Report from Gilbane Boston 2011

Nov. 29 – Dec. 1, 2011, Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel:  If you weren’t able to make it to the Gilbane Conference on web content management (WCM) at the end of November, or if you did, but want a recap of some highlights, we’ve got a high-level view.

Conference Themes

To summarize at the simplest level, Gilbane Boston 2011 was all about connecting more people with more context-aware content in more channels and more global locations.

The main themes of the conference were:

• Big Data is Here: It’s coming for certain enterprise businesses, and digital marketers as well as WCM practitioners in the enterprise need to learn how to structure it, connect to it, and manage it as part of e-business and marketing initiatives.
• Context is Key: As Magus’ Chris Lamb reported, The emergence of staggering amounts of big data in the marketplace calls for an examination of how “to add context to the idea of publishing more content to more channels in more languages.”
• Engagement is Primary, Not Secondary: It’s no longer enough to say, “If we build the content, they will come.” Since there’s no guarantee customers, consumers, and prospects will stay, creating engaging content that meets them at their levels of need and interest should be a significant—perhaps the number-one—goal of content creation for digital marketers.

Read and See More for Yourself

For greater detail:

• Read our recap of the Integrating Website and Mobile Strategy Workshop with Outsell’s Gilbane WCM Analyst Scott Liewehr and Big Blue Moose’s Chief Troublemaker Rob Rose.
• Review Chris Lamb’s roundup of the big ideas at Gilbane.
• See Peter O’Kelly’s slide presentation on Big Data.