Sessions

BECOMING A SOCIAL BUSINESS: IBM’S JOURNEY
Presented by: Kat Mandelstein
Cities Available: New York (September 23, 2011)

Kat Mandelstein will share insights on the IBM journey to becoming a Social Business and share practical strategies for how to empower your employees to live social, how to execute effective social media campaigns, and how to leverage social thought leadership to influence the influencers. B2B companies have unique opportunities when it comes to how social transforms their business. Starting from social media marketing to attract and retain customers and evolving into business process changes like crowdsourcing innovation with input from partners and early adopters of your products and services. Social is rapidly turning the traditional marketing and product development plans on their heads and creating two-way real-time dialogue for customer interaction. The guarded walls of the corporation are slowly turning into windows with a new level of transparency inside an effective Social Business.

As the world’s leading global technology brand with over 400,000 employees around the world, IBM is a great case study in leveraging both public social networks as well as their own innovations from IBM Research and product development. Being so large and geographically dispersed, it is the ideal test market for this transformation into a Social Business. IBM takes social seriously and leverages it far beyond the average company: for developing products and services; enabling sellers to find and stay connected with clients; training the next generation of leaders. Social has also been at the core of how IBM shares its vision of the transformation to a Smarter Planet among clients, employees, partners, governments, NGOs, and other key influencer communities. This year social also played a key role in the IBM Centennial celebration, where Watson may have won Jeopardy, but is now on to more serious business.

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BRAND RESILIENCE: MANAGING RISK AND RECOVERY IN A HIGH-SPEED WORLD
Presented by: Jonathan Copulsky
Cities Available: Atlanta (August 26, 2011) and New York (September 23, 2011), Kansas City (October 21, 2011)

“Marketing is no longer about building a brand. There’s now a need for brand defense.” – Jonathan Copulsky, Brand Resilience

We can all name the most prominent brands. But today, brand management has as much to do with safeguarding as it does with building. Brand saboteurs are lurking around every corner – especially in the age of social media where news spreads like wildfire – and organizations need to manage risk, anticipate attacks, and bounce back fast after a hit.

How can you protect your brand? By playing active and consistent defense. That starts with understanding how susceptible your organization is to brand sabotage – and knowing how to reduce its likelihood and impact. In Brand Resilience, Copulsky uses real-world examples, including many from social media mishaps, to bring the challenges of defending brands to life. As important as defining the challenges, he also shares popular brand war stories and lessons learned that organizations should consider and adopt.

In this presentation, Copulsky will walk through his seven-step plan to brand resilience. This includes assessing your brand risks, detecting early warning signals, and adapting your defenses. To further bring his plan to life, Copulsky will also draw on the experiences of today’s most well-known brands. By building an organizational capacity to expect the unexpected and understanding your brand risks, you’ll be in a better position to head off trouble before it occurs – keeping you one step ahead of your potential saboteurs.

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BUILDING CORPORATE SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Presented by: Sam Fiorella
Cities Available: Atlanta (August 26, 2011), Los Angeles (September 9, 2011), New York (September 23, 2011), Toronto (October 7, 2011), Kansas City (October 21, 2011)

We all know the importance of social media marketing and communications and many businesses have now thrown themselves into this space. However, is your corporate organization ready to maximize these new engagements with your audience? If your business hopes to drive leads or nurture prospects and customers through this channel while still driving an ROI, you must attend this session. Sam will navigate the audience through his corporate social roadmap and identify the best path for creating cross-silo collaboration & teams that enable measurable, revenue-driving engagement with your audience.

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CORPORATE BLOGS: TRENDS, BEST PRACTICES AND 10 IDEAS TO MAKE THEM NOT SUCK
Presented by: Mark W. Schaefer
Cities Available: Atlanta (August 26, 2011) and Toronto (October 7, 2011)

Corporate blogs are mystifying, frustrating, time-consuming … and perhaps one of the most powerful marketing weapons in your arsenal. In this fast-paced session, Mark Schaefer will discuss the solid business reasons to blog (even if nobody reads it!), current trends and best practices, the myths of community, and practical organizational tips to help your blog break through.

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DEFYING GRAVITY – INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO FUEL SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
Presented by: Rebel Brown
Cities Available: Los Angeles (September 9, 2011)

What’s Gravity? That’s the status quo way of thinking and doing that limits our ability to grow. It’s the number one reason many businesses flatline, or crash and burn. Gravity exists all around us – including in our social media strategies. We all know that audiences buy because of their perceptions. Today’s perceptions are created through the Internet and social media word of mouth. Businesses no longer have tight control over the way our markets see our business, the information that is available about our value or the buzz about your brand. Today’s buyers can research, compare and select products without our ever knowing they were looking. Everything changed. Your choices: change, too—or get left in the past.

Social Media offers a breakout opportunity for shifting our interactions with our audiences. But social media is more complex than many realize. Marketing, the way we’ve always done it, doesn’t work when it comes to social media.
Effective social media engagements demand out-of-the-box approaches. And that’s just what we’ll explore. We’ll examine:

  • Gravity and how it comes to our businesses.
  • The biggest Gravity beliefs limiting social media success today.
  • Examples and case studies of Zero Gravity thinkers who have soared to social media success.
  • Immediate, actionable steps that you can take to fuel social media engagement success.

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EMOTIONS- THE HEARTBEAT OF SUCCESS IN MARKETING
Presented by: Judi Samuels
Cities Available: Toronto (October 7, 2011)

Human beings make decisions based solely on their emotions. Let’s be clear – making a decision based on an emotion neither means that you will hold hands with all your neighbours and sing kumbaya, nor does it mean that you will break down and cry at the very sight of that one pink tablecloth you’ve been so desperately trying to find. What it does mean however, is that your consumer (and your client, and your employee and all the folks in your community) are passing judgement and making decisions about you, about what they buy because they feel something.

It is critical for businesses to deeply understand the emotions behind human consumption in order to be successful. For social media enthusiasts and experts alike, this is a point of great positive emotion! Positive emotions provide a foundation for growth and exploration and build the intellectual, social and physical capital for further growth and development. It feeds itself. Take a good look at those online communities that thrive – positive energy and emotion flow so freely, one often feels the impulse to jump in. This means that social media platforms have given marketers an important tool to expand those positive emotion touchpoints with consumers and to nurture those relationships.

Judi will share insight on emotional marketing and leave you with a few pointers on how to ensure emotions are considered in your next marketing campaign… Not to mention, you’ll feel really good about it too!

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HOW BLOGS AND SOCIAL DATA HELP DRIVE C-SUITE BUY-IN
Presented by: Shelly Kramer
Cities Available: Kansas City (October 21, 2011)

Social media is for leads and sales. Getting the executive members of your organization to understand that is a key element to your overall success. Whether you’re using social channels for HR recruiting, new business development or brand awareness and reputation management, data is critical. In this session we’ll show you how we use data and analytics to monitor, analyze and show growth in social channels, including the corporate blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and beyond. And also how you can use social channels to effectively support what you’re doing in your offline marketing efforts – and ultimately, lead to more leads and sales.

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HOW SOCIAL IS CHANGING THE SEARCH LANDSCAPE
Presented by: Sean McGinnis
Cities Available: Kansas City (October 21, 2011)

Search remains a key driver of traffic and leads to nearly every business with a web presence. In fact, Google alone serves up over one hundred billion searches monthly. As always, the search landscape is ever changing as the race toward the “perfect” search engine continues. Those changes have accelerated faster than ever as social and search have begun to come together. Today, the alliance between Bing and Facebook and the launch of Google+ are driving real changes into the search experience. In this session you’ll learn:

  • How social signals are being integrated into traditional search algorithms
  • How social data sets are being integrated into the search result pages
  • How social proof are changing what we click on while searching on
  • How these changes have real potential to take search to an entirely new level of accuracy

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HOW TO BLOG LIKE YOUR BUSINESS DEPENDED ON IT
Presented by: Tin Dizdarevic
Cities Available: Los Angeles (September 9, 2011)

Web Site vs. Blog – do you really need both? In this session, Tin helps you figure out what you are good at, and will share advanced tips and tricks to develop a content strategy to support it. He’ll show you how to connect with other bloggers in your field, act as a portal to enable your visitors to learn, and help you prevent falling prey to spammers and dirty SEO tricks.

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LESSONS FROM THE FACEBOOK TRENCHES: THINKING BEYOND “LIKES”
Presented by: Matt Hicks
Cities Available:  Atlanta (August 26, 2011), Los Angeles (September 9, 2011),  New York (September 23, 2011)

The power of Facebook for businesses goes beyond the number of people who click “Like” to connect with your Page. It’s about building relationships where people want to engage with and share your content, and it’s about building an authentic persona for your company that talks with people on their terms. This session will explore how to make your Facebook Page and other activities more personal and engaging through a mix of real-world tips, case studies, demos and group exercises. Topics to be covered include:

  • Advanced features for managing and setting up your Page
  • Developing a voice for your Page and creating the best mix of content
  • How to compete for attention in News Feed
  • Emerging opportunities beyond the Page and off of Facebook

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MAKING SENSE OF MEASUREMENT
Presented by: Candace Kemp McCaffery
Cities Available: Atlanta (August 26, 2011)

As time and resource investment in social media marketing increases, the management of the data that comes with it can be daunting: “Likes”, followers, comments, RSS subscriptions, click-thrus and more can create more questions than answers. What metrics matter in measuring success? How do you track them efficiently (and inexpensively)? And what do you so with the numbers once you have them? This session will focus on gaining greater insight into the performance metrics that matter, and direct attendees toward strategies that help them continually optimize the results of social media marketing. Walk away with new tools to refine your measurement program to meet the needs of clients ranging from small nonprofits to large corporations, and most importantly, how to use all the data you’re gathering to analyze and improve upon your efforts.

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MOBILE MARKETING MASTERY
Presented by: Brandon Eley
Cities Available: Atlanta (August 26, 2011) and New York (September 23, 2011)

With the explosive growth of smartphone adoption, mobile marketing has matured into a medium most marketers should seriously consider. In this workshop, you’ll learn about the types of mobile marketing, including SMS, display advertising, search marketing and location based marketing, and how they can be used both as independent marketing strategies and as a compliment to your current marketing campaigns, both online and traditional. We’ll also look at emerging mobile technologies, such as QR codes and high capacity color barcodes, and how and when they should be used in your mobile marketing.

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ONLINE COMMUNITY BUILDING
Presented by: Patrick O’Keefe
Cities Available: Atlanta (August 26, 2011), Los Angeles (September 9, 2011)

The question isn’t whether or not you have a community. Your community – the people who love and support what you do – is out there. The question is how you engage with them. In this workshop, we’ll talk about community management and engagement in spaces you control and spaces you don’t, from Facebook and Twitter to forums and blogs. This is the art of community building on the web, both the good and the bad, steeped in real world experience.

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PR MEETS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Presented by: Deborah Weinstein
Cities Available: Toronto (October 7, 2011)

Welcome to the wild wild west of social media marketing, where quality trumps quantity and content reigns supreme, Marketers the world over are turning to the virtual space to push their brands, good and services, thanks to the internet’s far-reaching power to get branded news out there and hopefully into the right people’s hands, heads and hearts. But how to achieve lift-off?

Never before has PR, with it’s awesome ability to target specific audiences with relevant, credible P2P (person to person) info that promotes positive consumer awareness and buy-in, held such sway. PR has moved from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘need to have’ in the rapidly changing marketing mix, and Canada’s leading PR practitioner, Deborah Weinstein, president of Strategic Objectives, Canada’s most award-winning PR agency, will take you on a deep dive into this now essential marketing practice – complete with case studies and tips on how to create an effective, results-driven strategy.

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SOCIAL BUSINESS, HOLISTIC STRATEGY
Presented by: Chris Heuer
Cities Available: Los Angeles (September 9, 2011), New York (September 23, 2011), Kansas City (October 21, 2011)

After spending the past 12 years on the top of search results for “holistic business strategy”, Chris Heuer believes the day has finally come for his insights to become part of mainstream management thinking. As the disruption caused by social media reverberates across all aspects of organizational operations and culture, market leaders are turning to social business to transform the enterprise and seize a competitive advantage. The rise of social business is not only the sucessor to eBusiness, it signals the dawn of the post digital era. Today, being digital is expected, it’s the price of entry. If you can’t think holistically, collaborate across traditional organizational boundaries, optimize your organization to act as one and earn the trust needed to truly serve your market, your business may soon be extinct. Chris will share his insights on how to think and act like a social business along with the perspective from his colleagues at Deloitte Consulting LLP on the dawning of the post digital era.

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SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING AND MEASUREMENT: UNDERSTANDING HOW TO TURN DATA INTO BUSINESS INSIGHTS
Presented by: Natalie Petouhoff
Cities Available: Los Angeles (September 9, 2011)

With Social Media and Digital Communications becoming part of how business gets done, businesses are wondering how should they use social media to enhance their business. When social media first started, companies reacted by putting up Facebook pages, signing up for a Twitter handle and adding a blog to their website and other basic social/digital interactions. Now the game has gotten far more complicated. Without a lot of knowledge or framework around how to make sense of all the social media and digital interactions, professionals from all walks of life—PR, Marketing, Customer Service, Production Development, Engineering, etc… want to know, “How does social media affect my business? Does it:

  • Increase Marketing conversion rates and Sales?
  • Reduce Marketing and Sales costs?
  • Reduce costs for building and maintaining brand reputation?
  • Shorten Product Development cycles?
  • Increase positive word-of-mouth and awareness?
  • Decrease agent-assisted calls in Customer Service?
  • Decrease overall costs by reducing items like return merchandise (RMAs)….

Yes, it does. And the question on everyone’s mind is How.” This session will use real-life case studies to illustrate with examples so you’ll leave with tools, tips, strategy and tactical capabilities to monitor and measure the success of your social media and digital communication programs. We’ll cover the how’s, the what’s and the why’s to social media monitoring and measurement:

  • Monitoring: What to monitor and why. Who and what to monitor. Where to find the audiences to monitor. Understanding what your audiences want and care about. What free social media monitoring tools to use. What paid social media monitoring tools to use. How to set-up social media monitoring searches to make sure you get what you need.
  • Measure: Once you have the data, how to turn it into business value. Secrets to taking data and turning it into insights. What metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and measurements you need. How to connect metrics, formulas and calculations. Social media ROI calculations, models and methodologies to show business value.

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THE FUTURE OF SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
Presented by: Scott Briggs
Cities Available: Toronto (October 7, 2011)

Companies are just beginning to grasp the true power of social data. The ability to collect feedback without the need for costly market research studies, surveys, and focus groups is a relatively new prospect. But as brands have started measuring, many sense that they could (and should) be doing much more with the abundant data at their finger tips. Simply collecting data is not enough. To remain competitive, marketers must fully realize the breadth and depth of knowledge and insights they can gain from online conversations.

Scott Briggs will discuss the state of social media intelligence today and where we are headed in the future. He will outline the advanced techniques that forward-thinking brands are using to move from simply collecting data to truly analyzing and drawing insights that are fueling smart business decisions.

The future of social intelligence is predictive, strategic, and unlike social measurement as you know it today. Are you ready?

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TREND CURRENTS IN SOCIAL MEDIA
Presented by: Steve Woodruff
Cities Available: New York (September 23, 2011),

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+: it is almost impossible to not get all caught up in the current trends and platforms that swirl around the social media space, making it difficult to see how these evolving approaches fit into a marketing plan. The fragmented and fast-moving digital networking world can blind us to the bigger-picture drivers of all these developments – forces that will certainly shape how we communicate in the marketplace in future days. In this session, we’ll get beyond the particular boats (current platforms and tools) and examine the river – the trend currents – which are driving social media adoption. We’ll step back from the noise and gain clarity on the handful of cultural and technological trend currents that make social media an inevitable evolution, and provide context as to how it can best be used for business growth.

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WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING: CREATING BUZZ AND ENGAGING INFLUENCERS
Presented by: Sean Moffitt
Cities Available: New York (September 23, 2011), Toronto (October 7, 2011), Kansas City (October 21, 2011)

Leading industry thought leader and practitioner Sean Moffitt delivers a session that provides a 360 degree overview of the world’s, culture’s, business’  and marketing’s greatest force – word of mouth. On the social web, word of mouth rules more than it ever has, so step back and enjoy a tour du force of buzz, evangelism, word of mouth, referral and passalong wisdom from one of the industry’s best .  Sean will take you through the 36 reasons why people buzz, the 6 types of influencers and what motivates them, a simple WOM planning and building model, some street-savvy shortcuts for getting the right message out at the right time to the right people, some great case studies and some thoughts on institutionalizing word of mouth in your organization and also a look at some word of mouth watchouts, tools and what word of mouth will look like in the future. Many WOM lessons were not only learned up close but also gleaned from studying the world’s top 100 social brands in his recent book Wikibrands – Reinventing your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace (www.wiki-brands.com)   If you have any interest in understanding what influences today’s customers in what they buy, think and do, don’t miss this session.