by Erynn Baird
We recently hosted our first Opal Community event for our users in the Seattle area. We’ve been fortunate to work with exceptional marketing teams from top brands in the Pacific Northwest such as Amazon, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Rational and our host of the event, SAP Concur. All of these brands were represented at our debut community event and shared how their unique teams use Opal as their marketing collaboration platform to orchestrate the various functions of marketing and storytelling.
Part of our mission at Opal is to help marketers do the best work of their lives and there are so many amazing stories of winning marketing work being done in Opal. We thought it was about time we connected with our customers in one area to share best practices, make connections and inspire one another on how to get the most out of the Opal platform.
And who better to share the latest tips and tricks than the people who bring their brand stories to life in Opal, every single day. These are the people who inspire me every day, and for whom our team at Opal purpose-built the platform for and continues to innovate for every day.
So in the peaceful morning hours before everyone’s crazy days got started, we gathered together at SAP’s headquarters to partake in a delicious waffle bar (mimosas not included this time 😉) and connect over a shared enthusiasm for marketing collaboration.
Our co-founder and Vice President of Product, David Gorman, shared new functionality in Opal: Timelines and budgeting. The Opal team purpose-built these new capabilities to better serve content marketing teams, but with a wide variety of teams represented in the room, we observed that the enthusiasm for these new platform innovations was shared by all. Gorman explained how teams can use Opal Timelines and budgeting capabilities in Opal to:
- Help teams align around a strategy and budget
- Identify gaps and conflicts in their content plans
- Manage flighting of content from one place
- Provide visualization of how an audience will experience content before publishing
“Opal has transformed the way we collaborate with other teams.”
– Meggie Clemens
Our speaker Meggie Clemens, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at SAP Concur, then shared her story with the room of marketers. Her team works in Opal to collaborate around the SAP Concur brand’s PR, social and field marketing.
Since adopting Opal in 2017, Meggie says they have cut their work in half. To help their team get the most out of the Opal Platform, they frequently share tips and tricks and how-to content in a digital newsletter and find value in the Opal Learning Center. “Opal has transformed the way we collaborate with other teams,” said Meggie.
Gary Ploski from our Opal Education team jumped in to share new ideas on how marketing teams maximize visibility, alignment and efficiency by working in Opal.
We finished with break-out sessions with Opal users by their role so different teams could connect over how they are working in Opal for day-to-day marketing collaboration processes and practices.
I think our MC for the event, co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer George Huff said it best when reflecting on our inaugural Opal Community event: “This event reinforces that all marketers face the same challenges. That’s why it’s so important to bring our user base together to share and learn from one another. And as it turns out, the marketing community is incredibly tight — everyone knows one another. Also, it’s incredibly gratifying to be able to connect with so many unique individuals and teams who bring their work to life in Opal, in real-time and in real life.”
We are already busy planning our next Community event. Stay tuned to the Opal Events page for more details on all of our upcoming events. We hope to be in your city soon!
