement a new content management solution and/or retire a legacy publishing tool? If so, you’re in luck – this session includes everything you need to know to make your project a success, from getting a handle on a possible “Wild West” content situation to stakeholder identification and management, migration strategy, success metrics, launch communications and more.

Site managers are often daunted by the prospect of migrating thousands of pages of content, possibly on different sites or platforms (and often not well organized), to a new content management solution. This is for good reason – a major migration project carries a high level of potential risk as well as reward. Careful planning, stakeholder management and organizational support are the keys to success for what can be a highly complex, time-consuming and expensive process.

This session covers the following aspects of legacy content migration projects:

Project planning

1. Stakeholder identification
2. Budget/time/resource definition
3. Technologies available
4. Roles and responsibilities

Content inventory

1. Volume
2. File types
3. Audience
4. Current location/structure
5. Quality/usefulness
6. Owner identification and skill level
7. Information architecture – future state
8. Content “buckets” based on user preferences
9. Card sorting
10. Surveys/usability studies
11. Navigation structure and terminology
12. Page structure
13. Content management system architecture

Migration strategy

1. Automated, manual or combination of both
2. Phases of migration
3. Microsite structures
4. File naming conventions
5. Future state content management

Workflows and access control

1. Content form and presentation templates
2. File storage requirements/restrictions
3. Process for user training, new site requests

Content standards

1. Appropriate use of templates, graphics
2. Web writing – voice and tone
3. Approval/oversight (publishing policy)

Governance

1. Home page management and maintenance
2. Publishing community management and oversight
3. Requests for new sites, templates
4. Budgeting, prioritization of projects
5. Strategy development and long-range planning

If you’re ready to learn everything you need to know to ensure a successful content migration project, this is the session for you!

The REALTOR.org content staff of 5 keeps the site up-to-date, leads the content efforts involved in redesigning site sections or the site’s representation of association programs, and serves as internal consultants for the rest of the association staff for all Web site issues.

• What can/should be automated with our CMS and what can’t/shouldn’t?
• What kinds of cultural changes are needed, and how do we go about making them?
• How to ensure that rules are applied effectively?
• How should we integrate content from various sources and various departments?
• When does a blog/podcast/audio/video make sense, and when does it not?

We have been successful from the beginning with some of our efforts and with others have had to revise our processes – or our expectations. We’ve learned from both these types of outcomes, and would like to share our learnings with others. Consolidating our content and applications from multiple platforms to one has helped us know what we know, solidify our approach and presentation, and evolve our standards to meet visitors’ expectations from the association.

Capitalize on the explosive growth of social media outlets and learn how to employ many of the time-tested best practices for social media optimization to generate additional brand awareness, website visits and product exposure for your online property at popular social news and bookmark services such as , Reddit, YouTube, MySpace, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, and popular sites like Techmeme, popurl and other blogs and news sites that syndicate social news.

Learn the difference between active SMO, passive SMO and Social SPAM. Master the necessary content development techniques that will generate attention (through traffic and incoming links) for your Web property. You’ll also learn how to design and develop pages that rank well organically in search engines and motivate visitors to act on your unique selling proposition once they arrive on your Web property.

This session will benefit those with an initial interest in social media optimization and intrigue those with more experience.

Social software and Web 2.0—notably blogs, wikis and social bookmarking—offer powerful business opportunities and an advantage to staying competitive on the internet. Prescient Digital Media’s VP, Client Development, Julian Mills, will outline the value of Web 2.0 technologies and their associated ROI potential. Web 2.0 refers to websites, products or services that are highly interactive, deep in dynamic data and harness collective intelligence. However, given that its proponents can’t fully define it, we shouldn’t be surprised by its struggle to enter common business parlance.

Web 2.0 offers a valuable resource for many companies. At a relatively low level of cost and effort, organizations are increasingly beginning to harness this valuable tool. Within certain circles, there is a passionate and wide-ranging discussion about how Web 2.0 technology will transform the way companies do business. While the debate won’t be settled soon, there can be no question that this technology is being embraced faster by consumers than by corporations. And that adoption pattern has significant implications, both for how technology enters the corporate environment, and for the competitive advantages early corporate adopters can gain.

This session will take the audience beyond the hype of Web 2.0 and deliver a jargon-free understanding of the concept and its enabling technology, specifically: Key technologies and applications enabling Web 2.0, including blogs, wikis and RSS; Statistics and examples of the emerging trends around Web 2.0, notably social networking; consumer generated media and enhanced communities of practice and management models required to harness the power of these new applications. In addition, the audience will leave with a concise checklist they can use to develop a tangible Web 2.0 action plan for their organization.

This session is geared towards a wide ranging audience from those well versed in Web 2.0, to those with little or no Web 2.0 knowledge, who are simply interested in what the hype is all about. Participants are sure to come away from the session with not only a firm understanding of Web 2.0 technologies, but also the associated opportunities involved with this exciting trend and how it can directly benefit your specific company or line of work.

Selecting a CMS vendor in today’s landscape can be an overwhelming task. Many vendors, old and new, are more than willing to show you their wares through online flash demos, brochures and web sites. All of them seem to have great features and functionality. Understanding your company’s requirements is paramount before any vendor selection should be considered. Failure to develop an integrated plan that accounts for an organization’s business, stakeholder and user requirements can ensure failure.

When choosing a CMS or any software product, functional user and stakeholder requirements must be clearly defined. A structured methodology needs to be invoked to not only ensure that the proper vendor is chosen, but that the product has a productive lifespan.

Prescient Digital Media VP, General Manager, Carmine Porco, will outline the necessary steps in the selection process. This includes:

• How to identify your requirements
• Functional capabilities
• Timeline and governance for the CMS

Participants will be taken through a jargon-free lesson on how execution of this stage is vital and can be done with relatively little energy and cost.

Attendees will learn:

• The value of planning ahead
• Interviewing users/stakeholders
• Creating and scoring requirements
• Meeting potential vendors

As with any new technology, an organization must understand its needs before deciding on a solution. This is even more important in the CMS field, what with all the new vendors and amalgamation of solutions there are today.

Individuals in all levels of an organization can benefit from participation. This session is geared towards a wide ranging audience including those well versed in CMS functionality and offerings, to those with little or no CMS knowledge or background. From CEO’s to IT staff, to content developers, to communications coordinators, to interested individuals, this session will be an extremely informative and valuable experience.

Participants are sure to come away from the session with not only a firm understanding of the necessary steps in the CMS selection process, but also the associated opportunities for cost savings and ROI potential.

This workshop for IT managers, web professionals and those thinking about implementing an online community for their organization, association or group.

This workshop takes a holistic view of collaboration and examines people, process and technology. We will track trends in collab-oration to see how today’s environment came about, as well as looking at scenarios for future technologies and their adoption. Virtual worlds, the semantic web and 3-D collaborative environments will be examined. A wide variety of virtual team spaces (VTS) and online community tools will be explored, including a number of open source environments and mash-up frameworks.

This workshop will also include best practices for groups and teams that work at a distance as well as the 10 rules for online communities and social network success.

A variety of exercises to determine collaborative alignment, team alignment, and strategies for getting around some common roadblocks in online community, as well as some strategies for driving traffic to communities as well as viral marketing will be explored.

Drupal recently became a winner of CNet’s Webware 100 award in the publishing category. Drupal is a Free and Open Source Web Content Management software and a web application framework.  It is highly used and has been included in the Google Summer of Code (SoC) project. The Google SoC reference’s Drupal as being the poster child for Web 2.0 community driven web site software.  I will describe and demonstrate some of the major features of the software as well as some of the limitations. Some specific features we’ll look at are the Content Construction Kit, Views, Taxonomy, and some Content Management functions.

Drupal adheres to some good content management practices. During the discussion we will look and modify some configuration areas for the more technical savvy as well as look at the content managers and content authors interfaces. Although, a computer isn’t required if you bring you laptop you will be able to log on to the site and manage content.

The value of content management systems for automatically repurposing content to multiple media has been discussed, debated and presented so many times in so many different vehicles that one assumes that there is nothing more to discuss—everyone is successfully doing it.  Not so! Repurposing content in intelligent ways for even one additional medium is not as straightforward as it seems. In some cases people still manually cutting and pasting content into their website pages.  This approach is clearly highly labor intensive and is very low tech but it provides control over the placement and editing process. The content fits the website design and navigation – although much of it may have been rewritten.

But most companies try to automate at least part of the process. Unfortunately, the results are not always optimal. Had they developed media specific metadata and, in many cases, media specifc content assets, they would have been more successful.  In this age of good full-text search and sophisticated web content management tools, the basics are often forgotten.  Tools are not solutions in themselves; they are only a part of a solution. 

In this workshop, we will examine the challenges for multi-purposing web content, ways that some content companies are addressing these issues and how industry metadata standards have evolved/are evolving to support their efforts. Then we will brainstorm about how new “web 2.0” technolgies and user-added metadata might play a role.

How does a global corporation like Siemens AG, with a massive accumulation of content assets and internal knowledge, effectively share its collective wisdom across a global, multilingual employee audience? Learn from one of Siemens’ billion-dollar divisions, which is tackling this challenge with a powerful sales and marketing portal that uses multiple Web 2.0 concepts in practical ways to serve an enterprise audience. 

This workshop-style session will provide the back story and process by which ISITE Design (a full-service interactive agency in Boston, MA and Portland, OR) created an enterprise enterprise portal. It will discuss how the site leverages tools and concepts including web CMS, Google search appliance, faceted search, user-generated content, folksonomies, online employee communities and collaboration, document management and content ratings – and make it available on six internal global sites in nearly a dozen languages.

Beyond highlighting functional and technical parts of the effort, this event will also solicit audience participation, commentary and self-reflection to help participants vision how a “Web 2.0-meets-the-enterprise” approach could provide a powerful answer to their content and knowledge management needs. It will also provide tactics to help participants overcome cultural and executive resistance while showing the value of such an approach.

Take-away lessons include:

• Usable ideas for applying Web 2.0 concepts inside your enterprise
• Practical uses of folksonomies to categorize corporate content/knowledge
• Tactics to help you gain executive support and pitfalls to avoid
• Ideas for rallying internal support from a resistant employee culture
• Best practices for weaving together multiple technologies (CMS, Search, etc.) to create a powerful solution
• Best practices for web content translation

With a few exceptions, enterprise web strategies are owned and executed by multiple operating units – lines of business, country marketing teams, product support teams, and IT departments, to name a few. The result is often a fractured user experience with inconsistent brand messaging, siloed content, and duplicative IT infrastructure and processes. While enterprises seem to unanimously recognize and reap value from their web platform and content investments, they have also suffered entropy within the system. Those who have invested in unifying (and simplifying) their web presence after they’ve let a thousand flowers bloom will testify that herding cats from corporate communications, channel marketing, sales, product teams, fulfillment, and geographies is at least half the battle.

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you’ve wished your business had the foresight ten years ago to organize operations and define processes with the now ubiquitous web platform in mind. Perhaps you’ve also observed the tectonics of the web begin to nudge, jolt, break apart, and now move about freely in the realm of mediated user experiences. One of the lubricants has been technologically simple techniques for delivering content anytime, anyplace – content syndication with RSS and other industry or specialized standards. Rare is an enterprise web site without an RSS feeds page. Uncommitted is a user who is not familiar with at least one content aggregator such as Yahoo!, NexTag, and Bloglines.

But there’s more to syndication than RSS subscriptions to editorial content. The traditional content syndication paradigm is now being applied to article marketing, product placement, and customer alerts – that is, syndication is a means to provide compelling but unintrusive anytime/anyplace communication with customers and partners throughout the lifecycle of the relationship. Focus on an enterprise syndication strategy today will keep your company afloat in the fluid world of digital experiences and information resources. It will also keep you out of the internal log jam where content publishers cross purposes and mix messages as they extend their content assets beyond the enterprise web site boundaries.

In this discussion, I will present an approach to develop an enterprise content syndication strategy, the corresponding roadmap to execute, and relevant case studies.

1. Primer on content syndication


• Business models: The content supply chain – creator, syndicator, aggregator, consumer
• End-users: Modes of consuming syndicated content
• Capabilities: Methods of syndicating content
• Key service providers today
2. Defining your enterprise content syndication strategy


• Understanding the current situation – Who is syndicating content in your company today? What methods and capabilities are employed?
• Coming together around a unified strategy – One size fits most, or a little something for everyone?
• The relationship to your media plan – Is syndicated content information or advertising?
• Defining your target content syndication network: A disciplined approach to managing your message reach
• Establishing processes and governance
• Measuring success
3. Case studies

Wikis are a popular tool in the technical community for collaborating in the development of web content. A wiki makes it easy for anyone to edit and create content. They have historically lacked many of the important features of content management systems such as workflow.

The next wave of wiki products are targeting some of the storage mechanisms used by content management systems, such as the Java Content Repository.  This provides opportunities in blended tools, enabling combined tools, and the integration of wiki and CMS systems. 

In this interactive workshop we will be working the opportunities and challenges presented by the new generation of Wikis and content management systems.  After some brief background on Wikis and the open standards that new wikis are being built around, we will be focusing on what this means for Content Management professionals, and how we can take advantage of the strengths of wikis in our systems. We will be focusing on how to best leverage the strengths of wikis for our content, and how they can form a part of our content authoring environment.

Traditional advertising, marketing and public relations is becoming an idea that is rapidly changing and becoming a thing of the past. Many companies both large and small are looking for ways to transition their campaigns to enter the online world and the new media we call the Web. With technologies racing to be the next big thing, companies are having a difficult time keeping up with emerging technology being used in marketing, advertising and public relations. This is a specialized area that cannot be covered by your IT department or anyone else in your operation.

With this new media and the new areas of technology, professionals are emerging to take on this new form of online campaigns. These professionals are keeping the pulse of the emerging technologies and blending those with a company’s marketing message, their advertising campaign and their way of dealing with the public. 

When looking to their own group of employees, companies now notice that their current assets do not include a blogger, a podcaster or someone that understand social networks. The only person they seem to find is that intern that happens to have a MySpace page. This is hardly the professional you would give charge to your communication department or someone you would want to give responsibility to produce the voice and image of your company.

People that should pay attention to this area of emerging technology and the people to help manage it are HR professionals, C level employees and their direct reports, small businesses wanting to compete in the larger world and anyone that wants to garner an online presence and stay ahead of their competition. This would also include anyone that wants to be the new leader in the marketing department, the advertising agency or wants to provide their clients or company an edge in the new PR.

Implementing a web content management system can be a long and painful process. By the time you send an RFP, review vendors, make a selection, refine requirements and specs, configure the tool, develop custom functionality and, well, everything else, you’re done. You’re really finished! When you hear “WCM” in the hallways you flinch. The last thing you want to do is “operate” the damn thing.

But who knows more about how the system works, where the ghosts are, who has the best grease to get the wheels turning? Face it; people will turn to you.

The last thing you want to do is just start operating. Unless you want to be the eternal go-to person for all things WCM you have to have a plan for day-to-day operations. Creating an operations plan can take weeks, maybe months of work but it will save you countless headaches (and not a few gray hairs.)

Your operations plan will boil down to three key components:

1. Services
2. Staffing
3. Setting Expectations

The services component is like it sounds: what value add will you provide to your WCM community (business and IT). That service set is birthed from clearly defining the processes around your web content management implementation. These processes will likely include the how you manage content (author, edit, review, approve, publish); how you maintain, modify and upgrade the WCM system; and processes around users, groups and security.
There may be other processes specific to your environment like translation or workflow to print.

Staffing is people. Who, besides you, will do what needs to be done? What business roles will they play? Who will these people report to? What skills do they have or need? How many are needed today and in the next 12-24 months?

Setting expectations is crucial to your success. Communication about your operations plan, at all its stages, will set the stage for how things will play out down the road. Buy in from all levels will work in your favor—from worker bees to executive management.

The way to establish your “cube cred” is to execute the operations plan. For example, when someone requests a new authoring template you fire off the processes to deliver that service:

• Request Intake/Triage Process
• Authoring Template Creation/Modification Process
• New Functionality Training Process
• Operational Reporting Process

It has be a simple formula to be successful. If your operations are bureaucratic, form laden and sluggish then WCM stinks, or at least it will acquire that odor in a short time.

Create enough process, provide enough service, staff enough people and provide enough reporting so that your operations are “enough” for your business. Most WCM users do not work where content is the core of the business. They’re bankers or lawyers or scholars or doctors or manufacturers. So, you’ll want lightweight, agile operations so the rest if the business doesn’t get distracted by the everyday operations of WCM.

Establishing a strong operations function for web content management makes the post-implementation job easier and quickly demonstrates the business value of this significant investment.

WCM is back, but now it’s multi-channel WCM.  Multi-channel requirements add both new success factors, as well as hazards that must be understood and overcome.  In this workshop, led by Percussion Software CTO Vern Imrich, you will learn how to identify and address these factors.

The workshop will begin with an analysis of several field examples, the success and failures in each, and the decisions made that led to them. These lessons will then be further explored in specific topical focus areas, such as the following:

• Usability—content authors in CMS environments have rapidly adopted “in context” editing to improve user adoption. But in a multi-channel system, do authors work in the context of a channel, many channels or in some new neutral channel environment?
• Content Reuse—where is “single sourcing” critical and where does it break down due to form factor, media type and creative concerns? And when single sourcing is limited, what can be done to maintain consistency and reduce workloads?
• Business Process and Lifecycle—simple concepts like “approved” or “expired” take on new meaning in a multi-channel world. Approved for one channel or for all?  What kinds of process automation and lifecycle management can be used to address these changes?
• Modeling and Template Design—decomposing Web pages into content components and templates can be tricky even for a single Web site. Can one model really be defined when this decomposition must apply to all the multiple channels that may be involved? And what happens when the inevitable new devices and channels hit the market?  How can a solid foundation be established that isn’t already obsolete by the time the system goes live?
• Overall Architecture—we all know about separation of content from format (presentation). But what about separation of channel presentation logic from customer experience logic? How do you ensure a consistent customer experience regardless of the channel they use?

In each of these areas, the focus will be to identify the key questions you need to ask, the pros and cons of the decisions you make, and the risk factors that are incurred. This is a “roll up your sleeves” workshop with extensive audience participation expected throughout, so come with your own questions, examples and concerns.

Plone is a flexible open source content management system that is being used by Motorola, Nokia, NASA, Disney, HP, eBay and the Free Software Foundation. PloneMultimedia is a suite of add-on Plone components which make it easy to publish audio/video files and generate podcast feeds.

This talk will demonstrate some of the unique features of PloneMultimedia and discuss case studies where Plone is successfully being used in an artist community to share music and video files.

When a user uploads an audio/video file to the Plone-based website, the metadata (album, artist, producer, etc.) is automatically extracted from the file. Not only does this save the user from tedious data entry, but this metadata is also indexed using Plone’s powerful search tool, so the content is readily searchable.

Plone has the concept of Smart Folders - saved searches that return a list of content based on criteria the site admin specifies. This makes it very easy for non-technical users to generate lists of multimedia content (i.e. all MP3s with genre ‘jazz’).

Using Plone’s built-in workflow engine, the multimedia content can be submitted for review, and approved by a moderator. This ensures that inappropriate user-generated content can be rejected instead of being inadvertently published.

Plone also has many collaborative features which help to foster participation and online community. Users can submit their own multimedia content and comment, rate and tag other users’ content.

Attend this session to learn more!

While blogs and wikis get all the attention, most organizations are still trying to get a grip on their “standard” web content management implementation. What is it that makes many web 2.0 applications a success, while most CMS implementations are so hard on their users? How can we use this to make these implementations work?

Adriaan will start off the discussion with a presentation on why a blogging cat is funny, but not very useful, while there’s a lot to be learned from the fact that it’s apparently so easy to blog even a cat can do it. After a couple of examples, you’re invited to join in on the discussion of what we can learn from web 2.0, and more importantly, how we can use this to our advantage in classic CMS implementations.

Is your web site ready to jump the chasm from static content to dynamic delivery? Find out how to bridge the gap with insight from recent Aberdeen Group research detailing strategies and technologies that enable the delivery of dynamic online content. We will explore methods for delivering contextually relevant content to new and returning users as they navigate their way through your online environment. We will also look at examples of 1:1 personalization of online content. Participants will be encouraged to share their stories for delivering dynamic content and methods for improving content relevance through segmentation and unique profile building. 

Content is more than just words on a page, it is the heart of the online customer experience. Content spans both IT and marketing groups, yet content creation, delivery and control are business process functions that influence revenue and belong in the hands of the Marketing department. According to two-thirds of companies surveyed by Aberdeen Group, content is owned and managed by their marketing teams. With the online channel quickly becoming the epicenter of the marketing universe, the success or failure of many marketing campaigns depends on the delivery and messaging of online content. Further, 62% of companies are delivering content to specific market segments and seeking ways to improve their effectiveness and delivery efforts. Contextually relevant content delivered in a dynamic fashion is a key differentiator for many companies leading their peers in online marketing efforts.

According to recent Aberdeen research, 47% of companies surveyed currently deliver static web content that rarely changes. Nearly one-third (32%) of respondents make continuous updates to their web sites by posting fresh content in chronological order. This leaves a balance of only 20% of companies that are currently executing on a truly dynamic content delivery model. Yet, dynamic content delivery is a strategy for 74% of Best-in-Class companies – which begs the question – how will they execute?

This roundtable discussion will demonstrate methods of dynamic content delivery that help companies to attain Best-in-Class status. Attendees will be encouraged to share their techniques and learn from Aberdeen’s Fact-Based research and their peers on methods for executing on dynamic content delivery models.

As businesses tirelessly search for new channels to influence customers, a new Internet buzzword is rumored to lead the next big marketing frontier. 

Web 2.0 is mentioned in boardrooms, referenced in IT venues and questioned by marketing departments still struggling with the implications of a Web log. Positioned as the best thing since the iPod, Web 2.0 is often mistaken for a formal set of next-generation Internet technologies for collaboration and information sharing.

Seldom with any definition, the phrase pops up everywhere. It has embedded itself into the mainstream vernacular with little understanding, while featured on the pages of Newsweek and Wired magazines. When Googled, 255 million hits return.

But what exactly is Web 2.0? More importantly, does it even exist?

Wikipedia, the widely recognized online e-reference guide, acknowledges that the term “lacks of set standards as to what ‘Web 2.0’ actually means, implies or requires. The term can mean radically different things to different people.”

The Economist recently subtitled an article: “If it’s cool, it’s probably Web 2.0.” That message captured the very mystery of the subject, while failing an attempt to define it. The term was initially coined by O’Reilly Media following the dot-com bust in 1999. O’Reilly recognized that while the commercial side of the Internet was sorting through its own rubble, the Internet still held powerful marketing potential.

With that, Web 2.0 was hatched as a nebulous catchall to identify the newest generation of Internet collaboration, such as the popular networking sites MySpace.com, FaceBook.com, Flickr.com and YouTube.com. 

For many people, the term has become a fallback to denote anything online deemed innovative. Wikipedia in of itself is considered Web 2.0, a site where anyone can enter a definition and allow others to edit the original entry.

Discussion groups and message boards first emerged as new media, but have evolved into Web logs, wikis, instant messaging and podcasting – or as many consider them, Web 2.0.  But the very notion that Web 2.0 is anything tangible clearly is fiction. 

True, it is a high-level description of a segment of the Internet, but trying to label such a dynamic and localized culture is like pinning the tail on art, literature or music in a single snapshot of time. It would be similar to renaming European Renaissance art “Art 12.0” back in the seventeenth century. This, however, would have likely left Chinese artisans from the Ming dynasty scratching their heads. 

If today’s online social networking is Web 2.0, then just what was Web 1.0?  Was there ever a Web 1.5? And who will be tasked to characterize Web 3.0? The term is nothing more than a vague attempt to promote a segment of Internet technologies by those in a position to benefit from it.

The Internet and its vast array of technologies have evolved into so many different things that trying to capture it all into a single definition, a sole thought or even a set of close standards is at best reckless. 

The Internet’s billion-plus users are constantly finding new ways to tell their story, connect with others and sell their wares in a variety of methods.  Grouping them all into a single category is impossible.

Nonetheless, there is a nugget of fact in the fiction: While inappropriately named, Web 2.0 does capture a new breed of social networking that is valuable to businesses and individuals. And, there will continue to be major innovations to the Web that will forever change the way individuals experience the Internet and how companies interact with their customers.

Taking a cue from household brands like General Motors, Ford, Microsoft and Maytag; many are increasingly using the Web to present and sell their products, as well as to talk to and listen to their customers – all in an attempt to influence buying decisions. And, with 172 million Americans online, no company can afford to overlook the Internet as a way to connect with its customers. 

The key is to find the right mix of interactive tools that fits your business to inform, brand and market to your customers while providing a forum for them to talk to you.  So the next time someone suggests stepping up your Web 2.0 capabilities, ask for details. Then ask, “What exactly is Web 2.0?”

Attend this session and you will learn:

• The future of websites and Web Content Management
• About the staying power of Web 2.0
• Why you might want to integrate Web 2.0 and Web Content Management strategies (even though they are counter to each other)
• How some organizations are putting this approach to use