Semantics and Analytics Unlock Value in Social and Online Content

Facebook, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor, and Twitter -- social media -- are almost incidental, replaceable tomorrow if another platform proves more attractive, powerful, and agile. (Think AOL and MySpace.) It's content that is king, the message delivered via the blog/e-mail/news/forum medium, generated by corporations and individual producers, traveling a two-way street between them and information-consumer audiences, who in turn comment, repost, and remix at will. And it's Smart Content, the focus of a conference I'm organizing, that allows producers and consumers alike to find the greatest profit, however measured, in online and enterprise content.The information governance concept, beloved by corporations and consultants, barely applies. It's a challenge creating standards and maintaining content-production rules, more a drag than a benefit, given the highly competitive, fast changing, almost chaotic content marketplace. It's semantic and analytical technologies, which help you find and exploit patterns relevant to your goals, whether expanding readership or automating sense-making, that allow content producers and consumers to keep up, to create findable, flexible, and reusable content and to generate business-linked insights.

Smart Content, the conference, is really just a next step in the BI/analytics/applications market education and match-making I've been doing for years. The opportunity is huge -- business and technical -- a consequence of the value content analytics can bring to news and social media and Web and enterprise content.

We'll cover a spectrum of approaches -- as applied in media & publishing, advertising & on-line commerce, marketing and PR, finance, research, and the Semantic Web -- enhancing the value of news and social media and Web and enterprise content -- with links to enterprise information management, content strategy, BI, text analytics, and search.

We'll start with Visionaries Panel with Dries Buytaert, CTO at Acquia and creator of Drupal, Natasha Fogel, EVP at Edelman StrategyOne, and Mark Stefik from XEROX PARC, followed by Jeff Fried of Microsoft explaining What Business Innovators Need to Know about Content Analytics.

We'll have talks by Rachel Lovinger, content strategy lead at Razorfish, Darrell W. Gunter, EVP/CMO at Collexis, and Randall Snare & Elizabeth McGuane of iQ Content, Dublin -- preceded by a series of lightning talks that will help attendees learn about the gamut of innovative smart-content solutions -- and followed by five Application Spotlight talks. Then stick around for a networking reception.

Smart Content will take place Tuesday, October 19 at the Executive Conference Center at 48th & Broadway in Manhattan. Learn more, and register today, at smartcontentconference.com. Register by September 10 for a $200 early-bird discount.

As my colleague Laurel Earhart, Smart Content marketing director, puts it, Smart Content is designed for decision makers, implementers, solution providers, and also investors. We're expecting great things to happen!

Lastly, I'm quite happy and appreciative to have Intelligent Enterprise as a Smart Content media sponsor, and the support of other prominent media and solution providers in the content management and analytics space. I'd love to have TechWeb readers and community members join us for what is sure to be an excellent program, due of course to the quality and expertise of the Smart Content speakers.

Please visit smartcontentconference.com for more information and to register. (Early-bird rates run through September 10.) Thanks!Facebook, LinkedIn, Trip Advisor, and Twitter -- social media -- are almost incidental, replaceable tomorrow if another platform proves more attractive, powerful, and agile. It's content that is king, especially "smart content" that allows producers and consumers alike to find the greatest value in online and enterprise content.