Drupal and Interactive Digital Marketing

Editor's Notes

• #4: Two successful case studies for Drupal integration. Connexion - Email marketing management A Web factory - Online transactions with Bancontact and Mister Cash on a multilingual Drupal e-commerce site.
• #5: This is Dries... I’m not Dries, but he says “Hello”. I work with Dries at Acquia.
• #6: When he realized he couldn’t be here, he said “Robert, please go to Brussels!” “Yes, sir!”
• #7: “And show the people there how much Drupal rocks!” “Yes, sir!”
• #8: Which was very exciting, because Drupal does rock, and I love to talk about it. I must admit though, when he first asked me to come here and talk to you, I was pretty darn scared.
• #9: What the heck does a web developer like me know about “Marketing”???
• #10: What the heck does a web developer like me know about “Marketing”???
• #11: What the heck does a web developer like me know about “Marketing”???
• #12: What the heck does a web developer like me know about “Marketing”???
• #13: What the heck does a web developer like me know about “Marketing”???
• #14: Well, maybe I *do* understand the *basics* of marketing...
• #15: So I decided to come anyway, and face my fear, and start by showing you what Drupal can do. Maybe along the way I’ll figure out what “Interactive Digital Marketing” actually means.
• #16: Drupal gives you everything you need to build great websites that look good and do cool stuff. That’s what Drupal does. It’s free software - no licensing fees, and you have access to all the source code.
• #17: Drupal is developed by a vast worldwide community on drupal.org. The community - thousands of passionate developers and designers - is an important part of why you should choose Drupal.
• #18: This is a picture taken at our Drupal conference earlier this year in Washington DC.
• #19: 6 months later we met again in Paris.
• #20: The large number of developers and companies devoting their energies to Drupal is truly overwhelming.
• #21: Let’s look at some sites that use Drupal. AXN Is Sony’s television network for adventure, reality, lifestyle, sports & features. It’s available in 60 countries across Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Middle East.
• #22: This is a large Drupal site. AXN Asia alone reaches over 100 million households.
• #23: They’re present in 60 different Markets. They have Over 90 URLs that lead to this site alone.
• #24: But, it’s the Same Branding. Same Infrastructure. It all runs on the same deployment of Drupal.
• #25: Another example is Warner Brothers Records. They have 120 musicians and artists on Drupal. Drupal gives them the same capability - many sites, one infrastructure. But in contrast to AXN, each site can brand itself differently.
• #26: WBR gives each artist creative control to set their own look & feel, to manage their own brand. BUT, WBR runs all of these multiple sites on a single infrastructure. This way, they can provide the same capabilities to each site.
• #27: Totally different feel. But similar capabilities - News, tour-info, streaming media, image downloads, a full community section, and an online ecommerce store.
• #28: Drupal can help solve another problem that most websites have: that they’re one-directional. You’re talking, but is anybody listening? This isn’t how you build success. People want to be involved.
• #29: This is how Bob Dylan is building community. The site allows members to blog, and then promotes the interesting blogs to a “featured” section on the site.
• #30: You can even go farther with involving people. CNNGo is designed to get local insights about global locations. But rather than do all the talking, they’ve asked their visitors to create the insights.
• #31: So what can Drupal do? It can make very interactive websites that engage your audience.
• #32: It can save you money by allowing you to leverage one infrastructure to launch many many sites. It can save you time by having great interactive features out-of-the-box.
• #33: Usually when showing people what Drupal can do, I build a new site. Today is no exception, and you can see the site I’ve built at this URL. Go there now, if you are online.
• #34: Besides, I still haven’t figured out what Interactive Digital Marketing is, so it’s good for me at this point to keep looking at Drupal’s capabilities!
• #35: As this is a Belgian conference, I wanted to make sure that the site would reach the French and Dutch speaking members of the audience.
• #36: As this is a Belgian conference, I wanted to make sure that the site would reach the French and Dutch speaking members of the audience.
• #37: Since I can’t speak Dutch or French, I needed help translating. Thankfully there’s a service called ICanLocalize which integrates nicely with Drupal.
• #38: Whenever I write new content on the site, it gets sent to the ICanLocalize servers (click) and their international network of translators get notified. They go right to work translating, and when they’re done, it gets posted back to my site.
• #39: Whenever I write new content on the site, it gets sent to the ICanLocalize servers (click) and their international network of translators get notified. They go right to work translating, and when they’re done, it gets posted back to my site.
• #40: Whenever I write new content on the site, it gets sent to the ICanLocalize servers (click) and their international network of translators get notified. They go right to work translating, and when they’re done, it gets posted back to my site.
• #41: Whenever I write new content on the site, it gets sent to the ICanLocalize servers (click) and their international network of translators get notified. They go right to work translating, and when they’re done, it gets posted back to my site.
• #42: Whenever I write new content on the site, it gets sent to the ICanLocalize servers (click) and their international network of translators get notified. They go right to work translating, and when they’re done, it gets posted back to my site.
• #43: Another important feature of any site is its search. Many sites overlook how important site search is, but remember that your content is of no use if your visitors can’t find it.
• #44: Acquia, the company I work for, has an excellent search service that is well integrated with Drupal.
• #45: The service is hosted by Acquia and offers great features like Faceted search, content recommendation, and spelling suggestions. You can try it out on the drupal interactive digital marketing dot com website.
• #46: Tagging, categories, and the semantic web are help to give the content on your site more meaning.
• #47: Drupal has great native tagging capabilities, but I didn’t have time to go through and tag all the content I wanted to write.
• #48: Fortunately, Thompson Reuters has integrated their Open Calais service with Drupal and I can use that to extract the important terms from the text that I write.
• #49: Every time content gets published on my site, Calais will find the relevant keywords and make tags out of them.
• #50: The integration of the Calais service and the Acquia Search service is so good that Calais terms automatically become search facets.
• #51: As I’m showing you this site I realize that not all of you have laptops, but many of you have iPhones or some other mobile device. Well, I want to reach you as well!
• #52: The mobile audience is very important, which makes it all the more fortunate that a company called Siruna has made an extraordinary product that integrates with Drupal. Siruna, by the way, is here today, and you can visit their booth on the show floor.
• #53: Their product, OSmobi, consists of a module and a theme that I have to install on my Drupal site. I can then customize how my site looks on your phone using the OSmobi tool.
• #54: After setting up ICanLocalize.com for translations, Acquia for search, Open Calais for tagging, and OSMobi for the mobile devices, I then and wrote a handful of case studies for your enjoyment.
• #55: Another company who is here today, The Parking Lot, recently decided to use Drupal exclusively going forward.
• #56: Here is what Evan van Lissum, their managing partner, had to say: “We've been creating beautiful websites for 10 years, and recently we decided to use Drupal exclusively when it comes to database driven websites.”
• #57: “With Drupal, we are not limited in our design or creativity (this is the main reason in fact). We can create very creative websites which are database driven. BEST OF BOTH WORLDS!”
• #58: I still haven’t come to understand very much about Interactive Digital Marketing. So to fill this gap I went and made a directory of all of the companies on the trade show floor. You can see this online at drupal-interactive-digital-marketing.com
• #59: The directory consists of a map (each point is a company), a table listing of the companies, and a filter that lets you look at the companies by their buzzwords.
• #60: Buzzwords are the terms that I found on company websites that describe what they do in the realm of Interactive Digital Marketing.
• #61: These are some of the buzzwords I found.
• #62: These are some of the buzzwords I found. SEO/SEM, E-Mail Marketing, Affiliate advertising, CRM, Web analytics, Widgets, Social networking, Mobile
• #63: When I looked over the list I realized that these are all things that Drupal can already do! How exciting! Drupal is doing “Interactive Digital Marketing”, and probably better, for less effort, and therefore cheaper, than some of the proprietary competitors.
• #64: And how is this possible? It’s possible because of all the amazing integrations that have been done with existing tools. Drupal is the king of integration - a totally flexible platform on which to build your product or service.
• #65: If you have a tool or a service that does “Interactive Digital Marketing”, chances are you could integrate with Drupal. What’s stopping you?
• #66: Again, a reminder to see the two Drupal talks that are still coming up!