Content is King!

"Garbage in, Garbage out". This is a familiar phrase that I am hearing used ever more frequently during conversations about technology in business. Want high quality financial reports? Need great customer insights from your CRM system? The technology alone can't do this – you’ve got to feed in the quality data to get anything approaching high quality business information out.

And so it goes with marketing. You could have the slickest html design for your mailer, the best handle for your Twitter account or the highest number of LinkedIn connections but if you've got nothing of interest to say or no value to add then what's the point?

This has been high on my mind recently as the team and I get ready for Progress Exchange 2013, our largest and most important customer and partner conference of the year. With hundreds of you committing your time to join us in Boston, we're making sure that your investments are rewarded by bringing you the best in content, presenters and entertainment to make it a fantastic experience for you and your teams.

And how will it differ from previous conferences you've been to? For anyone who organizes or attends these events you know it's not as simple as a few good breakout sessions and paying a fortune for a well-known sports manager to teach us about leadership! Each year we aspire to bring you a better conference than the year before and this year we've set ourselves some pretty big goals. For me and my team in the run up to the event, it's all about putting in huge amounts of time, effort and talent so that you get the following out:

• Keynote speakers that are as inspirational as they are informative
• Breakout sessions that spark great conversations, business ideas and connections
• Workshops where you can get hands-on and unleash your creativity in a lab environment
• Partner and customer-led sessions where the content is driven by you
• Showcases that explode with the power of your solutions on our platform

How does that sound as a recipe for success? Have we put enough in? Think it needs a little extra garnish? Well how about a ton of fun, the finest in regional food and some truly memorable moments.

You with me? Good! Here's where you can join in, stay tuned, and get the news as it happens:

• Follow me on Twitter: @jegriffinsmith
• Join the Exchange 2013 conversation using #PRGS13
• Connect with the Progress team on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/progress-software
• Book your place! www.progress.com/exchange