A popular topic at LavaCon in 2019, attendees will hear more than ever this year about
intelligent content strategies and applied
content engineering principles. Enterprises are slowly but surely investing in
intelligent content and the systems that make it work.
Technical communications and marketing organizational leaders have been encouraging their teams to expand their skill sets to encompass
strategic modeling and intelligent content delivery. Why? Because market competitiveness now hinges on content being unified, personalized for the needs of each audience segment, nimble enough for
reuse, and adaptable to
future devices and channels.
Many of the thought leaders who have been at the forefront of this movement, along with fresh voices in the industry, continue to evolve this conversation at LavaCon 2019. Here are just a few of the topics and speakers we’re most excited to learn from and exchange ideas with this year. You may find a full schedule for the conference
here.
Featured Content Engineering and Intelligence Speakers
Building Cross-Functional Unified Content Experiences
Toni Mantych, Senior Director of Product Content, ServiceNow
Kim Viano, Content Strategist, ServiceNow
This workshop will use ServiceNow’s journey toward a unified Customer Success Center to learn how to bridge organizations and create an experience that is unified while also maintaining the integrity of different content types and organizations.
Jump Into the Unknown: Storytelling for Emerging Tech
Andrea Zeller and Nadine Anglin, VR Content Strategists, Facebook
As content strategists and technical writers, we plan and write content for web and mobile interfaces, but how do you write for online experiences when they’re not limited to a computer screen? In this new age of tech, our responsibilities are evolving from perfecting words to understanding how people navigate, interpret, and engage with information in immersive and spatial experiences.
“Herding the Cats”: Benefits of Unifying Content for Customers
Richard Hendricks, Senior Information Development Engineer, Juniper Networks and Fawn Damitio, Director of Information Experience, Juniper Networks
Discover how to establish partnerships across departments and build aligned content that reinforces the same message, rather than tolerate fragmented content that frustrates your customers. Key examples include recognizing the power of video for GUI-based products.
Content Transformation: Serving the Right Content to the Right People at the Right Time
Angela Browne, User Assistance Manager, SAP and Dan Mehaffey, UA Architect, SAP
Taxonomy and
metadata are critical components of findability and headless architecture, but if your content isn’t ready, the CMS can’t serve or assemble findable content across sources. SAP SuccessFactors started 2018 with little metadata, no taxonomy, and a content audit that showed significant content debt. Only by solving both the taxonomy and the content structure could we deliver content that an API could assemble correctly, that machines and humans could find easily, and that authors could manage inexpensively. You will hear how the team phased the project, and how they sized the effort, sometimes unsuccessfully. Benefits, challenges, and lessons learned will be explained.
Alan J. Porter, Lead Content Strategist, [A]
This keynote will discuss the profiles and proclivities of common content stakeholders, ranging from “Captain Content” to “The Channel Master.” Solutions to overcome content conflicts will include an informed Content Intelligence Operating Model overview. This
content strategy-focused presentation will help you discover how to embrace your own content hero superpowers to avoid content “standoffs” and develop shared goals to work towards as a cross-functional team.
Developing Your Organizational Power and Influence
Andrea Ames, CEO/Founder, Idyll Point Group
Join Andrea for a quick tour of the proven habits developed for “people like us” to build our power and influence — both as individuals and organizations. She closes with an overview of her formula for adopting and integrating them for yourself.
Management as a Strategy: Upping Our Management Game to Boost the Success of Content Organizations
Toni Mantych, Sr. Director of Product Content, ServiceNow
This session examines some management best practices in the specific context of content organizations. Strategy development, employee development, relationship management, and the importance of transparency, accountability, and alignment will be covered. Toni will also look at how management practices need to change — and stay the same — as groups scale and as managers move up the management chain.
This is not a manual. This is an experience.
Stefan Gentz, Global TechComm Evangelist, Adobe Systems
This session will discuss why providing technical documentation as “digital” is just not enough. Stefan will discuss why technical communication is marketing communication, and, most importantly, why technical communication needs to become part of customer experience management.
Adapt or Die: The Challenge of Digital Transformation
Sarah O'Keefe, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Scriptorium Publishing
We talk about digital transformation, but what does that really mean? It’s not just moving from paper forms to web forms. We have the opportunity to connect information, data, and products into a seamless experience for our customers. That is the real potential of the information age, and we are so very unprepared to make this transition.
Unified Content Strategy in the Real World
Sharmila Rammohan, Senior Manager, Knowledge Management Solutions, LinkedIn and Rebecca Rhee, Information Architect/Senior Technical Writer, Thermofisher Inc
Until now, a unified cross-functional content strategy has all been theoretical. In this talk, hear how one company successfully implemented a unified content strategy across tech pubs, training, customer support and marketing teams to create, single-source, re-use, and deliver content in multiple formats and for multiple audiences, with tech pubs leading the way.
Intelligent Microcontent: At the Point of Content Convergence
Rob Hanna, President and Co-founder, Precision Content
Content distilled down to appropriate chunks of information in the form of intelligent microcontent take on a new life when they are made available to the enterprise for consumption and reintegration across different business functions in the enterprise. The silos all but disappear when content is rendered to microcontent that is classed, focused, structured, and contextualized. This microcontent then can flow freely across product, marketing, training, and support documentation.
Let’s Get Personal
Megan Gilhooly, Vice President of Customer Service, Zoomin Software
Technical content can make up the majority of your web presence — and have a significant impact on your bottom line. It’s time for us to get personal. During this keynote, Megan Gilhooly will introduce the four pillars of effective personalization and how they transform how we think about content strategy to drive amazing digital experiences.
Rage Against the Machine: Overcoming the Four Main Barriers to Content Strategy Success
Noz Urbina, Omnichannel Content Strategist, Urbina Consulting
In this session, attendees will learn:
- How to position their work in terms and ways that management will understand.
- How to shepherd their Content Strategy through the challenges that implementation realities through at them.
- How to bridge silos with their colleagues and begin cross-silo collaborations around content.
Bringing Everyone Along: Unifying Distributed, Siloed Internal Content
Kameran Kashani, Principal Technical Writer, and Deepa Aswani, Manager, Content Experience, Salesforce
To address collaborative content challenges and findability, Salesforce conceived of an information portal, named Port 80, that’s built around a simple content architecture. This session will cover:
- Problems you can solve with an internal portal
- Identifying audience personas, and customer empathy
- Connecting the dots: how to stitch together the big picture
- Prioritizing features, and managing the work
- The importance of stakeholder feedback in refining the work
- Techniques for branding, marketing, strategic placement, and tracking user metrics
The Three Kinds of Hidden Content Silos and How to Eliminate Them
Michael Andrews, Content Strategy Evangelist, Kentico
Diversity is the root cause of much complexity in content operations. It produces inefficiency, creates
governance problems, and hinders the execution of strategy. Content teams are likely to encounter three distinct kinds of silos: stakeholder silos, content type silos, and tool silos.
Many solutions to managing
content operations don’t address the full range of diversity happening within large enterprises.
Content as a Service (CaaS) is an emerging paradigm that allows large-scale enterprises to overcome silos and achieve coherence across different functions in their organization. Learn what CaaS is and the benefits it offers.