Tagged with 'web content conference'

Many large companies and non-profits have started using Drupal to manage their content-heavy websites: the White House, World Bank, and Grammys, to name a few. Its effects are both obvious and subtle: from easily incorporated Flash presentations to archivable front pages to user-friendly voting and rating systems, Drupal’s versatility is reflected both under the hood and on a site’s front end. It’s building blocks help craft a solid, attractive, and ultimately usable center for administrators and the public alike. In addition to this obvious benefit, what rewards an organization internally often, if not always, provides an equally powerful external advantage to the outside Drupal community.

Using existing use cases and apt Lego metaphors, Lullabot consultant Jeff Eaton explains how Drupal’s aggregate functionality works well not only within the context of an individual site and its infrastructure, but how each issue solved creates a “brick” of functionality- a building block that can be used again and again, whether you’re building a pirate ship, log cabin, or just mastering a stable table.

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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.

Although it’s gone by many names and through many iterations, the practice of content strategy has been around for over a decade. However, content strategist Kristina Halvorson would argue that it’s just beginning to come into its own, both as an essential component of a usable, lasting website, and as a process and strategy in its own right.

The importance of content is often underplayed, overlooked, or seen as something to work around, and a result is often disorganized and lacking, dragging down a potentially impressive site. Drawing on a wealth of personal experience, pioneers in the content strategy movement, and even Pixar’s touching eco-dystopia Wall-E, Kristina spoke with clarity, passion, and humor, outlining content’s frequent role in website creation, how it got pigeonholed there, and what we can do to make sure what’s actually on a website isn’t something shoved between 11th-hour design tweaks and launch. The CEO of Brain Traffic, a Minneapolis-based team of content strategy consultants, she believes in content strategy’s power to benefit user, company, and the Internet as a whole. Click “Read the rest of this entry” to see the video.
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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.

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.