 Well before I get started. So how many marketers do I have in here? Good. How many IT? Somewhere in between. Let's see like a couple. Okay. Cool. I think you'll all get something out of this one. I am gonna go ahead and get started since we only have right at three. So first I'm gonna introduce you to me. I'm Shelly Hutchins. I'm Director of Client Services at Media Current. I've spent about 12 years pretty well split between the marketing and client services side of the house and I want to tell you a few things about me because as we go through this presentation it's gonna make a lot of sense. So the first thing you should know is that I am a problem solver by nature. So I get really excited about weaving through the web of things and coming out the other side with something that makes a lot of sense. So those escape rooms? Yeah, completely my bag. My necklaces all get tangled up in the bottom of my jewelry box and I kind of get a little excited about it. It's just who I am. Second, I'm a data junkie. So I think data tells the story. Some of my favorite podcasts are Science Versus and Surprisingly Awesome. I think it's now called Every Little Thing. I'm also a podcast junkie in case you couldn't tell. But because of those two things I ask why a lot, which is kind of what led me to this talk today. And I do work for Media Current as I said. And so our goal is to answer that why that I talked about by building the right digital solution for that job. So this means we work with you from the beginning of your project to define those challenges and then where we work with Drupal and those other systems and technologies to give you and your team what you need to make those goals, right? So we don't say that we build websites. We build highly complex digital platforms that drive those results. And again, we ask why a lot. So now we're going to talk about buzzwords. So look at these buzzwords. They all tend to mean something, but what do they really mean? This is what we're going to talk about today. So we're going to talk about a few of these popular, often used words in digital and marketing and business. We hear them and what happens inevitably, right? You've been sitting around a table and you hear digital ecosystem and you go, and everybody else goes, yep, yep, on board digital ecosystem. Let's do it. Nobody ever says, wait, what does that mean? What does that really mean? Right? So that's what we're going to talk about a little bit today. So take a look at the word cloud. How many of you have used one of these words this week? How many of you use one of these today? Right? Right. So for the rest of our time, I'm going to cover the four most common ones that I hear and like to talk about. And then if we have time, we're going to talk about a few of the ones that maybe keep you guys up at night. We can wrap it fire a little bit and go back and forth and see what comes out. And as you'll notice, some of these I'm going to cover because they have some real meaning behind them. And some of them we're not going to talk about because seamless is something that we all say. And I think that we pretty. Oh, and again, so I'll be around all week. So I want to remind you that if I don't cover one of these today, we can talk about it later. I'll be at our booth. I'll be around and you can always find me on LinkedIn. So the first word, I get probably 50 emails a day that have digital transformation in the title. Any of you guys write lots of that. So we're going to start with a little Q&A. Somebody tell me what digital transformation means. Anybody? You guys don't want to play today. Okay. It's okay. So here's the definition that you find on the Internet. I'm going to read it for you just so it can sink in really good. The profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies, and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies and their impact on society in a strategic and prioritized way. Can we move on? We good? Right. But that's not how people use it. Right. I've heard digital transformation used to talk about augmented reality, virtual reality, to talk about the importance of a remote workforce and keeping them connected. And I've even used it myself to talk about how large enterprises can effectively use their inbound marketing tactics. But in practice, digital transformation really tends to be an umbrella term that means something different for every organization. And this is the key here. Going through a full transformation impacts your entire digital library, right? So your websites, microsites, mobile devices, if you've got a learning management system, all the places where you collect data, your social media, e-commerce, intranets. It's an umbrella term, but you want to be using technology to make a change. So while it's true that each of these things can be a driver for your digital transformation, it's just really important that you think through the details of what transformation means to you. So when we're talking about this transformation, we're talking about a shift in thinking, starting with that senior leadership, right, a full culture shift. So you need to take a hard look at your strategy, at your KPIs, for the upcoming year, for more than that, to understand what the core goal is of your transformation initiative. Is it improving culture because you have an international organization and you need them better connected via your intranet? Is it implementing systems that slow down on these manual processes? Is it creating a new website that more closely aligns with your buyer's journey? So revisit those goals and talk about your technology. And once you get there, you're going to find ways to improve your operations, your branding, and ultimately your revenue. And then you're going to be able to find a roadmap that makes sense. And digital transformation isn't this thing that we all want to happen some day, somehow, but it starts to become something that's attainable. In order to really achieve this, though, you have to be forward-thinking. You have to be thinking six months, two years, even further. And just continue to ask those questions. Ask why, right? I told you I like to ask why. And ask what's next so that why keeps you grounded in the now and that what's next keeps you grounded in the future and continuing to make sure that you're thinking about those things in your industry for yourself, for your competitors, and really focused on what that transformation is. And when you're thinking about what's next, that's where the transformation for you starts to happen. And when you hear digital, it's very easy to consider digital transformation as a technology challenge, right? But in real practice, it's our users' shift in behavior. We're living in an age where we're talking about chatbots, a reality to improve your user experience. And virtual reality is becoming a part of daily lives, right? We're talking about these future things. And those are really cool things, but don't buy into the hype. Understand the needs of your users and use technology to solve that problem. So here's a great example. The company that I used to work for was an international supply chain finance company. Our targets were CFOs of companies, $2 billion more in revenue. Virtual reality, probably not the right thing for them. But maybe I'm a company that sells a new technology, a new vehicle, let's say, a new driving experience. If I can't bring them all to the car, perhaps virtual reality is the perfect way to start to transfer my business there, right? So don't just buy into the technology because it sounds really cool. Really understand your buyers and understanding what technology is going to help them make the right decisions. So we're going to take digital transformation from a buzzword to something we can get behind. Again, it's a shift in mindset. It's not just a technical shift. It's a shift in your users' behavior. It's focused on users, data, and forward thinking. So unlike Bigfoot, it is real, and we can debate that later if you want. But the takeaway is that it's real. It's needed, but it's different for every organization. So at Media Current, we want to ask you why. We want our strategy team to work with you to ask what's next. And for our own organization, we do the same thing. We're asking those questions. We survey our customers. We want to hear what we're doing well, what we're doing not so well so that we can get better. And we can use the right technology for the job. That's what digital transformation at the end of the day really means. So the next one, digital ecosystem. Anybody? So here is the general accepted definition. An interdependent group of enterprises, people, and or things that share standardized digital platforms for a mutually beneficial purpose, such as commercial gain, invasion, common interest. But when you hear the word ecosystem, you probably think of a visual like this from elementary school, right? This illustrates how every living thing exists because of every other living thing, right? So you've got plankton and fish, and they go up to the smaller animals. And ultimately to humans, and we all exist because of the other. So if we apply this to a digital ecosystem, we're saying that if you have standalone systems, you're operating in silos, you're just not maximizing your investment. It's not enough to understand that connections need to exist, right? Like the digital, like the ecosystem that we just saw. It's important that the right connections exist. So that they're feeding the necessary information to each other. What you see here is an example of a digital ecosystem from one of our customers. As you see, every single system isn't 100% integrated with the others, right? That doesn't make sense for them. But the right connections are made so that their marketing automation system can work to provide personalization. Another buzzword, we'll talk about that in a minute. And then their marketing automation system is feeding back to their.com. And they're able to work to even personalize further, to give them the right information, the right learning that they need. And I won't turn left here, but marketing automation and data management is something I get really excited about too. So something else we can discuss. So all of that said, the important part about digital ecosystem is that what we're talking about are making connections between your technologies. So this earplugging is not a strategy, right? You have to be focused on communicating outside of your silo. Marketing should work with delivery, to work with internal IT. At one of my previous companies, here's another example. So I was in charge of our.com and our marketing automation. Our IT system, our IT team rather, was in charge of our internet, which was a struggling SharePoint site. And then our product team was working to build our products via Ruby on Rails, with a team in India and here working together pretty much 24 hours to develop our technology. But we were all operating pretty separately. I was talking to, ironically, someone at Media Current about a Drupal migration. Our product team was working on implementing some gear technology to help with their project management. And then our IT team, all the while by themselves, were working and had rolled out a brand new internet, a new SharePoint site. So that didn't work for us, right? We had already established that it didn't work for many teams. But because we weren't communicating, no one was on the same page of that. And we got another SharePoint site that very quickly went the way of the other. But had we communicated, we may have been able to avoid those licensing fees and found the right integrations and found an open source solution for us that would have worked for all levels. So we're gonna sum it up, it's relevant, right? Ecosystems rely on connections, not just content. Re-imagine your properties as a system that shares data and functionality. And things like Drupal 8's API-first technology makes that possible for you. Makes you able to think of all of the various ways and it doesn't limit you in ways that perhaps we were before. So we're going to move on. Next one, agile. How many of you guys say agile? Work agile? Every single day. So what does it mean? Able to move quickly, easily? Relating or denoting to a method of project management, right? This is probably the definition we know. So I'm gonna go through a couple of things here and this is based on some recent experiences that I've heard or seen in several different instances. So what agile doesn't mean? It doesn't mean you don't need a plan, right? It also doesn't mean we'll figure out that really complex functionality later. And it also doesn't mean, I mean, there's no schedule, there's no timeline, no defined deliverables. There should be. And this is the one that I get, I wasn't going to include in first, but over the past, I would say, six, eight months, I hear agile used a lot in discussion. But I think a lot of people get a little confused about what it actually means. So the reason agile's beneficial is because it allows you to iterate a lot. It allows you to run small tests, learn from them, and then make better decisions on the next test that you're going to run and the next sprint you're going to go through. Like I said before, I spent a lot of time on the marketing side of the house. And I think of agile, agile marketing is also something we're using a lot. And what it means, again, is that I can run a small campaign. I can learn the success of that, my messaging, who I'm sending it to, the time of day, whatever it is, what personalized content I'm serving up. You know, all of those things I can test on small levels, learn from them and continue to adjust. So I can improve my speed, predictability, and then I can also adapt. So I'm accomplishing things, but along the way, I'm able to run these small additional tests to make me better. I still know that I want to deliver either so many campaigns, so many pieces of content. I'm still focused on them, still running that way. But then I can maybe try something that's a little on left field and I can test. So I can test, learn, and improve. I can learn faster, I can win quickly, and I can fail quickly. And then I can continue to problem solve. I can always find a way to be better from a problem solving standpoint. So this graphic over here is an example of a sprint cycle at Media Current. But again, you can apply this to a lot of different places. Agile marketing is one of the words that I hear a lot now. The concept, though, is that you've got a plan. You're still running on the strong things that you know you want to do. But these smaller cycles allow you to really learn and grow and change and try things you might not normally do if they're going to be a three month really expensive test. So Agile helps you continuously learn. Don't use Agile as a crutch to avoid those hard planning sessions. Focus on quick wins and leveraging successes to fuel your team. So when you say Agile, you mean let's move quickly, but you don't mean let's move in 12 different directions at once. You still want to have that roadmap in the plan you're following. So last word I'm going to cover right now. Personalization, I think we all know what this is, right? Design or tailor to meet an individual's needs or specifications. Meeting their needs more effectively, efficiently. Increasing customer satisfaction, the likelihood of repeat visits. This step that I'm about to show you, I think I've used in just about every presentation I've given in the past year because it made such an impact on me. Even some of our teams using it now because they get really excited about it too. By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with you without ever talking to a person. 85%, that's huge. That means they're going to use the web, your app, or even text messaging to interact with you never speaking to a person. Delta does this really well now via Twitter, right? You can get an answer on Twitter much quicker if you ever called anyone at the company. Because they've responded to the fact that that's how people interact with them. So those customer preferences and behaviors have changed and those buying journeys are so self-directed and digitally led now. Which means that more than ever, it's important that these types of marketing for the customer facing and revenue generating functions. More than that, it's important that large companies can harness this to have that one-on-one digital conversation with their customer at scale. Again, Delta is a great example, they're starting to do it right. So this buzzword, like the others we covered, is not hype. It is very much though a Rome wasn't built in a day scenario. When you understand what it means, you've still got to define what personalization means for your organization. So you've got to start by defining your why. So define what your goal is. For one of our clients, they're designed for travel and tourism. Their goal is to serve up more content to you based on the places you've said you want to go or the places that you've checked out that you want to visit. It could be conversions for e-commerce, more relevant purchases like Amazon does for us, but you want to define what that why is. That helps you understand how to personalize. It doesn't mean that every piece of your site should be personalized. And I do want to say personalization, I suppose, well, I suppose personalization is, you know, hi Shelly, how are you today? How's the media current? And it's a funny story because when I first started using marketing automation, that's what they were saying. We offer personalization. You can customize your emails with your client's name and their company. And while that's true, we've evolved so much further than that, right? So you want to be defining the what next. It's about the content that you're giving them. It's about the messaging that you're giving them. It's about the context that you're using to communicate with them. So you want to define what that what is. And then you get to what the how is. So the why and what move you down to choosing the right technologies, the right interactions. So in some cases, you might have personalization built into your marketing automation system or another piece of your technology stack. But if not, you're going to want to work to something that meets your needs. This is something that I tell clients a lot. You don't buy a Maserati or a Ferrari to drive it 15 miles an hour, right? That'll be no fun, right? You buy a fast car because you want it to go. So do the same thing with your technology. Don't go out and buy the most expensive technology with all of the bells and whistles because it's a shiny new toy, right? Pick the right technology that serves you. If you need something really complex, then choose that tool. But also go out there and look for other pieces of technology that potentially still accomplish what you need without breaking your bank. Because you are going to get started. Again, it's a long process. We're talking about agile and we're talking about personalization. You're going to want to test a lot along the way and iterate and make changes until you find the right balance that works for you. So bottom line, the why wins again. You're asking why you want to build the right team and the hype is real, personalization works. It does work. You've got to learn how it works for your audience, but it works. So, I have, so for these last few minutes I want to try something. You can ask a question, but if there's a buzz word that bugs you, we can do a little bit of rapid fire Q&A, can give you my thoughts there. And you can give me yours. But let's think about the ones that really do mean something. So we don't need to talk about synergy, right? Or low hanging fruit, or let's see, let me pick out some others. Close the loop, right? We know what those things mean. But if there's really one you want to get to the bottom of, let's chat. And I'm happy to answer some more questions with the time we've got left. I'm the channel? Omni-channels when I hear a lot and I left it out because I was sure I would have time. To me, omni-channel means understanding all the channels that are available to you much like we're talking about your ecosystem, right? Understanding all of those possible channels and acting on the right ones for you. So omni-channel, when you hear it, companies that are saying they want to be omni-channel to me are companies that are saying we want to be globally recognized leaders in every space possible for our vertical. And that's great, but really it's about understanding you're focused on every channel that your users are interacting in. That's kind of my take on omni-channel. We could talk more, I think there's more to it than that, but basically when we say it, that's what we mean whether or not that's actually the truth. Anybody else? Questions? Anything I didn't cover? Anybody disagree? Big data. Big data. Like I said before, I love data. So we're collecting and I think I heard it described this way the other day. We're pretty much leaving tiny little fingerprints all over the web. And people like me when I was a marketer got really excited about that because I could know whatever I wanted to and talk to you in whatever way. But the reality is once you get into that, finding a way to get all that data in one place and get it synthesized together where it actually makes sense. You know, I mean there's a piece here, there's a piece here, but to get it into a place that would actually make sense. That's what people are saying when they say big data, right? It's what technology can I find? And to be honest, you know, I've heard of Hadoop, but I don't know all of the details, but I know that we're all trying to solve that same problem because we're trying to find the right tool to get all of those little pieces into one system so that we can visualize it better. Data visualization is another one, right? We're always looking for ways to see all of the information that we've got. And there are some softwares out there that try, but I think there's probably still a magic bullet that we haven't gone. Well, I'll be around if we want to chat any more about buzzwords or you know, data management or podcasts. Thank you guys.