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A Digital Palace full of Sitecore Solutions Seekers at Dreamcore Europe

Dreamcore, Sitecore's Developer and Partner conference is held on a worldwide basis. 2010 is the inaugural year, and the first event in Boston was over-the-top exciting and successful- but now moves to a Digital Palace promising new heights.

Having two Dreamcore' events one month apart across the Atlantic from each other (or should I say on opposite sides of that crazy Volcano),is totally hectic. It's the overlay of major events on top of a hair-on-fire global expansion pace that makes you look somewhere for another gear to shift into.

But there is a bright side advantage. We get to incorporate new ideas and feedback from the first right away into the second Dreamcore Europe event, happening this week in Copenhagen.

We've added an interesting customer presentation, featuring the very popular English soccer club Manchester City and their partner Aqueduct, providing the story behind fostering the fan passion and fueling the on-field success.

The popular Technical track review of three challenging implementations takes on some wonderful local color. The UK's Conservative Party, just recently elected into power features an exciting online success story with their Sitecore website with True Clarity. Then Austrian Airplines and Sitecore partner ecomplexx describe their site deployed for an amazing 56 countries and 22 languages. Partner Eduserve will dish out a number of tips on optimizing SEO with Google while still managing rapidfire changes in your Sitecore architecture.

Then building a bridge across the Atlantic, Partners Pentia and HedgeHog Development are co-presenting on Team Development and best practices- melding their many strong experiences from both Europe and North America.

Sitecore had numerous presenters who drew rave reviews and they are back, such as wild John West, who smoked the stage with his 10 (actually many more) things you didn't know you could do with Sitecore. He has inspired Sitecore bloggers as far away as Australia who are raising the bar to 25 or 50 hidden tips now, a true sign of talent and passion on the web for Sitecore solutions.

There is more content oriented towards business cases for the Online Marketing Suite, along with several talented solution architects with fresh insights into data retrieval techniques, ways to add customized features with Sitecore and more. See the full online agenda here.

With an at-capacity crowd coming from 11 countries around the world, and a Sitecore Community which values transparency and sharing and a passion for innovation, the classical Palace we are meeting in will be rocking amd morphed into a Digital Palace of Web Art and Science!

Putting more sales into your website sales enablement

Here is a real live scenario of 'sales enablement' that I heard from our Sitecore North American VP of Client and partner engagement, Jason Crea. Makes a marketer smile.

Our sales professionals at Sitecore are very skillful at listening. One of the hot requests they have picked up on from their prospects - the marketers, execs and IT pros they work with is this- "show me ways I can learn more about my visitors so I can service them better. Take my anonymous visitors and give them a persona, and even better, if they fill out a form and provide me their info, breathe that information and their interests into my CRM. And use that CRM info to control their web experience."

So the sales team figured it out and responded- "No problem- we'll show you in real time, with your own data!"

It turns out Sitecore's public website uses the Sitecore Online Marketing Suite to help us understand visitor preferences. Working with Sitecore's Web Forms for Marketers, form data is imported into the CRM. In fact, the visitor's entire experience info is collected, associated and imported real time.

Our sales team demos this by using GoToMeeting to show the prospects several things. First, the prospects visits the site , views and downloads a few thing, and then fill out a form. The sales team then logs into the CRM, turns on GoToMeeting, and shows the prospect how they 'ding!' just showed up in their CRM view, along with their website history, as soon as they filled in the form. In fact other prior visits may also show up if the same cookie was still active. That is empowerment!

Then, often there is a technical developer on the conference, who may have signed up on our developer website, called SDN (Sitecore Developer Network). This site has a whole treasure chest of technical insite and materials, and anyone can sign up and get partial access- but not all the jewels. But, on that same GoToMeeting the sales team shows how, by looking up the developer in the CRM from their initial registration, they can click on a few check boxes and gives them full access to all resources. Literally the developer refreshes their screen and a whole new experience opens up with new resources and assets- all controlled by the salesperson from the company CRM.

Real time alerts in response to website visits are another aspect that lights up the sales team. They get an inbound email message, no matter where they are, and clicking a few links they see what content their prospect was looking at. Often the sales team will then reach out directly with related and supplemental info. Prospects are happy to get the 'just in time and on target' info, and they are absolutely amazed at the visibility the team has- and what a compelling demo this makes.

I wish I could say Marketing thought of these demo scenarios, but we didn't. Our web marketing team did have a bit to do with putting the integrations in place, which is relatively easy with Sitecore technology, but Sales gets the kudos and credit for connecting the dots on how to share and extend a vision for their prospect customers.

And Sales also just showed how to put more sales into 'sales enablement'- from your website!

Dreamcore North America "Coming of Age" Mind Meld

There comes a time when a growing and thriving organization does more outreach to it's customers and Partners. It is a time when a level of momentum has built up. A time when there is a broad range of happy customers who want to share mutual commitment down the road. Customers who are depending upon your company to solve increasingly sophisticated business challenges. Individuals immersing their careers in your approach. And Partners who are building substantial aspects of their business model around your product.



Well folks, that time arrived here in North America for Sitecore today. Sitecore launched its Dreamcore Developer and Partner Conference- and it is a more than sold out event I'm pleased to report! There are presenters from multiple roles within Sitecore, ranging from the CEO to product architects, developers, marketing and field support and sales. And attendees range from hard core Sitecore, C#, XSLT and Visual Studio geeks, Business Users and website managers, to Informations architects, and Business Developement types at partners.


Best of all-it is a real conversation. Lots of tweets following the dreamcore hashtag, and lively sessions with interactive strategic and roundtable Panels including President of Sitecore USA Bjarne Hansen,VP of Partner and Client engagement Jason Crea, and CEO Michael Seifert.

You can sense some the excitement and see Dreamcore with live video coverage from the event's first day.

There is much more coming this evening and tomorrow, but a new milestone has been reached in Sitecore's history in North America. And no doubt, the conversation will continue to more exciting heights together.

Sitecore's Dreamcore more powerful than a hot Volcano!

The anticipating and excitement is building about Dreamcore, the Sitecore Developer and Partner Conference. The North American event, which is sold out and on extended capacity, is in downtown Boston next Thursday and Friday. The month following it will travel to Copenhagen for the European Community.

Dreamcore is loaded with web best practices and insight for the growing talented partner base that implements Sitecore solutions. Also in attendance are certified Developers from the End user community, so key to ongoing success. All of our technical presenters and the entire community is tweeting and blogging and amped up about it.... in fact so much excitement built up in Iceland that a volvano literally blew its stack!

Actually, this volcano really is a bit of a troublemaker. We have a number of presenter coming from around the world, some of whom are now making plans to travel around the crazy and disruptive volcanic ash that has spewn out of Iceland. This particle laden cloud is blowing all over Northern Europe. In particular our Danish colleagues are facing airport closures - but their optimism is strong! I mean after all, didn't they sail to North America from Scandinavia in wooden boats a along time ago, and that was before mobile GPS devices!

It's bizare, but our Dreamcore image, seen above, looks alot like this crazy volcano in a sunset:




Anyway, as much as it looks like it, we didn't plan our image to look like a Volvanic Sunset, but we are planning on a spectacular event nonetheless, the volvano notwithstanding. Hope to see you all there and stay tuned as we tweet and blog about it!

Increasing Online Campaign Effectiveness Video

Here is a video we did recently to describe a number of ways to use Sitecore to help marketers easily measure and improve online campaign effectiveness from Google Adwords, banners, email campaigns, and more. Enjoy!

WCM market size and jobs- real enough for Mom

I read an article about "10 Careers that didn't exist 10 years ago" and what struck me was that of these 10, four of them are right in the heart of our business, web content management (WCM). They include 1- Blogger, 2- Community Managers or Content Managers, 3- Social Media Strategists and 4- User Experience analysts.

It is a natural reaction to be excited that there is growth, interest, and demand associated with ones industry and technology. It is confirmation that, "Yes Mom, this is a real business". A bit of feeling you have arrived.

Then the irony struck me. Aren't tools such as web content management systems with social media features, in part supposed to empower writers, subject matter experts, and other expressives without extra people involved? So what is the extra help for? Is this a trick?

Well, let's see what they do. Bloggers research and write posts to communicate objectives, ideas, and positions- whether promoting for a company, organization or oneself. With the informal tone, the ability to turn on a dime, and create two way conversations, bloggers can get a lot more accomplished and interactions happening when it used to be just a broadcast.

Community and Content Managers do the same on a broader scale. They motivate and referee as well as instigate and create.

Social Media strategists- they are they ones who play chess knowing four steps ahead where they want to land and what others might do. Except the playground is twitter, facebook, blog sites, and the latest mobile mash up.

And the fourth, User Experience analysts, well they help clean up the mess normal people make when they try to become artists on the web. A great user experience is hard to describe, but you sure know it when you have a really good or bad one. It is kind of like cruising downhill on your mountain bike with your tunes blasting versus over the handlebars then into the ditch wondering how your wheel got reshaped into a mobius strip.

When we think about how much broader an audience we can now reach online, how much selectively we can messages and hear back from our audience, how much easier we can research and find crucial information, then these new roles make a lot of sense. And it becomes clear that they are more than just direct substitutes for industries where there is displacement (e.g. traditional media and advertising) but part of a larger industry.

My colleague Darren Guarnaccia has some real insight into this, and in his travels with leading analysts, sees Web Content Management as a one $Billion dollar industry, and growing to 7 times that size when you add in Email, Web and Marketing Analytics, Marketing Automation, Social media software, eCommerce etc. We need a lot of guides, mechanics, creatives and advisors as we make our way into completely new ways to interact together, and of course the leading companies are going to make this all work together as part of the expected website experience.

So yes, Mom, these are real jobs that do make a net new difference in our world!