Internet World 2012 with Sitecore

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Here are a few images from my talk at IW2012 on Thursday. A great turnout for my guide to behavioral and referrer based personalization using Sitecore, held in the Affiliates and Search Theatre (and then again at the Sitecore stand).

We covered the whole process of performance based marketing from search and affiliate, and central to the talk was an outline of my approach to developing digital marketing which delivers experiences which reflect the overall context of the users’ visit (where have they come from? what do we know about what they are looking for? how might time of week or day affect their preferences?).

Adapted from the DTS2012 presentation, but with more of a focus on the project planning stages, we discussed how Sitecore can monitor and track user behavior, profile and group audience segments on the fly and deliver the most relevant profiled content.

Digital Trendspot 2012

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to speak at the Sitecore Digital Trendspot 2012 event held on the sunny banks of the Thames in London. It was a great turnout of over 150 in a packed room to hear a talk about how to understand audiences and build compelling personalised experiences using Sitecore 6.5.

I told the story of a client of ours, Natural World Safaris – who provide fabulous tailor-made safari experiences for their clients and took the audience through the process of identifying objectives, translating these into measurable actions and user behaviour, adapting these into personalised experiences and profiling content, and finally developing a multichannel digital marketing plan.

You can see my (first attempt) at the Prezi for this here. the video from the event (its rather dark I’m afraid) is here.

Blurb for presentation:

Online success is driven through delivering relevant, individualised experiences for users. In this session you will learn the practical process steps to developing a practical actionable digital strategy for your company or product centred around your users. From audience research and insight through choosing a technology platform through to developing personas, designs and evaluation and optimisation, this whirlwind tour will give you the highlights of the research and design process and the key things to look out for at each stage

What you will learn:

- How to define your business objectives and critical success factors
– Researching your audience and validating the strategy
– Developing user journeys, personas and a content plan
– Launching measurement and optimisation

Win a New iPad and help us understand Digital Customer Experience in 2012!

cScape (where I lead the Strategy and Engagement Practice) have teamed up with leading Customer Experience web site MyCustomer.com to launch the Digital Customer Experience Survey. This survey is open to companies across industry sectors and aims to capture a picture of how organisations are using digital multichannel services, personalisation and marketing strategies to transform and improve their customer’s experiences. It comes from the same team who have researched and published the Digital Customer Engagement Report for the past 5 years so comes from a rich heritage of industry research.

With the ‘age of the customer’ truly upon us and social routes into businesses expected by customers and driving tangible results for business, how is yours rising to meet the challenge? Share your answers confidentially with us and get a free copy of the report in advance of official publication date in the spring and we will even throw in the chance to win a new iPad!

Digital customer experience may be a moving target, but one you need to keep top of mind to stay within the most humble of customer expectations. However you define it, and whether you deliver core services through the web or not (and these days you probably do) it is being driven by changing customer expectation from a generation of consumers native within the Facebook/Foursquare/Twitter universe. We would love to hear how you are experiencing the adventure!

See my interview on MyCustomer.com

Take part in the survey here.

Back to the mountains…

It’s March, which means it must be SirIKT (the Slovenian conference on technology in education). Another three days at the Kompass in Kranjska Gora towards the border with Italy and Austria debating the future of education, exploring the challenges educational leaders are facing in delivering the six new ‘e-competencies’ in ICT in teaching, and learning about real world case studies.
I was invited to run a set of three workshops looking at podcasting in education (presentation here) and the use of social media, to groups of educational leaders, as well as presenting the outputs at the final closing ceremony with my great team of students from last year. You can see them in action, here.

Customer Engagement Club podcasts, Peter Sinden of LV and Prof Katie Truss of University of Kent share their advice…

I was back in December for another session at the CE Club Directors Forum, which focused on Employee Engagement, and the positive effect that has on the workplace and levels of customer service. While there I met two speakers from the day and was lucky enough to grab a few minutes with each of them:

Peter Sinden, Director of Sales & Service at Liverpool Victoria Insurance (LV) shares some of the remarkable story of LV’s transformation from an organisation which was losing both customers and staff into one which now offers market leading service based on a foundation of effective employee empowerment and engagement.

Katie Truss, Professor of Management, University of Kent discusses her research on employee engagement (in partnership with CIPD among other organisations), and offers key tips and themes to improve day to day relationships between employees and employers.

#OEB11 – Impressions and thoughts

Once again it was great to spend some time in Berlin at Online EDUCA at the start of this month. Its a refreshing getaway from the day to day to remind you why it was we chose this career path, and see what a world of colleagues, competitors and partners are doing. As usual the insight and inspiration was found both in and out of the conference sessions – so much of OEB is about socialising and meeting new friends and old.

This year I was interviewing keynote speakers, exhibitors and participants again (see a short cut of the output below) and also chaired a session on the challenges of delivering learning in organisations across cultural boundaries. It was an interesting discussion – we attempted to understand what these boundaries might be, exploring how they might be interpreted beyond simply geographical and departmental. I was joined by three terrific panelists who presented and discussed these issues eloquently. My thanks goes out to them:

David Mallon, Bersin & Associates, USA
Corporate Learning Goes Borderless: The New Practices of a High-Impact Learning Culture

Virpi Slotte, AAC Global, Finland
Towards Internationalising Online Learning Service – Experiences About 40 Languages

Marion Bruhn-Suhr, University of Hamburg, Germany
Bridging Cultures Through Joint Learning Experiences

You can see the video below:

Martin Moehrle (consultant, former CLO, Deutsche) discusses the past and looks to the future

Another Online EDUCA podcast: Where I meet advocate of ongoing and personalised learning, OEB keynote speaker Martin Moehrle believes that enterprises can enhance performance by fostering a culture of learning and curiosity in which colleagues can tap into each other’s knowledge.

Moehrle, a Learning consultant and former Chief Learning Officer at Deutsche Bank AG, argues that in many of today’s workplaces, the culture of learning is still a child of the 20th Century: having evolved in an industrialised context, it is not designed for the knowledge-based context into which we are transitioning.

Listen to the podcast here