Big Themes From the Phone Number List Smart Content Conference

Strengthen your partnerships with fellow geeks

Creating content that combines the phone number list wonders of technology and human capabilities in a way that powerfully supports an organization's goals – in short, smart content is a lot to do. While we marketers must help lead the way, we cannot do it alone. We need to be prepared to work with at least three types of colleagues that don't yet exist in many companies: content strategists, content engineers, and data scientists.

Create possibilities with content technology

With the phone number list future of content technology sometimes portrayed as a clash between people and machines, with artificial intelligence poised to wipe out our jobs, ICC speakers highlighted the opportunity to build a future of people and machines. Several speakers, in fact, made it clear that it is us – the marketers and business strategists, not the phone number list IT people – who must lead the way in our organizations.

Yes, I'm talking to you. You who do not feel ready phone number list to lead the way. This challenge is not about being ready. It's about jumping in before you feel ready, answering questions, creating things, and learning as you go.

It is about creating the phone number list future.

Ready or not, we are all competing in an algorithm economy – or “alga economy,” as ICC speaker Chuck Parker put it. The phone number list alga economy includes fascinating and inspiring things that happen with intelligent content in forward-thinking companies where marketers, content strategists, content engineers and data scientists work together phone number list to produce results.

Here is a sample of what we heard at the conference:

• IBM's Pavan Arora updated us on how the phone number list artificial intelligence agent Watson is revolutionizing content analysis and delivery in more and more industries.

• Sam Han of The phone number list Washington Post shared information about how the newspaper is automating aspects of reporting to create accurate, compelling, and timely content at a volume that would be impossible with solely human staff. (Read more about this below.)

• LinkedIn's Katrina Neal urged us phone number list to explore our content-related data, base our decisions on evidence, and become our own “chief experimenter.”

• IBM's Andrea Ames reminded us that content automation is in its infancy and now is the phone number list time for marketers to "get started."

• Joe Pairman, Val Swisher, Noz Urbina, James Mathewson, Cathy McKnight and others created a chorus of "No more content blobs!" The phone number list need for structured content strategically tagged with appropriate metadata emerged throughout the discussions.

• Ryan Bell gave example after example of virtual reality as a tool for creating powerful storytelling experiences. “Leave your mark. We are entering a storytelling renaissance. Virtual reality needs you.

Here is one example among many others that we have heard about. The phone number list Washington Post has created breathtaking possibilities for using technology to scale up its reporting without sacrificing excellence. His teams have developed an “intelligent, automated storytelling agent,” which they affectionately call Heliograph, a name that combines “heliograph” (a message-sending device) and “graf” (“paragraph” in journalistic jargon).

The phone number list Post's newsroom editors worked closely with data scientist Sam Han to test and monitor the paper's automated content processes and outputs. Staff journalists ensure that machine-generated content meets editorial standards phone number list for accuracy and readability.