Sitecore Symposium - Key Takeaways
Sitecore Symposium 2020 was all about “Moments that make Experiences”. As Paige O’Neill put it, marketers need to transform to a “Moment to Moment Mindset”.
On the theme of “moments”, Dan Heath, author of “The Power of Moments” created the most memorable experience for me at Symposium. A few concepts that stood out:
Our experiences are “mostly forgettable and occasionally remarkable”
Breaking the script: Psychologists know that we carry around expectations of how the moment will unfold; we need to break that script in a positive way to create a memorable experience
Our relationships are stronger when we perceive that partners are responsive to us. That equates to Understanding, Validation, and Caring
So, without further ado, here are the sessions/takeaways that created the most memorable experiences for me at Sitecore Symposium:
Sitecore AI Standard and Auto-Personalization Announcement and related sessions: This one will warrant its own blog posts. Check out “Automated Personalization in Sitecore: AI, Cortex, and more”. For those of you with All Access Passes, I would suggest watching these 2 videos:
Desta Price’s “The Road to Product Innovation”
Marco Guimaraes and Nancy Lee’s “Sitecore Content AI”
Marco Guimaraes and Nancy Lee’s “Sitecore AI: Auto Personalization Standard for Sitecore 10”
CaaS Announcement and related sessions: Content-as-a-service was announced by Tom DeRidder in “The Road to Product Innovation” . This delivers Sitecore’s completely headless, SaaS platform exposing content via GraphQL queries to be consumed by any front end. To get more info on CaaS here are some additional sessions to check out:
Alistair Denesys and Andy Cohen’s “Content as a Service: A Preview”
Una’s on demand session AMPlify your SXA!: Una gives a detailed walkthrough of how to use Google AMP along with Sitecore SXA. AMP is optimized for mobile presentations with no javascript and limited resources. Una shows us how we can modify the SXA renderings and layouts to be compatible with AMP.
Shelley Bernhoff’s session Choosing the right option for building your Helix solutions: Shelley starts with a great quick overview on Helix and then dives into the 3 ways you can build your Helix solutions:
From scratch
Using Yeoman
Using the Helix templates VS extension
Sitecore Training Session: Discover how SXA empowers JSS site development: This was my favorite course in the training offered by Sitecore to learn how to use the admin interfaces of Sitecore for flexibility and ease of use for content authors and marketers, while retaining the UX flexibility and ability to create great UIs with JSS
Walt Rolle and Pushkar Chivate’s Content Hub Session: End-to-end campaign execution and ROI with Content Hub and Sitecore XP: The session was a good example of how to create and distribute content using Content Hub and Sitecore XP, and how the two platforms complement each other.
My biggest “Breaking the script” moments of Sitecore Symposium were:
1) John’s Hopkins Story: John’s Hopkins won one of the Ultimate Experience Awards for Creating Human Connections. During a time of panic, Johns Hopkins was able to quickly put out information that was relevant to users, and scale with the traffic to the website. Incredible moment of connection providing the right content at the right time.
2) Sitecore Sense of Community: This was a difficult year in general, and Sitecore Symposium, like so many other things was very different this year. I knew going in that it wouldn’t be the same with networking and building relationships. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the sense of community. I got networking requests through the Sitecore app and via LinkedIN, and was able to keep in touch with so many through twitter, chat, and slack.
I am grateful that Sitecore kept Symposium going even through the pandemic. I am excited about the announcements of Auto-Personalization Standard in Sitecore 10, and CaaS. Most of all, I can’t wait for next year and the moment of connections when we meet again in person at Las Vegas 2021.
