Scott Abel kicked things off Thursday morning with some logistics, some observations, and a lot of good humor.
Day 1 of the 2014 Intelligent Content Conference (Thursday, February 27) in San Jose, kicked off with a welcome message from the organizers, Scott Abel and Ann Rockley. Their humor and warmth was inviting and set the stage for a great day of conference sessions and networking opportunities.
The big themes that stood out to me throughout the day were:
Encouraging Collaboration
- We’re really excited to finally get a variety of people at the table to talk about ideas, strategies, execution plans, and measurement. This is the first time we’ve had the opportunity to bring together product, content marketing, tech comm, publishing, and more.
- We need to collaborate among departments and roles.
- We need to connect with peers in our own areas of expertise to share ideas about intelligent content.
Joe Pulizzi’s keynote featured three-legged stools, and sales, savings and sunshine (see it on slideshare)
- When it was just the internet, we posted everything; now with social channels, we post content everywhere without a strategy, goal, or metric.
- We need to gather requirements, ask why we’re even working on a project, and create a content strategy before we just start creating content and posting it to every single social channel in existence.
Using Metrics and Analytics
Cleve Gibbon: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
- We need a starting point. We don’t need to be afraid of metrics or governance or technology. Think big, start small, and it will all come together eventually.
- When we decide to work with metrics, we need to know who we’re collecting them for and who we’re trying to convince?
- Metrics are critical for planning, budgeting, etc., NOT to measure employee performance.
- We may need to edit metrics over time because features change or become irrelevant.
- We don’t have to have access to the major tools and we don’t have to boil the ocean. We just need to start with one measurement and build from there.
- Even though we all like the chart data going up and to the right, marketers don’t respond to that.
- We have too much belief in numbers without always knowing what they mean or how to use them.
A full house for the opening panel discussion on Thursday at Intelligent Content Conference 2014.
Overall, we need strategy to create thoughtful, meaningful, intelligent content that is designed to work for our audiences. Our technology choices should not be made before we determine the project requirements, goals, and needs. We need to be proactive and ask why we’re working on projects in the first place and we need to articulate those details to sponsors getting us the budgets and marketers. Our role is to work with the right people, such as the marketing and product folks, to make these things happen. We need to do the intelligent content part, which makes the marketing side easier and more connected.
