Featured Speaker: Emma Hamer

Understanding The Impact Of Change: How To Become A Master Of Your Craft, Again (And Again)

Emma Hamer is a Certified Cordon Bleu Chef, and has a fabulous recipe for Poulet Farcie au Pomme. But that’s nothing compared to what she has cooked up for Web Content 2007. She also has 25 years of experience as a business manager, operational director, and career strategist. Though Emma never cooks out of the box , she certainly thinks that way. Emma knows that implementing a content management system in your organization involves more than just choosing the right software.

It almost always involves cultural change in the organization as well; change that includes defining new roles, using new tools, and forming new teams that need to work together effectively. Emma has spoken and written extensively on the topic, and at Web Content 2007, you can hear her best advice.

It’s important not to underestimate how moving to a Web content management system can affect the entire organization. Being realistic about the changes can help you plan for them and avoid dangerous (and costly) pitfalls. Emma believes the three most important words in CMS implementation are: Preparation. Preparation. Preparation. That’s why she works closely with Strategy A Consulting Group to provide organizations with the complete package when it comes to starting up your CMS; one that includes preparing the organization for all the changes involved.

Implementing a Web content management system can also create a shift in ownership of the content and perhaps a redefining of roles and responsibilities across business areas, including Finance, Marketing, and Information Technology, all of which are led by Senior Management. Emma’s recipe includes bringing together of all these areas—and bringing them together early—to address change-related issues. Her presentation at Web Content 2007 is bien cuit and of interest to everyone in your organization, especially management and marketing. Register for Understanding The Impact Of Change: How To Become A Master Of Your Craft, Again (And Again), on Day Two, part of the Content Development and Management track.

Summertime in Chicago Means Baseball

Chicago, or Second City, is home to two major league baseball franchises: the Cubs and the White Sox. Both are charter franchises of their respective leagues.

The Cubs play at Wrigley Field in the North Side Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago and are a National League team. Their pet names are “The Cubbies” or “the North Siders.” However, they’re also called “The Lovable Losers,” because they’ve gone almost a century without a championship.

The White Sox play in the American League Central Division, and their home park is the fairly new U.S. Cellular Field. They are known as “The Sox” or the “South Siders.” The Sox shocked the baseball world when they won the 2005 World Series.

Sounds like normal baseball trivia, right? But there’s more to Chicago baseball than meets the eye. Baseball in Chicago is cursed. That’s right , it’s cursed.

Take for example The Curse of the Billy Goat. It ‘s an urban legend that has been used as an excuse for the regular-season and post-season woes of the Cubs. Perhaps it explains the Cubs not winning a World Series since 1908. In 1945 a Greek immigrant named Billy Sianis brought his pet billy goat to the Series. After all he bought it a ticket. Eventually he was evicted from the game because of the goat’s putrid smell. He placed a curse of the billy goat on the Cubs and they lost the Series. He later sent a telegram Cubs owner Philip Wrigley asking “Who stinks now?” Many attempts have been made to break the curse.

The Ex-Cubs Factor seems to be a corollary to the Curse of the Billy Goat. Mike Royko first wrote about in 1990. The Factor asserts that since the Cubs played in the 1945 Series, any club headed into the post-season tournament with three or more former Cubs on its roster has “a critical mass of Cubness” and a strong likelihood of failure.

Prior to the 1990 World Series Royko jokingly predicted that the heavily-favored Oakland Athletics were “doomed” to lose the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. The A’s had several former Cubs on the roster. When the Reds stunningly won the series in a 4 game sweep, Royko repeated the story. In subsequent years Royko referred to it just before almost every post-season series. Its accuracy was proved.

Another Chicago baseball curse refers to the Black Sox Scandal, when the White Sox threw the 1919 World Series. The name “Black Sox” was given to the team from that year. Eight members of the Chicago franchise were banned from baseball for throwing games. The Curse of the Black Sox was born. They didn’t win a championship after that until 1959 or the Series until their win in 2005.

Conference Sponsor Spotlight: FatWire

FatWire Software provides Web Content Management and Delivery solutions for deploying persuasive Web sites and applications. What does FatWire mean when it says persuasive? Influencing the behavior of your organization’s key stakeholders – customers, partners, and employees – persuading them to take actions that support their goals and meet your business objectives. It must work. The list of clients is impressive, including Sony, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the European Space Agency. This list of accolades range from KMWorld’s List of 100 Companies that Matter to Content Management, to a positive rating from Gartner’s MarketScope.

Financial services, manufacturing, retail, media/entertainment, telecommunications, travel, healthcare, and government all use FatWire’s products, which are tailored to meet the needs of all sizes of businesses from the Bank of China to the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Perhaps KMWorld said it best when they developed the Top 100 list. “Vendors are embracing knowledge management—as we at KMWorld always have—as an attitude, not an application.”

The company was founded in 1996, so it has built a solid reputation on that attitude. Though it’s headquartered in NYC, there are offices all over: North America, the Pacific Rim, and Europe. FatWire’s Content Server platform gives its users complete control over the creation and presentation of content, and provides an architecture for content delivery and multi-site use. Unlike other Content Management products that focus only on getting content under control, FatWire’s solutions help organizations to put content to work by delivering highly-targeted experiences to customers, partners, and employees.

FatWire’s newest (Web 2.0) social computing modules include:

Blogging tools that make it easy to create new blogs in seconds by copying existing ones.

Easy to use forms that allow users to create forms pages or simply add fields to existing pages and capture and publish user generated information.

Tagging to allow site visitors to assign tags to items to make it easier for other visitors and themselves to find information.

E-mail and landing pages that enable users to design and send personalized e-mail marketing campaigns to drive new traffic to their sites and to provide information and marketing offers to customers.

And FatWire backs it all up with a comprehensive education and training program to bring all users up to speed quickly. I guess you could say they do it all. Including taking time to speak at Web Content 2007. Register for Kamal Kapur’s presentation, Relevancy: The Essential Ingredient to Exceptional Online Experience, on Day Two, part of the Tools and Technology tract. Kamal’s ten-plus years of hands-on engineering experience and his unique understanding of the typical web content management business user, helps him deliver the persuasive and scalable tools that are needed in today’s marketplace.

Featured Speaker: Chris Baggot

An integrated Strategy for Online Marketing: Email & Search

Chris Baggot knows, that for most people, money is hard to come by. So when a company wants us to spend it on its products, there are certain things we want from them in return. First, we want good–personalized–customer service. Whether it’s now (when we buy), or later (when we need something), we demand it.

Getting customers to spend hard-earned dollars on your products is tricky. It takes a mixture of persistence and finesse. And in this new climate, for the first time in years, the little guy’s personal service is heavy competition against the big guy’s purchasing power.

With the playing field leveled, how does the big guy who offers 90,672 door locks compete with the guys who will still show you how to use the red nozzle straw on your WD-40? How does the big guy engage the customer by delivering personal attention the way the little guy in your neighborhood does?

Chris says there are two basic aspects of successful relationship marketing–beginning a relationship and maintaining that relationship to the mutual benefit of both the organization and its constituents.

And he should know. He’s been helping his clients do that for several years. He founded Exact Target, a company ASPnews calls “one of the world’s 25 leading service providers for the ASP, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Utility Computing industries.” To build and maintain customer relationships it’s important to know the difference between the customers you’ve had for a long time and the ones that happened to stop in on the way to little league practice. Then engage those customers–and keep them engaged–by personalizing information to each of them in a way that reminds them who you are and what you can do for them.

But how do you do that? Chris knows, and he has written the book on it–literally– Email Marketing by the Numbers. Why Marketing by the Numbers? Throwing your money at a campaign that may or may not turn potential customers into loyal buyers doesn’t get you very far. But measurable ROI based on measurable conversion rates of your marketing campaign does. And Chris will tell you it’s so easy anyone can do it.

Chris has taken time out from building his next success, Compendium Software, to speak on Day Two of Web Content 2007 at An integrated Strategy for Online Marketing: Email & Search. It’s part of the Tools and Technology track. These are some tools you’re gonna want to use, so don’t miss it.

The Architecture of Chicago

Chicago, the city of the big shoulders, is also the city of the great architecture. It has long been associated with some of architecture’s most important names: Sullivan, Wright, Holabird and Root, and even Pablo Picasso, who gifted a famous and mysterious sculpture to the city, though no one knows why since he was not a frequent visitor. Indeed, many buildings built in a variety of styles grace the downtown area.

Some say the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 leveled the playing field , so to speak; even that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow did more for American architecture than any dozen 19th century designers. Since most of the buildings in the downtown area were destroyed by that fire, Chicago’s buildings are noted more for their originality and design rather than for their antiquity. In the arena of world-class architecture, Chicago is relatively young. Many of the first modern skyscrapers were built in the city.

Chicago even has its own school – the Chicago School of Architecture- where steel frame construction and large plate glass usage was pioneered. Louis Sullivan, the skyscraper pioneer, designed buildings with an emphasis on their “verticality.” Frank Lloyd Wright, a student of Sullivan’s, and his Prairie School influenced both building and furniture design. And the list goes on…

From 1974 until 1998 the Sears Tower in Chicago was the world’s tallest building. Depending on which category of tall one refers to: Tallest tower, tallest spire, tallest roof height, tallest antenna? Of these, the Sears Tower remains the tallest to the top of the antenna(1730 ft.). The Taipei 101 in Taiwan wins on tallest to the architectural top (1671 ft.).

What ever you think about that, there’s no denying that Chicago architecture is something to write home about. The list of famous and must-see buildings is a long one:

Farnsworth House,The Arthur Heurtley House, Leiter Building, The Marquette Building, the Merchandise Mart, Nathan G. Moore House, The Robie House, The Rookery, Sears Tower, Frank W. Thomas House,William Winslow Residence, The Water Tower, The Old Colony Building, Wainwright Building, Frank Lloyd Wright Home, and the Frank Lloyd Wright Studio.

Maybe it would be best to check out a guided tour. Chicago Line Cruises offers a 90-minute architectural tour along Chicago’s winding water arteries. Included in the $30- price tag is a Starbucks latte. Yum! Chicago Architectural Walking Tours sponsored by the Chicago Architectural Foundation touch on various types of buildings and neighborhoods. Or, just for fun, check out these Art Deco and Prairie School on line tours.

Conference Sponsor Spotlight: Hot Banana

You heard it hear before: Content is King. Everyone knows it, but Hot Banana believes it. Hot Banana wants you to get your Web content management system up and running. So much so, they offer services such as Web site implementation, design, SaaS hosting, and optimization to help you get started with as little interruption or delay as possible.

They will help you control your content, but they aren’t control freaks. So you can choose Web content management through Software as a Service (SAAS) or licensed software solutions.

We all know how long it takes to implement a new or revised Web site. Getting the right infrastructure in place internally—especially if you want to include content management as part of the plan–is difficult and time consuming. Hot Banana will host your site using SAAS so you can go live right away, while your company moves toward bringing your Web site in-house.

And if you happen to be a worrier and fear that off-site hosting of your mission critical Web site seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Stop worrying. Your data is a lot safer being hosted in a secure data center than your mad money is tucked away in your underwear drawer. First, these data centers use high-tech security features like biometric palm scanning for identification, armed guards, video surveillance—which is also backed up off-site— and complete disaster recovery plans that include off-off sight digital vaults.
Hot Banana also uses a point of presence (a physical location where multiple telecom companies’ data traffic flows into the country creating redundant connections) backed up with diesel generators for power-source security.

Wait, there’s more. Hot Banana is also a Marketing Automation platform perfect for capturing, qualifying and transferring leads, making it possible for you to maximize Web site traffic with marketing campaigns; capture leads using landing pages and Web forms; convert leads into qualified prospects; and transfer those leads to a customer relations management platform such as salesforce.com.

Join David Terry from Hot Banana at Web Content 2007 as he shares his Marketing Automation expertise at his Day One presentation, Web Site Optimization and Automation to Maximize Lead Generation and Conversion, part of the Content Design and Access tract.

The Magnificent Mile –One of the Great Avenues of the World

What began as an Indian trading post in the mid-19th Century has become one of the world’s premier shopping destinations.  Chicago’s Magnificent Mile is resplendent with great shopping, first class dining, and top-notch hotels.

Twenty-two million people visit the Magnificent Mile yearly.  The Magnificent Mile district features mature trees, flower-filled medians, over 40 parkway gardens, and two museums.  All of them combining to complement the unique architectural beauty of the city.  It is truly a unique space.

Flourishing within a one-mile area of tree-lined streets, from the Chicago River north to Oak Street, just a few yards away from Lake Michigan, visitors can experience:

Department and Specialty Stores
With 3.3 million square feet of retail space the mile contains 460 stores. Elite retail establishments such as Bloomingdale’s, Lord & Taylor, Marshall Field’s and Nordstrom’s can more than keep you off the streets. Chicago also has a Neiman Marcus, known for it’s “the sky’s the limit” Christmas catagloue—literally.   The 2006 catalogue featured a $140,000 BMW and a charted trip for six to space for a mere $1.7 million.

On the Mile unique experiential retail offerings include: American Girl Place, The Official NASCAR Store, Niketown, and The Lego Store.  Remember that episode of I Love Lucy, where she worked in the chocolate factory?  You can get a “taste” of that experience  at Hershey’s Chicago where you can be a chocolate factory worker for a day. Or perhaps you are in need of a $1,200 moisturizer; Saks Fifth Avenue is where you’ll find one.

Boutiques
Unique boutiques line the Mile, including Tails in the City, where you can find designer doggie dresses, hair accessories, and bling for your bow-wow.  World class shops include Cartier, Salvatore Ferragamo, Armani, Hermès, Anne Fontaine, La Perla, Tiffany’s, Ermenegildo Zegna. Plus, many more internationally recognized names,   Look out Rodeo Drive.

Dining
The Mile hosts 275 restaurants including the critically acclaimed: Spiaggia, Tru, and the Signature Room at the 95th (floor of the John Hancock Center, that is).  A truly international representation of cuisine greets you.  From fondue to curry, there’s a something to satiate your appetite.

Hotels

Fifty hotels cater to almost any demand.  They include four-and five-diamond hotels such as: the Conrad, the Ritz-Carlton, the Peninsula, the Four Seasons, and the Park Hyatt.  If the (four-star) conference hotels aren’t up to your standards, how about staying in one of these hotels where the guest list is so exclusive, even we couldn’t get it.

So, if shopping or dining is your bag, the Magnificent Mile is your venue.  For more information on the Magnificent Mile contact the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association (GNMAA) @ 312-642-3570. Or sign up for the newsletter.
 

Featured Speaker: David Esrati

The Blogzilla Report: Fact, Fiction, Fear: the monster of the Internet explored 

What’s in a name?  Everything. A rose does not smell as sweet if it’s called a dirty sock. It just doesn’t. And according to David Esrati, the word blog is a misnomer.  It’s the great misunderstood monster in the room, and he’s here to alleviate your fears of it.

Look, David was a member of a US Army Special Forces team. If he can be dropped in the middle of a desert with nothing but a sharp stick and a 110-pound backpack full of rocks and survive, rest assured he’s not afraid to say what he thinks. And he thinks using blog tools to manage your web content is the only way to build an effective community of users (sometimes also known as people who buy things).

David also owns his own ad agency, The Next Wave, and like he says, his Special Ops training has given him the problem solving skills to solve any problem you may have with advertising. So it makes sense that he started his own company from scratch. Along with offering ad services, his company teaches hands-on  seminars called Websitetology, which teaches you how to build an effective web site—it’s not blogging, but websitetology does use a blogging tool.

Confused?  That’s okay.  His plan is to make Google your new best friend. The key is getting content to the web fast, and if you are still using a tired old static web site, you are falling behind. David can help you get caught up, and he never gets lost. So he can lead you through the murkiness to the clear way to build a community of loyal customers who want what you have, and will keep coming back for more.

So stop wasting money buying keywords (that’s so Web 1.0), and start producing valuable content for your customers using David’s advice.
 
You can hear him speak on Day One at Web Content 2007; Tools and Technologies track. Who couldn’t use a best friend like Google?

Conference Sponsor Spotlight: Sitecore

Web Content 2007 sponsor, Sitecore Inc., offers a CMS pricing structure based on customer needs. Hmmm. Why didn’t someone think of this before? Instead of pigeon-holing customers into buying something that’s too small or too big for their needs, Sitecore offers corporate, professional, and small business editions of its content management systems. And here’s another cool part. You can upgrade them. So as your business grows, so can your system–without having to buy a new system altogether.

What used to be considered value-add features, such as newsletters, portals, RSS feeds, and friendly editors, are now must-haves. And Sitecore has them, so you can too. Good thing, because the impressive list of organizations who are using Sitecore products is growing, and we don’t want you to miss out.

Check out Sitecore online (where it’s obvious they practice what they preach) or at the conference. And don’t miss Jason Crea’s presentation Driving Effective Email Marketing With Web Content Management. Crea, Director of US Partnering and Alliances for Sitecore, will teach attendees how content management systems can help improve email marketing campaigns.

Book Flight and Hotel Now

If you haven’t planned your travel to Chicago for Web Content 2007, it’s time to get on it.  One way to make it easier to search for your flights, hotels and car rentals might be through Kayak.com.  This site searches all the major travel sites for the best deals. So instead of looking at Hotels.com, Travelocity.com, CheapTickets.com, or individual airlines, Kayak does all that for you. It’s a search engine, so the information comes to you. You don’t have to go find it.  Smart, eh?

Flying to/from Chicago
While you are researching, keep in mind there are two airports in Chicago, O’Hare International and Chicago Midway. Both are owned and operated by the City of Chicago, and both offer multiple flights from major cities. Just make sure you are going to and from the right airport. 

Both are about the same amount of time (about 45-60 minutes during rush hour and 30 minutes mid-day and evenings) and distance from downtown. A cab ride will cost you about 25-50 bucks depending on traffic and actual commute time. The Gary/Chicago airport also supports Chicago, but be prepared for a longer drive and a fair amount of construction going in to the city from there. Count on using O’Hare or Midway if possible.

Hotels
As you probably know by now, the Conference is at the USB Tower Conference Center and the designated Conference hotel is just two blocks away.  Hotel Allegro (pet friendly) has rooms starting about $239 a night for a standard queen room. Looking for rooms on Kayak.com with a check-in date of June 17 and check-out date of June 20, we found the hotel offered the best price when compared to Orbitz and Cheaptickets on Kayak.

Another recommend nearby hotel is Hotel Monaco. The same is true. The hotel is offering the best rates at about $269 for a king deluxe room. The Hyatt Regency Chicago is located just down the street at Wacker and Michigan, but the rooms are a little steeper, about $239 for Sunday night before the conference, but jump up to around $430 Monday and Tuesday nights.  All have wireless internet in rooms and throughout the hotel. All have nice TV’s (Shame on you if you watch TV while staying in one of the greatest cities in the US.), hairdryers, irons, all the usual stuff. But bonus amenities vary from fuzzy robes, to spas, to Aveda products in the baths.

In the one-mile area surrounding the USB Conference Center, Kayak lists eight other hotels, all ranging from about $240 to $400 dollars per night.  So choose carefully to find the best deal with the amenities you desire. 

Use this Special Values Card, offered through the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau, to see if you can get discounts on hotels, restaurants and other things while in town.  Just check out the list of discounts or ask when you book your room, rent your car or sit down to dine. But most of all, have fun while in town and learn all you can while you have a chance to hear what’s on the minds of the web content experts at the conference.