Small Feature Award 2021: GatherContent Wins Big With Shareable Links

Small features can indeed have a huge impact and make all the difference. This has always been the focus of our Small Feature Award, and earlier this month the annual contest was held for the 3rd time at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference with 6 strong contesters.

Congratulations to content operations software firm GatherContent, which impressed both the crowd and the jury with their shareable links feature - enough to win the prestigious award ahead of 5 other vendors.

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Microsoft Power Platform at Heineken

"Microsoft Power Apps is a game-changer"

That's what one of our non-technical Norwegian government members said when we returned from the summer holidays and met in our local peer group meeting.

Since then the Microsoft Power Platform and Power Apps have come up multiple times in several group meetings, be it communications focused, digital leadership and also our more technical groups focusing on Microsoft 365.

In a recent member conference call, Andrew Sayers from Heineken in the Netherlands told us more about the low code platform and the business apps he is responsible for. The call provided a look behind the scenes at how they approach governance, how he is responsible for the end-to-end support, and finally his work on promoting awareness and self-service usage of the Power Platform tooling to facilitate business processes and drive efficiency and transparency.

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Expert of the month: Ron Brumbarger

"If not you, who?" and “if not now, when?"

Ron Brumbarger set the stage for an inspirational conversation about leadership, mentoring and life-long learning with these two seemingly simple questions.

Ron enjoys mentoring and teaching and finds it fascinating to hear the different answers to these two questions, but clearly also challenges himself with the questions from time to time.

He is Founder and President of Apprentice University, based in Indiana in the US and also our expert of the month.

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Introducing Experience Level Agreements

You have probably heard about SLA's. Service Level Agreements that contractually define what service you can expect, like uptime for your website, maintenance windows for your app or that your search has filters. That's fine and good, but what about the experience?

Casper van Amelsvoort works with Workplace Services at Rabobank and a year ago he introduced the idea of moving from Service Level Agreements to Experience Level Agreements (XLAs). If your website is up and running, but the experience is really bad? Slow loading or what if your search engine doesn't give you reasonable and expected search results?

In a recent member conference call, Casper elaborated on the idea, what the difference means in practice and how he is considering implementing it.

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Digital leadership is about making decisions

Leadership has always been about making decisions, but when it comes to digital, you tend to be dealing with many unknowns in a fast-moving and innovative marketplace.

Coupled with adapting to unpredictable market conditions, even following the best recipe have been tricky, to say the least, and the need for learning from the best and networking with peers has been higher than ever.

Together with Kontent by Kentico, we recently organised two breakfast briefings in Amsterdam and London. Both events looked at what lies around the corner when it comes to digital leadership, but our world-class speakers also shared some of the key decisions they have made.

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What's the MACH Alliance all about?

The MACH Alliance’s mission is to future proof enterprise technology and to propel current and future digital experiences with open and connected enterprise tech.

Still, as Casper Aagaard Rasmussen from Valtech said in a recent member conference call, many companies don’t know about the MACH Alliance, don’t understand it or find it an uncertain multi-vendor play.

Besides several notable software vendors, the alliance has also been joined by leading agencies, including Valtech. Casper heads up the global strategic activities within Valtech’s MACH and Composable Enterprises business.

In the member call, Casper shared why the MACH Alliance matters, what it means to the marketplace at large and how it impacts agencies and customers.

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Creative CVs welcome

It's tricky to find talented new colleagues and building the right culture takes much more than just academic qualifications.

Jan Zerkowski is Innovation & Design Partner at Roche in Basel, Switzerland and he was recently a guest star in one of our Future Workplace peer groups. In the session, he mentioned the idea of hiring using 'creative CVs', where you highlight life skills, like film making, music, or like me elite running and learning quite a bit from working in a supermarket.

In a recent member conference call, Jan elaborated on the idea and he shared how he encourages different applicants and what he looks for in CV’s.

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Expert of the month: Michael Bednar-Brandt

“To build your innovation muscle you need motivation, practice and success”

When I recently spoke to Michael Bednar-Brandt, he made innovation initiatives sound quite a bit like practising for a marathon. Or rather, he made it crystal clear how innovation programs can easily fail if they are not treated more like a corporate fitness program instead of an innovation magic pill.

Michael works as Business Innovation expert at Oracle. Based out of Vienna, Austria, he has over 20 years of experience with innovation programs at both startups and large corporations and is a self-proclaimed corporate innovation demystifier. He is also our expert of the month.

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Understanding the 24 phases of web projects

Building and managing a web project is a big, complex process — one that branches far beyond the phases directly in front of us.

On one hand, there’s the multi-disciplinary nuts and bolts work of creating the site itself. But beyond that, there’s the connective points — the ideas, the strategy, the decision making, and the upkeep. Even if you’re an expert in your field, it can still be a struggle to find context across the entire project landscape.

With The Web Project Guide, Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker teamed up to bridge those gaps to help understand how each stage of the website process fits in with the next.

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Expert of the month: CJ Walker

“Great. Now you can ask ‘would you like fries with that ?’ in seven languages”

This is what CJ Walker’s family and friends jokingly told her when she graduated as a linguist. Back then in the ’90s, the job market wasn’t exactly booming with demand for people trained at modelling and documenting language, but much has fortunately happened since then.

Following extensive work on user manuals and technical communication jobs at Alcatel, HP, the European Union, and Microsoft, in 2007 she founded Firehead, to focus exclusively on content recruitment and training. Since then, she has actively helped shape the content strategy community, trained and placed people in content jobs around the world.

She also helped organise the very first content strategy conference in Paris in 2010 and is our expert of the month.

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Building websites for environmental sustainability

The Internet has a larger footprint than the airline industry, yet we continue to build new digital marketing campaigns, launch new domains, use high resolution for video calls and insist on impressive visuals on our digital presence.

Fortunately, thinking about website carbon reduction is actually win/win. James Cannings is Chief Sustainability Officer at digital agency MSQ and has been working with environmentally sustainable digital leadership for longer than most.

In a recent member conference call, he shared how sustainability also impacts our digital work, where to start, and the 3 layers in building for sustainability. In this post, you’ll find my notes from the call, slides, recording and links for your to make progress on your digital sustainability journey.

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What’s going on with content?

This is not just any random piece of content you might find on the Web. You probably found it by clicking a link from another site or from an email, but I assure you that I wrote it.

Just to clarify, given the huge rise in content, much of it written by machines, this piece of content is actually written by a human and based on a collaboration led by Angus Edwardson from GatherContent and several of our peer group members who work with content and content creators every day.

As you’ll see, content is not just content and while this specific piece of content might look timeless on your screen (you didn’t print it, did you?), much is changing when it comes to how we work with content and how we consume content.

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Expert of the month: Robert Petković

“People tend to look at the wrong numbers and misinterpret the results”

Robert Petković is known to get to the point and in our conversation, he’s straight-talking as expected when we talk about his take on digital marketing in 2021 and his background as one of the first full-time digital analysts in Croatia.

Today, his role is higher level as Digital Analytics Director at Pro media group in Zagreb, Croatia, where he focuses on data storytelling and website analysis for large corporates.

In his own words, he frequently draws on his psychology background to help understand human behaviour and from talking to Robert, it’s clear that we’ve come a long way in the past 20 years when it comes to website analytics, but we also still have a long way to go.

Robert is our expert of the month.

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Does your content speak for itself?

With spoken content fast becoming a preferred way to get information, how will you prepare your content when navigation becomes negotiation and when links, calls to action, and breadcrumbs become a matter of aural and verbal gestures?

Preston So has written the first-ever book from A Book Apart about voice interface design. It's also the first-ever book to hit bookshelves about voice content, with everything you need to know about voice content strategy and voice content design.

In a recent member conference call, Preston joined us for more about what's inside the new book: Voice Content and Usability.

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Domain discovery is all about protecting your brand

It is an incredible surprise to most people when they see just how large their digital estate has become over the years. Clearly, if you don’t have a grasp on your domains, it can have far-reaching consequences, both legally and financially.

Gavin Colborne from Little Forest in the UK has worked with this issue for almost a decade. He recently shared his latest and greatest thinking on the problem in a member conference call. As he said:

Existing domain management approaches often come up short. In a nutshell, it’s all about brand protection.

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