Events News & Articles

Attending a lot of conferences on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 lately? Sure you’ve come away with some great information, probably a ton of potential vendor solutions and more consulting business cards then you’ve ever dreamed of having in your roledex. But are you still wondering how to implement social media on your website?

1to1 Media is having a Webinar that will be of interest to you: Get Past the Social Media Hype: Here`s how to create real value from online interactions. The free webinar will be held on Wednesday, July 16 at 2PM EST and is designed to teach you how to increase customer engagement and loyalty and drive up your marketing and sales metrics using the latest social media technologies:

• Understand how to apply the basic of social media to your business
• Learn how to select the right options and set objectives for your initiatives
• Define how each social media technology will contribute to your success
• Learn how to use these technologies to drive bottom line results.

This is not a webinar about a specific social media technology or vendor. It is business focused showing you to take advantage of these new technologies that have become essential elements of any website design today.

So if you still aren’t sure how social media is helping drive your bottom line and bringing you in more customers, sign up and learn a little.

If you can’t get enough of social networking — and clearly we can’t — make sure and pencil in the 4th annual Social Networking Conference taking place July 10-11 in San Francisco. The San Francisco chapter will focus on my favorite topic, enterprise social networking and on mobile social networking. The keynote speaker will be Britt Selvitelle of Twitter, who’s talk, cleverly entitled “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” will touch on why it’s not enough to make passionate users, but also “passionate creators” (a reference to Twitter’s wildly popular API, no doubt).

Creating a successful e-commerce experience can be tricky. Making it engaging can be downright challenging. Keeping up with the evolving web skills and demands of online customers often means upgrading technology and making sites more interactive — but at what cost? And who’s time? And for what? Having a better understanding of how to execute a strategic approach to an engaging e-commerce experience is the key.

Thank goodness then for Human Factors International (HFI). They will be hosting a free, live webcast on Thursday, June 26 at 3:30 PM (EST) about Optimizing e-commerce UX: Create websites that empower customers, are effortless to use and create a joyful shopping experience.

Next up on our coverage of the Gilbane Conference in San Francisco was the “mini keynote” for the “Web Content Management” track which was a panel discussion with some big names in the WCM space, moderated by Tony White, a Lead Analyst for the Gilbane Group.

The panelists present were Yogesh Gupta, President and CEO of FatWire; Erik Aeyelts Averink, of SDL Tridion; Bjarne Hansen, President, Sitecore USA; David Graham, CIO, Vignette and Jim Howard, CEO of CrownPeak. The first round of the panel consisted of each panelist discussing what they thought were the most pressing issues when picking a potential Web CMS provider.

The 4th annual Gilbane Conference kicked off in San Francisco yesterday. The three day conference devoted to all things content management started things off with a special keynote session devoted to search headed up by Google’s VP of Engineering, Udi Manber followed by a discussion with Dan Farber of CNET and Denis Brown of the SAG group, moderated by Frank Gilbane, CEO of the Gilbane Group.

Early bird registration is going on from now until July 1st for the 4th international jboye08 conference, a meeting of global gurus in Aarhus, Denmark. The conference brings together IT practitioners from all over the world in order to share and learn in an open environment. It is described as intense, with discussions, demos and interaction from the attendees.

There are a lot of conferences on Web 2.0 happening this year. It’s good to see people taking advantage of the knowledge, experience and insights of a number of industry professionals especially in the area of web content. And in the case of the conference hosted by Duo Consulting and TheContentWrangler.com — Web Content 2008 — this has definitely been the case. Our friends over at Chicago-based Duo Consulting have done another great job designing and promoting the Web Content event this year. As of a few days ago, the ship has sailed. The list is full. The show is sold out.

Two weeks before the conference is to happen (June 17-18 in Chicago), they have closed the doors to new registrants.

Web Content 2008 is a two day conference all about what else — web content. Which means it covers things like website design, online marketing, search engine strategies, ecommerce and more. It’s divided into two tracks: Web Content Strategies, Practices, and Standards and Web Content Tools and Technologies. Topics covered include online marketing, social media, open source and content management.

There are a number of workshops, case studies and presentations in each track led by some of the industries most well-known content junkies including CMSWatch, Clickability, Crown Peak, Duo Consulting, comScore, Juniper Research, Atlassian, Google and many more.

According to Michael Silverman of Duo Consulting, “We designed our Web Content Conferences as an intimate event, with a focus on learning and discussion : with this in mind, limiting the number of people becomes a necessary evil.”

They are working on getting bigger venues for the next set of conferences. If you live in or feel like visiting Clearwater, Florida you can hook up with the Web Content 2008 conference happening there February 17-18, 2009.

We’d love to point you to the session details and registration page for the Chicago conference, but, well that would just be mean…And to push the knife in deeper, CMSWire reps will be there blogging the event. Oh well, you know what they say — you snooze (or have a cheap boss), you loose.

For those of you in the Washington, D.C. area, on Wednesday, June 4 Gartner, Inc., an information technology research and advisory company, presents Gartner InFocus Day: Government.

Spend a full day exploring enterprise change strategies designed to help you drive change specific to your environment. The conference offers a highly-focused single track and interactive workshop style sessions aimed at everyone from CIOS to IT directors to non-technical, strategic government leaders.

It can be a real pain trying to keep up with all the upcoming conferences that happen every year. With web 2.0 being the subject of late, there are a lot of conferences and events designed specifically around it. What follows is a list of some of the top web 2.0 conferences happening this summer. Have a browse and see if anything tickles your fancy. Then think about how you can convince your boss to send you.

Speaking of designer’s guide for research, there are many ways to learn more about how to create your Web site so that it not only looks nice, but serves the needs of those that use it.

As your plan your summer calendar for professional (or personal) development, consider Human Factors International’s How to Design for Persuasion, Emotion, and Trust (PET) 3-day course. This course, scheduled for July 22-24 in Baltimore, MD, aims at providing attendees with the information essential to transitioning from being a “classical usability engineer” to becoming a complete user experience designer.

CMSWire is here reporting live from the How Design Conference in Boston. The conference, which caters to all kinds of creatives, from marketing managers to graphic designers to advertising executives to web designers and strategists alike, aims to teach us a thing or two about being more productive, creative, organized and most of all inspired.

Coming from all backgrounds, designing for firms with lots of clients or working as an in-house designer with a staff of five, we designers face a multitude of challenges. The art of communicating effectively, whether it be with other creatives or our business clients, is our most challenging task. Enter Kathy Burton of The Creative Group, a staffing agency for marketing and advertising professionals. In one of the first workshops of the conference, Can’t We All Just Get Along? How to Identify and Work with Different Types of Communicators, attendees came equipped with their DISC profiles, indicating the four primary behavioral styles, each with a very distinct and predictable pattern of observable behavior.

If you’re looking to take part in some big open source fun, the fourth annual Red Hat Summit is happening in Boston June 18-20 at the Hynes Convention Center. And from the looks of it, there are good geeking times to be had.

Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Finns, it’s time to flex your open source muscle. The Open Nordic Conference is happening in Norway on June 19-20. Brought to you by a formidable team consisting of eZ Systems, ICT Norwary, National Center for Open Source, and ICT Grenland, the Open Nordic will actually be three different, but related conferences running in parallel. They’re all related to open source and promoting the use of free software — something we can definitely vouch for.

On a whole, the art of Web design has begun to be better understood as a necessity in the world of ecommerce and content management. After all, content is only as good as its design and vice versa. Once viewed as something that made your site look pretty but had little significance to the bottom line, web design is now considered an integral part of a site’s success.

West coast CMSers, it’s time to get yo’ summit on. The Gilbane Group and Lighthouse Seminars have announced that the 2008 CM Pros U.S. Spring Summit will take place on June 17, in conjunction with the fourth Annual Gilbane San Francisco Conference which is June 18-20 at the Westin Market Hotel in San Francisco. The summit will offer attendees an in-depth forum for discussing the business and technical side of managing and delivering dynamic content.