Filed under WebContent Conferences

One of our experiments with the Web Content Conference was to video record all of the breakout sessions. Admittedly, we hadn’t completely planned out what we would do with the content once we had it. But we knew we had only one chance to capture the live event  Our annual conference is always a work in process so, well, we’d figure it out. When set free, content finds its own level. We had all the time after the conference to consider how to free it.

Content Delivery Network

Throwing these videos up on our YouTube or Vimeo account would’ve been easy, free and social. But our videos were too long for these services.  Instead we are storing the videos using Amazon  Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Cloudfront as our content delivery network.  Because this is streaming media, we’re using  Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP). These services charge for storage and bandwidth.

Delivering  Content

Once the video was uploaded, we started posting the videos individually to our company blog. For each we wrote a short summary and then embedded the video into the post. Because we found that each video actually loaded on the page when the blog was accessed, page load times were unacceptably slow. So we used the “more” feature in our WordPress blog and embedded the video “below the fold”. Now the blog visitor can read the short summary and only when they click the “read the rest of this entry” does the video load. Not perfect, but good enough. And we were learning.

Web Content 2010 Video in a branded wrapper and embed code provided

Packaging the Product

We went back to the drawing board and created a friendlier “wrapper” for the video, branding the video frame with video session title, presenters name,  company logo and a prominent start button. To encourage viral distribution we also included the embed code which brings the video, the quick start usability and branding assets. Now any person can lift the video and place it wherever they’d like.  We created a video page on the conference website. Pretty cool.

Content Lives

Web Content 2010 was a great event. And as most who attend conferences know, the presentations are rich chum for stimulating dialogue among the attendees. There is tons of great actionable  information in these videos.  Special thanks to our presenters for giving us the permission to video and release their valuable information.  If you were unable to attend the Web Content Conference and/or web content is your thing, watch the videos. And pass them on. We’ve given you the tools.

Equal parts success story and cautionary tale, veterans of web-based content management Kelly Tetterton and Fred Salchli explain the process of building an online web-first platform for renowned newspaper Christian Science Monitor, and the issues it raised. Delving into the ideas and assumptions each team brought to the table, they show how the human, real-life factor involved in large-scale content migration and CMS implementation can influence as much, if not more than more technical considerations.

In the end, a widget can’t fix everything, but checking your assumptions, doing your research, and above all clear communication can not only launch your website, but help everyone walk away satisfied and happy.

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Sonny & Doug kick off the Drupal Workshop at Web Content Conference

Delivering Drupal, in a BIG way! Some attendees of the 4th annual Web Content Conference took advantage of an amazing, educational opportunity via a POWERHOUSE team of Drupal experts. The session titled, “A Drupal Immersion for Non-Profits and Small Businesses,” was a well attended, high octane experience for all.

Sonny and I started off with a brief overview of Drupal. Sonny discussed Drupal basics, the meaning of OpenSource software, and Drupal as a business tool and business model. I gave Drupal it’s human touch as I waxed poetic about Drupal as a community of people. I mentioned how often we get together in large groups and stressed how important it is to us to educate each other.

After that Jeff Eaton took the stage to WOW the audience with an impressive showing of well built and often famous Drupal sites. Whitehouse.gov received top billing as did the New York State Senate site and Sony and Warner Brothers. Jeff also showed off some impressive magazine and newspaper sites. We were all Inspired!

Next came Ryan Szrama to show off the ecommerce side of Drupal. Ryan revealed functionality that will be available as Drupal Commerce becomes a reality when Drupal7 is released within a few months. Emanuel London armed the audience with a powerful tool that he stated is underused. He showed how the CiviCRM system integrates with Drupal to expose tremendously powerful and useful features. Lastly Josh Ward took us through an SEO trip making sure that the attendees knew that any site built in Drupal CAN be Search Engine Optimized easily. Josh stressed that Drupal has the technology and the tools but that it does take effort on the part of the stakeholders to use the tools to get the best results for their site.

I spoke with many of the attendees at lunch to get a sense of what they received from the small army of Drupalers on the stage. What I heard was that the people enjoyed the very well rounded expose of Drupal. Everyone heard a few things they already knew but they heard far more that they had never heard before. The SEO portion was the most common source of new information for the attendees. Jeff’s stellar list of Drupal sites shocked some people who had no idea that the music industry was in love with Drupal. I got a lot of questions about CiviCRM.It’s clear to me that some more training is needed on that topic.And lastly, few of the people that I spoke with had need for Drupal to act as an Ecommerce platform. The few that did express the need  said that adding payment processing would be a future addition to their projects and that Drupal-Commerce looked like it would satisfy their needs completely.

The old saying goes, “Always leave the audience wanting more.” Well, we accomplished that. Many attendees would have loved to spend hours going in to the backend of Drupal and showing off the admin screens and configuring settings etc. A Site-Building workshop is what they’re asking for. And this makes sense too. Some of these small institutions, nonprofits, clubs, associations, etc. are not going to hire a firm for $50K to build the site. They want to hire someone to train them how to build their own. I explained to one person that I have done just this very thing and that, with the exception of a few custom modules, the client was able to build the project herself. I even heard a phrase for this kind of business model. I heard it called “Product Management.” I wonder if we’ll see more and more of this as time goes on. I think we will.

Pick up your SF DrupalCon Sticker at our exhibit

Like so many shops who use Drupal, we are gearing up for what will be an awesome DrupalCon in San Francisco next week. We’re sending 4 people this year including Drupal Trainer – Doug Vann [me], CTO Fred Salchli, Director of Developers – Tony Rizzo, and Director of Internet Marketing – Sonny Cohen. Our sponsorship of the event provides us a table in the exhibitor area where we will be handing out hip stickers that we designed especially for DrupalCon and you can preview it here.

Sonny and I return from San Francisco and 10 days later find ourselves presenting at the 2010 CMSexpo. Last year Sonny was an attendee of my Drupal KickStart session at the CMSexpo. This year he brings his marketing prowess and salesmanship to the stage to reinforce how Drupal is a solutions provider. Together we will give the audience a very well rounded understanding of the technical and practical aspects of the role that Drupal plays in business and technology.

While the rest of May affords a breather, June picks up the slack with 4 events! The WebContent Conference is back for 2010. Two days of multi-track sessions are designed to help organizations increase the effective utilization of the web for their missions and goals. Whether you’re large or small, non-profit or for profit, Chicago based or elsewhere this event is a concentrated dose of practical wisdom from nationally known experts in their fields. Visit the WebContent2010 website to see the phenomenal speaker and topic list. As the website boldly states, “With a solid content strategy and the right platform, you’ll always deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time.”

From there things start going South; as in South Carolina. The SouthEast LinuxFest is building on the wildly popular event they pulled off last year. A bigger venue, more speakers, and something new. This year the organizers have asked me to put on a DrupalCamp right on top of their event. On Sunday the 13th we will have two of their large meeting rooms and 6 sessions in each room. When I made this public I received an instant flood of emails of people wanting to present a session. It will be good for the Linux and Drupal communities to hang out with each other and celebrate free and open source software.

Eleven days later we move slightly up the East-coast to Washington DC for LibraryCamp-DC. It is no coincidence that we’re doing this the day before the giant national event held yearly by the American Library Association. Duo Consulting is proud to say that we built the ALA website some time ago. We have also built a number of local library sites and continue to work on others. We see the library market as a very special group who has large communication needs and often restrained budgets. We’re happy to be able to utilize Drupal with it’s low-cost implementation and rapid deployment to satisfy the needs of this very important group. We are sponsoring the camp by sending me out to speak. I’m also helping to organize the event details.

Rounded out the first half of the year we have the 2010 Chicago DrupalCamp. Playing off of last year’s HUGE success, the organizers have found a larger venue with a more central location. The details have not been announced yet, but the anticipation is high with many very excited to have the event back in to the summer months. A side note, this years Chicago DrupalCamp is, in some ways, a precursor to the 2011 DrupalCon Chicago! The same event organizers are also planning what is likely to be the largest Drupal event ever for the Spring of 2011.

While San Francisco is raising the bar for DrupalCon attendance (2674 signed up – so far!), it is widely speculated that Chicago’s Midwest location will provide an easy go-to location for people all over North America. Even some Europeans have commented that a flight to Chicago is more appealing than a flight to the West-coast. Will the record be broken? We shall see! One thing’s for sure. You will see Duo Consulting there!

Now in its fourth year, the Web Content Conference continues to provide some remarkable value.

If you go back 4 years, when Michael, a/k/a the boss, proposed the Conference, I was the first to provide my unqualified support by calling the conference a stupid idea (more emphatic adjectives removed). Today, I continue to eat crow. In spite of my involvement with website content development, at that time I didn’t appreciate either the body of knowledge surrounding content management or the evolution in web content management systems. Clearly, others did as that conference and each successive one have played to an SRO crowd of attendees.

Today, the Web Content conference continues to provide an effective forum for taking a snapshot of what is happening in website content. Unlike DrupalCon or CMSExpo, Web Content 2010 takes a more strategic view of content management. Attendees are those who are responsible for content creation, website administration and business strategy. Increasingly people who perform online community management are also drawn to the conference because of the strong social media component and the understanding that social media is content. When you put the crowd of about 150 in a room together, as we do for some sessions, meals and hospitalities, the mix of disciplines generates some interesting buzz.

What really makes Web Content Conference glow is the program and the talent that fills it. The one-day session-based conference is preceded by a day of more in-depth workshops. For example, a workshop exploring the entire business case for online content management will feature specialists in online commerce, search optimization, client relationship management and web content management and focusing on not-for profits and small business.  And this year we’ve attracted Kristina Halvorson, founder and president of Brain Traffic,  to do an entire afternoon workshop on Content Strategy as well as offer a shorter session during the main conference. Many of the presenters like Seth Earley and content marketing evangelist, Joe Pulizzi,are alumni of prior conferences and are back, quite literally, by popular demand.

Web Content 2010 is offering workshops on Monday June 7 and a full conference on Tuesday, June 8. To accommodate attendee’s schedules and interests, various participation packages are available.

It is rare for a day to go by that we don’t receive some kind of inquiry about Drupal. In fact, in response to the inquiries, our lead Drupal developer, Doug Vann, published a Drupal-related blog post just last week. In his post he addressed the question, “What’s All the Buzz About Drupal”

So we’ve decided to offer a hands-on Drupal Training Workshop to dig a little deeper into the question of why Drupal is getting a lot of buzz.  Let me emphasize right away that this workshop is aimed at website administrators and marketers who are NOT deeply technical. Web developers who are technical but want to also understand the business case for using Drupal would also find this workshop useful. I took a very similar course from Doug over the summer and found it to be a great way to orient myself to Drupal. And this course has the advantage of also being hands-on.

We think that some of the likely candidates for this workshop include people who are in the following situations:

Leverage Social Media
Drupal is social publishing software.  Chances are you are encountering challenges integrating social media with your present content management software. You can find out if Drupal might take you closer to where you want to be.

Micro Sites
We know that a complete corporate website overhaul may not be in the cards for you today, but you may have some business initiatives you want to pursue online.  When budget and timeline are significant constraints, Drupal may offer an implementable solution. Our client, the Lake County Forest Preserve District just launched a simple Drupal microsite on a very short leash. Not only was the outcome successful, but they have a Drupal site in which they might explore capabilities in anticipation of some future re-development of the District’s main website.

Dated, Proprietary or Non-existent Content Management System
Perhaps you are still managing your website using either page-based content management systems like Adobe’s Contribute or just making changes in the HTML website code. The Drupal CMS might provide a relatively easy evolution of your website to something considerably more powerful and requiring fewer technical skills to manage.

I suspect I haven’t captured the scenario of everyone who might be interested in migrating their website to Drupal. For an investment of your morning on October 13, 2009 and $40, you can assess your website problem against this solution. It could be a very efficient way to gain clarity on your requirements as well as evaluate this particular option.

If you are interested in one of the 18 seats available, you can register here.

You know you’ve been there. You open your email inbox only to find a string of emails, replies and forwards regarding something as trivial as a meeting agenda. And because everyone involved has made a change to the original document you sent out, you hunt through trying to find the most recent copy because you’re in charge of the meeting and it starts in…5 min! Ugh.

There must be a better way, you say. And there is. Stewart Mader of Future Changes and author of wikipatterns gave a keynote presentation at the Web Content Conference this morning showing us how wikis can save the day where more familiar tools like email have failed us.

Many of us are drowning in email. What was once a “cool new thing” that made communication faster and easier is actually making us less efficient today. We have come to rely on it as our sole communication tool, when in fact there are better tools for collaboration, documentation and knowledge sharing.

If you’re new to wikis – or you think a wiki is an encyclopedia – don’t be discouraged. A wiki is simply an editable Web page. Start with a pilot wiki and host a workshop to get others in your organization acquainted with using a wiki. Once you get others in your organization to adopt wikis, as Stewart says, you can stop getting started on things and instead “get done.”

If you’re like many marketers, delving into social media may feel like stepping onto a roller coaster; exciting and super scary all at the same time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I don’t get Twitter. Why do I care what someone had for breakfast today?” The truth is, social media is here to stay, it can help your business and if you’re a marketer I hope you’ve already bought your ticket.

In a keynote presentation at the Web Content Conference, Rob Rose argued that we are in a transformational stage in marketing. Those of you who cringe when you hear the term “social media” will love his view that when it comes to this Web 2.0 world where there are “no rules.”

The bad news is that if you’re looking for an easy road map to follow or a step-by-step guide to guarantee success, there isn’t one. The good news is that innovation wins; and you can use the skills and ideas that you already have as a marketer to make social media work for you. Don’t be afraid to blaze your own trail.

If social media is still an unknown to you, don’t let your fears paralyze you. You don’t have to be “this tall” to ride, but you do have to jump on.

Most of us search, we find stuff, we move on. We write content, we post it, we move on. But what is the importance of the technology behind the content? Do we see the big picture? This morning I was served a dose of XML with my coffee at the Web Content Conference, forcing me to think about the backbone of everyday web applications and how that applies to marketing.

Joe Gollner of Stilo International spoke about the technologies behind the content and the relationship between the two. As business professionals and marketers we need to understand a little bit about the power behind the technology in order to consider the possibilities that lie ahead. Ann Rockley of The Rockley Group talked about how XML and other technologies allow us to provide a customized experience for customers like they’ve never had before by only delivering the right content at the right time.

There are certain things that we take for granted today, such as being able to easily move information from one application to another. I can quickly send an email with a link to my friend who can then view a video, digg it and post it on her Facebook page. We can thank XML for a large part of this. Back in the day, there were great applications, but they couldn’t talk to one another.  You can think of XML as the mass transit system of the web; your content is the passenger. It doesn’t do us any good to have great content if it’s just sitting still. Once that content can easily “travel,” that’s when the magic happens.

So how does this affect us as marketers? The convergence of content and technology allows for better performance and allows us to have better interaction with our customers. We’ve moved beyond just giving people information to giving them the ability to take action. We’re not just arming them with knowledge, we’re equipping them with tools. And we can effectively do this if we start thinking of our customers as both consumers and publishers.

Social media has the buzz. Mention Facebook or Twitter and eyes light up in recognition. Heads nod in acknowledgement. But if you steer the conversation to content management systems, people drift away. Or snore. Yet content management systems are the engines under the hood of every web presence. If you have a website, you have a content management system. But that is like saying that if you eat, you are on a diet. Well, you are. It just may be a bad diet or an unmanaged diet, but it is your diet.

Not understanding your content management system can have the same effect on your web presence as not managing your personal diet. It can lead to poor performance and even death. So we’ve been on a crusade to raise awareness of content management. We’re kind of the Homeland Security for Content Management. Pay attention. The threat level is orange. So in June, we’re having a content management party and we’re calling it Web Content Conference – Delivering Personalized Dynamic Web Content . We’ve recruited a number of stars to help us out. Meet some of them below. And meet them in person.

One of my favorite Tweeters is Joe Pulizzi (Twitter.com/juntajoe) who embraces content marketing and can tell you how your online content is killing your brand. I also follow Jeremy Epstein, Twitter.com/jer979,and has a great website, www.NeverStopMarketing.com. Perhaps you never heard of him but Jeremy’s clients include the the New York Times, Microsoft and Johnson and Johnson. Maybe you want to pay closer attention to what Jeremy is doing. And I really like Stewart Mader, who recently published Wikipatterns, because he continues to evangelize Wikis in the workplace. If you do nothing else, visit his bloggish website, www.ikiw.org (wiki spelled backward!)

So if you think web content management isn’t sexy, permit us to change your mind. Over 2 days, 5 keynotes and 11 breakout sessions, we’re bringing some of the best content management authorities together to share their knowledge and experience. The Web Content Conference is June 15 and 16 in Chicago.