Colleen Jones provides a framework for understanding content effectiveness in six dimensions, tips for measuring it, and examples of applying insights from it to content strategy and more. 

Rahel Anne Bailie introduces content operations (ContentOps) as an emerging practice and will demystify some of the high-level principles that make this an exciting development for content professionals across the board.

Scott Abel delivers a quick review of content strategy, past, present, and future with an eye toward explaining the need for content strategists to find ways to leverage their skills to help the organizations they serve become information-enabled. 

Charles Cooper helps you spot natural departmental allies and convince them to work together with you to make your content strategy projects successful. You'll also learn to spot naysayer and other problematic players and learn a few tricks to help you convert those who oppose the project and turn them into allies.

Given that content jobs lack standards around naming conventions or skills sets, it's a wonder that we manage to match people to jobs at all. As the content landscape evolves, content strategy maven Rahel Anne Bailie argues that we need to keep in mind that our roles keep changing within it. 

Robert Mills explores lessons learned from several different organizations that are investing in ContentOps. Attendees will learn what improvements these organizations are hoping to make, why, and how.

Sarah A. Rice examines ethics (in the context of content strategy). She will pose questions of the audience and suggest ways attendees can discuss a code of ethics to be applied widely among content teams, including contexts and formats that may not have been considered before.

Mark Walsh, founder of Motional AI, a platform for transforming chatbots and voice assistants into warm, charming, and visual animated characters, will share essential tricks to defining a persona for your bot, voice, or visual assistant. You’ll gain insights into writing for conversation, and learn how to design a voice and visual that makes consumers feel understanding, respect, and even love for, your brand.

Andrew Lawless helps us overcome the after-lunch slump. This mid-day an experience will help you eliminate your biggest stressors at work in just a few minutes – for life. You will be high-fiving a lot of new people at the end. We promise.

Will you be fortunate or unfortunate today? The choice is yours. Strategic interventionist coach, Andrew Lawless, will lead a short mind-setting exercise that helps you get the most from this conference. A surefire conversation starter for networking opportunities in the afternoon.

In this presentation, product content and design strategist, Tracy Ulin, will examine the challenges of executing content strategies and look for ways to avoid being part of the problem. Because when a content strategist deeply understands the organizations they serve, they get better at the business of executing on content strategy.

Lisa Gettings teaches you how to put customer journeys, personas, user scenarios, empathy exercises, and content mapping to work for you.

Content strategy defines the relationship between an organization and it’s customers. But not every organization is ready to admit how important content strategists really are. The power of content designers extends far beyond words. Attend this presentation with Danielle Kirkwood to learn how she discovered how her approach to content strategy killed her career as a content strategist. She'll share lessons learned and suggestions for moving content strategy forward in your organization.

Experience designer Colin Eagan discusses content personalization — asking is it realistic (or even desirable)? In this highly practical talk, Eagan will focus on the ever-expanding role of content strategy in ethical personalization design, including technology selection, user data models, editorial considerations, and the "infinite content problem."

Screen readers are assistive devices that convert text content displayed on a computer screen into a form that visually-impaired consumers can process.. In this presentation, Vince Abbate and Carrie Farber take a look at screen reader content — the good, the bad, and the ugly — and share several good practices you can put into place to ensure your content is accessible.

Attend this presentation featuring strategic interventionist coach, Andrew Lawless, and you’ll discover how forward-thinking leaders are leveraging a scientifically-proven team performance framework that produces results and unity. You’ll discover how to build a frictionless, high-performing collaborative team.

To drive success, today’s content strategists and content marketers must work together to design a superlative “content experience” with assets that are integrated and orchestrated, supporting and enhancing the customer journey at each step. Attend this session, presented by Lindy Roux, to discover the exciting new arena of content experience.

Consumers don't search for information, they look for answers. Emerging technologies around conversational interfaces are driving changes to how we create, manage, and deliver the answers they seek. Rob Hanna explores the need to develop information-enabled organizations that are capable, by design, of deploying intelligent microcontent in a manner that enables consumption and reintegration across different business functions in the enterprise. 

Featured presenter, Colleen Jones, will help you understand what these insights mean for content roles ranging from writer to strategist to engineer to manager. (Hint: You might need shades. The future is bright.)

Val Swisher takes a look at the role that words play in our ability to understand others, and how we can better understand each other by being open to, acknowledging, and using different vocabularies.

Most business content is more forgettable than it is memorable. Attend this session with Dr. Carmen Simon to learn the science behind what it takes to keep your audiences’ brains engaged and likely to recall your message.

Michael Haggerty-Villa leads a discussion with a panel of content design strategists on how to turn style guides into useful tools for design team collaboration. The panel will explore better practices for sharing style guides, discuss ways to integrate them into design systems with visual and interaction guidelines and help us think through how our efforts will be impacted by chatbots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Scott Abel kicks off day two of the conference and provides a quick overview of the days activities.

Lucie Hyde kicks off the conference with a welcome message and a quick overview of the conference.

Mindfulness coach Janet Fouts will discuss the need for a kinder, more compassionate approach to content creation that focuses on the needs of the customer. You'll discover how adopting a thoughtful approach to content strategy can help you turn prospects into loyal customers and brand evangelists.

Val Swisher explores what it means to transform content and shares concrete steps you can take to begin preparing content for digital transformation.

Workday's Simone Ehrlich will share a new approach, a riff on content first, in which designers and product teams consider the user’s information needs throughout the design process. Attend this session to learn how designing with words can help you shape or improve your product or project.

Blaine Kyllo will share how a regional government utility company transformed an aging, cluttered information repository into a sleek, modern knowledge center, and how shaving seconds from phone calls is saving the government hundreds of thousands of dollars each year.

Jessica Pease explores how the PayPal Content Team rethought their hiring strategy, experimented with hiring and training approaches that helped them find a slew of new writers, and brought magical new energy and ideas to their entire team in the bargain. 

Laverne Henderson will discuss how FogHorn Systems documentation team moved from a manual content creation and delivery process using Markdown and WordPress to an automated process using Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) to author content, GitHub to store it, and Zendesk to publish it.

Catherine Lyman will show you how the team at MapR Data Technologies expanded a simple feedback system into an automated process, saving the writers and the manager time and much pain. By adding integration tools to a ‘human’ process, the MapR team radically reduced the effort required to manage feedback that they get from their users and got an easy way to generate customer analytics in the process. 

Pushpinder Lubana explores how PayPal measures the quality and effectiveness of content globally in a standardized, consistent, and repeatable way. You'll find out how the company developed content metrics — based on customer feedback — and how these quantitative measures of content quality have helped PayPal determine whether content is meeting its declared goals. 

In this case study presentation, Alexa K. Apallas will help you understand why writing clear, concise microcontent is so important and you'll learn how to use limited space to communicate clearly and enhance the customer experience.

Shibi Sudhakaran examines the content infrastructure in place at PayPal, from content creation to delivery. Discover how PayPal is developing the capability to deliver Content-as-a-Service (CaaS)  to distribute personalized content to users across a variety of channels.

Attend this case study presentation from Robin Boldt to discover ideas you can borrow from the content teams at Rockwell Automation and apply them to your organization in an effort to overcome content challenges, improve content quality and usability, and develop a successful content strategy.

In this case study presentation, Glenn Lafollette will discuss why commercial real estate giant JLL determined that they needed content governance, the steps they took to establish it, and the role that content governance plays in the organization today. 

Attend this presentation from Ben Colborn to discover how Nutanix applied terminology and taxonomy guidelines to help the company better deliver consistent customer content experiences. 

In this aspirational closing keynote presentation, content leadership coach, Andrea Ames will share best practices for getting the most out of any situation, including practical advice designed to help you clearly demonstrate the value of content to business leaders and customers alike.

Rich Schwerin leads a discussion with a panel of three SEO experts on how organic search is evolving and what every content strategist should know to stay current. The panel will explore the past, present, and future of search, debunking some long-held myths, with an eye on where search is heading next. Panelists include Benu Aggarwal of Milestone, Michelle Robbins of BetaGirl Consulting, and Punnyatowa Ghosh of VMWare.