January 2021 Summaries

The use of images in storytelling has been a universal language across cultures and continents, with at least 350 cave paintings found in Europe alone, and more discovered in other parts of the world, such as Borneo. The human brain can process images quickly, with vision being our sharpest sense, and images combined with text improve comprehension by up to 89%. Images have been harnessed in marketing and advertising from early on, and are powerful tools for connecting with audiences and reinforcing brand personality. However, generic stock photos are not enough, and custom visual content that fits the message, tone, and brand is always better, as seen in Contentful's successful implementation of a custom illustration strategy to humanize technology, promote inclusivity, and reinforce brand messaging.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated shifts in how companies engage and support their customers digitally, with a growing emphasis on customer care, self-service tools, and human connection. Brands are finding ways to adapt by leveraging technology, company culture, and local engagement to provide support during this time of uncertainty. Companies with agile structures and cultures are better equipped to respond to operational changes and pivot quickly, while knowing one's brand is crucial for adaptability. The pandemic has also highlighted the importance of balancing machine-to-human interactions in customer support, as well as the role of business in the community. With the lockdown expected to be temporary, companies are encouraged to take the good of what they've learned from this time and apply it to their future operations. By being creative and venturing into new channels, businesses can stay relevant and engage with customers even when traditional methods are not viable.

We've improved our search function to provide phrase-based search, allowing you to find precise results by limiting "false positives" and reducing the number of irrelevant results. This new feature will be available in our full-text search engine, including the content APIs and web app, making it easier for users to quickly find what they need without wasting hours searching through thousands of irrelevant results. The phrase search strategy queries data in a more efficient way, resulting in faster search times while providing better relevance and accuracy.

Digital experience is customer experience`, says Forrester analyst Amanda LeClair. To succeed in the digital era, brands must be resilient, adaptive and creative, making smart decisions about platforms, practices and partnerships to reconfigure business structures and capabilities. Brands should focus on getting to know their customers, understanding their needs and expectations, and delivering more information, videos, AR/VR content, and lifestyle content. The biggest problem brands face is struggling to understand who their customers are, how they behave, and what they want, often due to disparate systems and data silos. To overcome this, LeClair recommends aiming for small advantages and quick wins, tapping into existing datasets through APIs, and building agility by connecting siloed systems. Forrester's four principles for digital transformation are API-first, cloud-first deployment, enabling practitioner self-service, and automation to do this at scale. Ultimately, digital transformation is a continuous journey about building skill sets, processes, and adopting technology to support adaptive, creative, and resilient business models.

It was the Black Friday where digital reigned supreme, with consumers spending more than $9 billion USD online on November 26th, a significant increase from last year's sales. This surge in online shopping has led to brick-and-mortar stores converting into fulfillment centers and a shift towards mobile commerce, highlighting the importance of having responsive mobile sites. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, but experts agree that ecommerce would have happened even without it. As a result, companies like Contentful are essential for managing large volumes of traffic during peak sales events like Black Friday, with the company handling 669.9 million CDA requests and 18.1 billion API calls in November alone.

GraphQL is a powerful query language for accessing data stored in backend systems, allowing developers to fetch and manipulate data through an HTTP API. The examples in this tutorial show how to write a GraphQL query using various programming languages such as cURL, Python, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, and Postman, and demonstrate how to use these queries to retrieve data from a simple employee database schema. The tutorial also provides information on how to use the GraphQL Playground tool for Contentful users to start learning GraphQL right in their browser.

The first annual customer conference, Fast Forward, held by Contentful in 2020, brought together experts and digital leaders from various industries. Topics covered included lean innovation, the evolution of knowledge management, and scaling content on a global scale. Key takeaways include the need for enterprises to focus more on content creation rather than maintenance or infrastructure, the importance of control and customization in choosing technology solutions, the challenges and strategies for localization, the value of taking risks and embracing lean innovation, and the evolution of content knowledge management. The event also highlighted various app integrations with Contentful's marketplace, such as Translations.com, Mux, and commercetools, which cater to different needs like translation management, video infrastructure, and ecommerce solutions.

In the rapidly changing world of technology and data, customer experience directors like Claire Robinson believe that brands must invest in agility and collaboration to stay ahead. With the help of established digital transformation consultancies, big brands such as Lexus, Unilever, and Visa are creating exceptional digital experiences. However, Robinson thinks that taking it a step further by partnering with other brands across broader customer experience could unlock huge opportunities for real value delivery. Brands should focus on building seamless customer experiences, going beyond superficial promotions and sharing customer data transparently, while also leveraging AI to take away mundane tasks and triage frustrated customers to humans. Ultimately, adaptability, experimentation, and a healthy culture are key to successful transformation, which is never complete and requires continuous adaptation and celebration of small failures.

Contentful is positioning itself as an agile Content Management System (CMS) by emphasizing its ability to provide a unified content access point, facilitate collaboration and planning among practitioners, and deliver optimized omnichannel experiences. According to Forrester, an agile CMS should have components such as a single content repository, brand consistency, competitiveness, easy collaboration and planning, and APIs that enable teams to manage their CMS programmatically. Contentful's features, including its API-first approach, content governance, and extensibility options, aim to address the challenges of traditional CMSes and provide a more agile and flexible solution for practitioners. By doing so, Contentful is positioning itself as a leader in the agile CMS market.