Sessions at Web 2.0 Expo New York 2011 on Tuesday 11th October

The next digital decade will be of a scope too big for most firms’ siloed, understaffed, interactive marketing organizations. The future of interactive marketing is neither an ideal organization nor a set of characteristics to layer into a multichannel campaign. Rather, the future is for interactive marketers to master four directives: Customize, Optimize, Respond, and Empower. At Forrester, we refer to this framework as CORE. Here’s what we mean (included in each – an example of a related problem marketing departments are facing):

• Customized: Customized marketing experiences use interactivity to fuse marketing with product experience (the problem: only 17 percent of companies have an interactive marketing team that pushes the agenda at the company)

• Optimized: Optimized decisions and processes enable customized and responsive interactivity (the problem: only 10 percent of companies have automated multi-channel campaign execution)

• Responsive: Responsive customer engagement brings a human touch to the customer, anytime, anywhere (the problem: only 20 percent of companies are investing in tools to allow customers to interact with your product teams)

• Empower. Empowered staff and customers propel the CORE mission forward (only 20 percent of interactive marketing professionals believe they have the full support of their CMO)

FedEx is a company that is accomplishing the CORE mission and during this presentation, we’ll be able to share the story of one FedEx Marketing Manager who recognized that a sweeping change was needed to serve their customers’ changing needs.

Finally, this session will provide attendees with a 16 question diagnostic test in order to benchmark their CORE maturity.

Melissa Parrish, Forrester

Maybe you’ve wanted to dive in to CSS3, but have held back because you just didn’t think it was ready. Don’t be fooled, CSS3 isn’t the future, it’s the present, and is ripe for the pickin’ and is ready to respond to display your sites in multiple devices right now. This workshop will touch upon the gamut of CSS3 properties from colors, web fonts, and visual effects, to transitions, animations and media queries. If you aren’t yet using CSS3, this workshop will give you the inspiration and resources to go forth and implement the new properties with confidence.

Maybe you’ve wanted to dive in to CSS3, but have held back because you just didn’t think it was ready. Don’t be fooled, CSS3 isn’t the future, it’s the present, and is ripe for the pickin’ and is ready to respond to display your sites in multiple devices right now. This workshop will touch upon the gamut of CSS3 properties from colors, web fonts, and visual effects, to transitions, animations and media queries. If you aren’t yet using CSS3, this workshop will give you the inspiration and resources to go forth and implement the new properties with confidence.
PapillonEffect Consulting

Denise R. Jacobs, PapillonEffect Consulting

This session will cover the ins and outs of tablet application development from a non-developer’s perspective, based on the experience of launching a suite of applications across a range of tablets.

We’ll review the most popular tablet operating systems, and the advantages and disadvantages of working with a third party to develop applications, as well as some suggestions for how to set “rules of the road” and what not to say to the developers you’re working with. (Hint: avoid such phrases as “This is an absolute must-have” and “ I have an ask.”)

Other general principles of development will also be reviewed, such as preventing scope creep, factoring the “mythical man month” into your planning, and shortening the development cycle… which makes everyone happy, even (especially?) if that means removing yourself from the weekly development process.

Launched in 2004, Flickr was part of the first wave of Web 2.0 sites. While boasting a pioneering and industry-leading API, it has always operated in a passive rather than active mode when it comes to delivering content; come to www.flickr.com (or talk to the API) and get some photos. Now real-time is the new hotness. With the ever-decreasing time between when events occur and when the people that care about those events wish to observe them, repeatedly polling an API to get those events becomes less and less practical.

Learn how Flickr recently added PubSub features to its API. We’ll take a look at what we built, why, and how. In particular we’ll focus on how to add real-time features to an existing site without adversely affecting performance, requiring major investments in new infrastructure or re-architecting large chunks of code. Node.js, websockets, and Redis are some of the technologies we used. We’ll discuss the reasons behind these technology choices, the trade-offs required when using them and the types of features they enable.

Neil Walker, Flickr

Nolan Caudill, Yahoo/Flickr

As consumers evolve, moving seamlessly between phones, computers, social networks and retailers, their payment methods have to evolve too. With mobile payments just the tip of the digital wallet iceberg, there are many new products and services on the horizon that will improve the consumer payment experience. This session will examine what is happening in this space today, and explore what Visa is doing to reinvent how consumers pay and get paid.

The BlackBerry Web application platform has gone through some amazing enhancements in the past year: WebWorks SDK, WebKit, Flash, new development tools, HTML5, Web inspector, etc. Come to this session to learn how to easily transform your amazing HTML5 and Flash content into exciting BlackBerry Smartphone and PlayBook applications. Learn how to use Ripple mobile emulator to build your mobile application content and see how to use Web Inspector to debug, profile and test applications running on a live BlackBerry Smartphone or Tablet. Discover how to use available platform services such as the BlackBerry Messenger social platform and BlackBerry Payment Service to attract more users and sell digital goods.

Fingers and thumbs turn design conventions on their head. Touchscreen interfaces create ergonomic, contextual, and even emotional demands that are unfamiliar to desktop designers. Find out why our beloved desktop windows, buttons, and widgets are weak replacements for manipulating content directly, and learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. Along the way, discover why buttons are a hack, how to develop your gesture vocabulary, and why toys and toddlers provide eye-opening lessons in this new style of design.

Josh Clark is a designer specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience.

Conversation with Karin Klein, Bloomberg

A follow up to the NPR Everywhere presentation at Web 2.0 NY 2010. This presentation explores the emerging best practices in API design and product implementation with concrete example from NPR, the media leader who first brought a public content API to the market in 2008. NPR continues to innovate and learn about what it means to have flexible content. Our philosophy assumes that to maintain relevancy in an online world media companies need to be adroit at delivering content to multiple channels and disparate platforms. This in turn has led us to keep a strategic focus on our API development. This positions us not just to meet our distribution needs, but has also helped drive business opportunity and allows for effective design and user experience whether in a browser or on a mobile device.

This presentation will share our lessons learned and key metrics around successful creation and use of flexible content – from technology needs to business, editorial and design opportunities in an increasingly fragmented online product landscape. In the past year we have completed a major refactoring of the code in our API. As ever increasing demand of the API validates our overall approach, we needed to make changes to the underlying code to support ever growing traffic. These changes have resulted in a 22% increase in performance and a much more maintainable code base. This session will examine the flaws with the original design, and explore the latest changes and forthcoming improvements to NPR’s suite of APIs.

Ensuring good architecture of systems and flexibility of content has also allowed NPR to have the freedom and agility to quickly deploy solid user experience and elegant design to multiple platforms. From the Peabody award winning website, to rapid development on various mobile products, this approach has required changes and created new opportunities for editorial, design and product processes. We’ll further explore how content, technology and design intersect and what has worked in NPR’s content and platform initiatives.

The future of retail lies in a brand’s ability to evolve with technology. With a commitment to test, learn and embrace new ways of connecting with consumers, RadioShack has partnered with Foursquare to create several location based campaigns. As smartphones become the 1st screen of interaction for many, both companies will share how they are approaching the future of engagement and powering business growth. Enjoy an interactive session—with lessons learned on what works and what doesn’t—as a 90-year-old retailer and a hip tech platform come together to power real-time shopping.

The continual evolution in connected technology and the prevalent presence of social media has moved ecommerce beyond the traditional retail model. The new frontier in ecommerce is now in digital media and content—games, books, software, news, music, video, professional journals—and how it will be delivered—not only traditional computers, but mobile devices, game consoles, set-top boxes, even vehicles and appliances. In short, the “internet of things”.

As consumers demand more than just a shopping cart, enterprises must evolve their ecommerce strategies to provide an experience that is frictionless, social and everywhere.

This presentation will explore:

- How enterprises can monetize digital content when the product is expected to be free

- How connected devices compel us to re-think everything about APIs

- How industry leaders go beyond the transaction to Digital Relationship Management

This session is sponsored by Elastic Path Software

If being a government contractor sounds like the absolute antithesis of your career goals or your aspirations for your startup, you’re forgiven. So much of the culture of the web stands in stark contrast to our notions of what it’s like to work with the government, including its bloated requirements, decidedly non-agile development methods, and a lack of respect for good interfaces and user experience. And much of that perception is justified. But there’s a lot that’s quietly changing, often in small pockets of innovation, but growing each day, and there’s increasingly an opportunity for web 2.0 teams to make a real impact on the $166B government technology market. Remember, the government market is 30% of our GDP.

This session will outline three demographic trends that make change in the sector inevitable, describe the changing environment that is opening up a formerly insular system, and then get real about how hard it really still is to work in a government context. We’ll hear stories from such companies as Azavea, OpenPlans, SeeClickFix, and GroundCrew. Then we’ll return to the sunny side of the street and talk about how you can disrupt this market from the inside or the outside, and why it might actually be worth it.

Think about it this way: the Internet is going to disrupt every sector at some point. It’s just taken its time getting to a sector where it’s failure that drives innovation instead of competition. More importantly, it’s not just money but also glory that awaits those who find better ways to serve the institution that is designed, however inefficiently for now, to serve us all.

For over 30 years business have been running their mission critical applications on IBM’s Host Systems because of their reliable, secure and effective transactional and operational cost. Today IBM is helping customers grow their business, improve customer satisfaction, lower operation costs by improving self-service and employee productivity by Revitalizing, Transforming and Modernizing these applications.

Join us and learn how IBM can Modernize your existing applications, and leverage your existing skills set to achieve the latest WEB 2.O Social and Mobile User Experiences. Learn how you can exploit your diamond in the rough to grow your business, improve customer satisfaction, and lower operation costs by improve self-service and employee.

This session is sponsored by IBM

Bring your own experiences and questions to this conversation w/ Oliver Hurst-Hiller, the CTO & EVP of Product for DonorsChoose.org.

Just as good user experiences can delight us and make our lives easier, the same tactics can be used to deceive and manipulate us. This talk will cover some of the most common user experience “anti-patterns,” exploring the ways to avoid these techniques, and building a case for greater awareness of the ramifications of our UX decisions.

Nick Disabato is an interaction designer from Chicago.

In a world where perception rules, how can you use online communication to keep your company’s reputation safe? In this session, you’ll learn how to prevent – or repair – communication crises. Using case studies from business and politics, we’ll cover: • How to develop an online crisis response plan – and integrate it with your offline efforts • Proactive online techniques to build relationships with fans and opinion leaders • Rallying online supporters to fight back on your behalf • How to apologize effectively (if necessary) – or crush your critics if they’re lying • Leveraging your own content (via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and podcasting) to drive your message and respond to critics.

Dorie Clark is a consultant specializing in helping clients increase sales, enhance brand reputation, and move policy issues forward.

HTML5 has captured the minds & hearts of web developers with impressive demos in cutting edge browsers. But what can you actually depend on this month? And is anything dependable in a “living specification”?

In this presentation Tantek illuminates what makes HTML5 both easier and more powerful, and which features are ready now, roughly usable, totally ignorable, unfortunately ugly, or worthy of web application experiments. HTML5 is also a work in progress – learn how by using it and providing feedback, anyone can help shape this important update to the foundation of the web.

Tantek Çelik is a well known open web standards advocate and innovator. He is a founder and community leader of GMPG and microformats.org.

This session will focus on:

- Using Meetups as a tool to bring more talent into the top of your recruiting funnel. - Blogging for a technical community - Identifying talent via social media - Empowering your employees to actively participate in social media with an eye towards recruiting

This talk is about the hard rules of delivering exceptional performance. Your users won’t wait more than 2 seconds for a web application to load. They expect interactions to be instantaneous. If you subtract network time and client side processing this less from less than a second to a couple of hundred milliseconds. Learn what this means for your business applications.

From Degas to Danger Mouse, what’s your place in the debate of content creation and curation? Both companies’ and consumers’ expectations of user experience have matured, helping content strategy come to the forefront in driving good user experiences. Content strategists shape communication goals, hierarchy, and taxonomy. Are these innocent choices? Or politics, discrimination, and the dark side of design?

We’ll discuss this through the lens of content correlation and “merchandising” on news sites, editing and mashing up to “create” anew, and curating in traditional settings like museums. From seemingly benign audits and style guidelines through published content packages, do curators create meaning? If so, how should you confront similar choices?

It’s been a breakout year for content strategy. Come hear why now we need to confront its ethical relevance – and learn about the missteps of teams that don’t – through the lens of case studies, Sarbanes-Oxley, user-generated content, and the perspective of the new publishing landscape.

Margot Bloomstein is the principal of Appropriate, Inc., an independent brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston.

While many of us have an intuitive feel for what works and what doesn’t, understanding the techniques required to validate your hunches with regard to design is a skill that will define the next generation of executives. Attendees will walk away with an understanding for the design process and the basis for design decisions.

You’ve embarked upon a user experience project – updating your website or creating a Web or mobile app. You know there will be an element of visual and experience design, but do you understand the basics behind why your designers are making the decisions and recommendations they make?

It’s important to understand some design basics in order to communicate effectively with the designers on your team. While many of us have an intuitive feel for what works and what doesn’t, developing a vocabulary to describe your issues and feedback and understanding the techniques required to validate your hunches are important skills in order to ensure the success of your project.

This session goes in-depth on which design techniques and principles ought to be part of every executive’s vernacular. By the end of the session attendees will understand the basics of both high level interaction design and lower-level visual design in a way that maximizes energy and time in the approval process, including:

• Basic design principles to help executives understand a design’s intent. This includes a basic understanding of layout, color theory and typography.
• Design vocabulary, heuristics and analysis techniques
• The difference between information architecture and interaction design, and how both have a critical yet often unseen influence on the development of the end project
• Why incorporating user research is critical to good design

This session is sponsored by EffectiveUI

For years, most Web teams have designed for the desktop. Mobile, if it even happened, was a port off the desktop version, designed and built before anyone even considered the mobile experience. This made perfect sense for a while. Browsing the Web on mobile phones was painful; carriers controlled access to the Web on their devices; and mobile network speeds made everything often grind to a halt.

But things have changed so dramatically over the past few years that starting with the desktop may be an increasingly backwards way of thinking about a Web product. Designing for mobile first can not only open up new opportunities for growth, it can lead to a better overall user experience for a Web site or application.

In this presentation, Luke Wroblewski will dig into the three key reasons to consider mobile first: mobile is seeing explosive growth; mobile forces you to focus; and mobile extends your capabilities.

Luke Wroblewski is currently Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Bagcheck Inc.

Designing a massively scalable highly available persistence layer has been one of the greatest challenges we’ve faced building out Twilio’s cloud communications infrastructure. Robust Voice and SMS APIs have strict consistency, latency, and availability requirements that cannot be solved using traditional sharding or scaling approaches. This talk describes how we’ve divided “in-flight” and “post-flight” data into separate datastores implemented using a range of technologies. We’ll review the lessons we’ve learned building and maintaining a system that supports an API used by more than 35,000 developers.

Dr. Evan Cooke, is Co-founder and Chief Architect at Twilio.

We need a Social Media Architecture.

Based on field work with several major European and US brands, this talk is about a critical problem facing any organization of size and the methodology we have successfully used to address the problem. In this regard it is (1) based on real and current business needs and (2) very prescriptive.

Take one look at any large brand and you find literally dozens of social sites that lie abandoned with no active engagement. Many are redundant, fracturing the same potential audience into separate, so-called “communities”. Further, the majority of these sites are isolated, without any formal linkage to a brands’ other sites where customers might find value. And the bigger the organization, the bigger the problem. In one recent project we found our client had close to 150 Facebook pages and over 65 YouTube channels and 100 Twitter feeds.

This is unsupportable and counterproductive. While most companies and agencies are still talking about successful on-off initiatives the terms of success are shifting from “pages” and campaigns to coordination and connectivity of customer experience.

The solution is a social media architecture.

A Social Media Architecture is defined as “A structure that brings harmony, utility and durability to the diverse elements of an organization’s social media presence”

A proper Social Media Architecture answers the following questions:

What is my current blueprint? —Techniques and tips for visualizing your complete social media presence across all platforms

What communities will I serve? —How to identify unique communities that you can serve.

What needs will I focus on? —Communities vary, needs do not. Discovering the five need states common to all communities and how to prioritize which need states you should focus on.

What is our “Link and Like” structure? —How to design your social site map so customers can navigate (link) to the communities where they belong (like).

How do I design for durability? —Paradoxical as it sounds for social media, everyone should be designing for a durable architecture. I will introduce a basic checklist to ensure the architecture remains sound over time.

Joshua Michéle Ross is SVP and Director, Digital Strategy for Europe with Fleishman Hillard, a global communications firm.

It’s well know that the ability to leverage data has reached a new level of critical importance in organizations to improve decision making. Now, with commodity technologies, it is possible to cheaply create data products that can have a massive impact on the business (e.g., People You May Know or Who’s Viewed My Profile on LinkedIn). In this talk I’ll walk though the product philosophy I’ve found works best to rapidly test and deploy data products. I’ll also address the critical gotchas in developing highly engaging user facing data products.

Digital payments are customer expressions - statements of behavior and interest. Payments intelligence is the next layer of CRM which Web 2.0 demands. Join this discussion about the future of digital transactions, what they tell you about your consumers, what you need to learn from the data, where to get it, and how to act on it.

Learn from a well-established company’s experiment on creating a location-based chat app with a tight deadline of six weeks. Ask.com’s CTO Lisa Kavanaugh shares what it takes to create an app in a new space for them. Hear how they worked against the timeline, who should build the app, how they built it and what they learned from their users regarding privacy.

Web 2.0 attendees will see first-hand how the idea of the app came to Ask based on user feedback, how they were able to come up with an idea and execute it and launch it in a short timeframe. Attendees will learn how a larger company can come up with a concept for an app – even if it’s in a space that’s not familiar to them – develop it and launch it, all with keeping their users in mind.

Lisa Kavanaugh is Chief Product & Technology Officer at Ask.com.

Priorities of SMB CIO’s.

The early days of social media were filled with hope – and hype. Social media marketing gurus started popping up everywhere, offering brands assistance based on shaky credentials. Catchphrases became commonplace: customers are in control! Focus on people, not technology! Listen first! You don’t need a Facebook strategy! Social “stuff” has the potential to change the way businesses engage with consumers, employees work together, and consumers communicate with each other. However, businesses that focus on the learnings of early social media will find themselves no better off than the early pioneers who found themselves with figurative consumer arrows in their backs. This session will focus on what worked early on, why it doesn’t work now, and what companies need to be thinking about now in order to create and capture value from social business.

Peter Kim is Managing Director, North America at Dachis Group, a Social Business Design firm.