This was the second Sitecore meetup this year. This one was at a different location. It was at Productive Edge in downtown Chicago. It was a scenic walk from the train. The office itself was setup nice. A lot of the attendees will be at the Sitecore Symposium, so it was nice to connect with them. We also used the Symposium app scan on the network menu to connect with each other. Of course, they had my favorite pizza, Lou Malnati’s.

The first presentation was a joint effort by Ryan Kuchler and Will Rolloff. This covered Context Marketing from both a marketer’s point of view and developers’ point of view. One of the things I believe that are overlooked by clients after a Sitecore site is complete is the powerful marketing tools that are in Sitecore.

Summary of topics:

• Marketers – Get to know Context Marketing and deliver personalization to your audiences with out of the box Sitecore features and configurations – Today!
• Developers – Architect and deploy the right application components that enable the business to drive context marketing and scaling it to meet your organizations needs using Microsoft Azure

They did an excellent job presenting and it was the best presentation I have seen on Context Marketing. I walked away with much more specific understanding on how all the different pieces worked. I especially liked the parts were previous versions of a page were compared to a new page, setting the score for each campaign and swapping out presentations based on visits. I will be using this information in the future.

Last, but not least Will presented tips for first time Symposium attendees. I wish I had these for my first Symposium. Even so it being my second Symposium coming up I still learned a few things.

One thing he forgot to mention. Take all the Sitecore bling you can with you.