In this session, you will learn how to build and implement a social strategy on a small or limited budget. You will see a suite of social media tools that you can turn into a dynamically integrated social marketing program. You will learn a variety of practical skills that can be easily applied within your own organization, including how to:

Leverage all available marketing material from your company to begin your social media marketing plan

Develop a social media strategy and policy that enable your program to grow and thrive

Identify the right social marketing and analytical tools available to execute a successful social marketing plan

Collaborate with partner organizations to highlight synergies and connect with key audiences

Add a social layer to your website to increase audience engagement and build awareness for your mission

Chaos is the new norm. Consumers have so much competing for their attention; it’s an ongoing challenge to stay top of mind instead of out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Want good news? There IS an innovative way to get noticed above the noise.

It’s called The SPIKE – and It’s based on the premise that none of us have the bandwidth to be top of mind – all the time. As leaders and CEO's, we’ve got to TRIAGE our resources to maximize our organization’s visibility, “virability,” and profitability. You do that - by getting ahead of the SPIKES – and staying on top of the SPIKES.

What are SPIKES? They’re an abrupt rise in awareness and attention. There are trend spikes. Media attention spikes. Celebrity spikes. Topic relevancy spikes. Complaint spikes. Natural disaster spikes. Holiday spikes. Research spikes. Political spikes.

And your success depends on your ability to:

Track positive spikes relevant to your organization and capitalize on them as they occur

Forecast negative spikes so you can mitigate or minimize them in advance

Create opportunity spikes by leveraging fortuitous variables to your advantage

You’ll love this session in which marketing expert/crisis communications specialist Adele Cehrs shares real-world cautionary tales and success stories that dramatically demonstrate the bottom-line consequences – good and bad – of ignoring the spikes or acting on them.

More importantly, you’ll discover how to pro-actively manage the SPIKES that impact your organization – so you can turn them to your advantage.

Sure, you may already be in the social media space and might be interacting with your audience, but how meaningful are your engagements? How do they translate on and offline, and how do your engagements contribute to your social media [and business] goals?

This session will tackle those questions and others relating to how you can create, track and measure engagements in the social media space.

By attending this workshop, you will understand:

How to define and determine a "meaningful" engagement

Creative ways to generate more meaningful engagements

Ways to measure the efficacy of engagements and interactions

Consistently among the highest rated workshops and all new for 2013, get ready to be wowed!

You’re tweeting, friending and pinning and now it’s time to pull it all together with content that engages… that makes it possible for you to BYPASS traditional media, control your message and deliver that message, fully intact, to the very people you want to reach.

Sound too good to be possible? Well, it isn’t.

Because seeing is believing and doing makes things stick, be an active participant in this hands-on workshop that will make you a believer in online press releases… and how they can be leveraged to be game-changers for you and your business.

Oh, and bring your laptops, iPads or similar device and be prepared to work.

This session will cover content feedback and social data to understand the story behind the need and utility for Boeing’s digital content marketing campaign. Join Jim as he shares lessons learned when Boeing analyzed data across platforms to achieve internal buy-in and launch their latest campaign. Gone are the days of looking to external sources for content. The new social demands require development of an entirely new skill set. Now in its second year, learn how Boeing conducted focus group research and used the feedback and data in collaboration with their internal communication team to shift their social strategy to find what works.

Long gone the days when social media can be treated as a bolt on to a marketer’s “proven toolbox”. As such social media needs to be fully connected to the marketing and overall company strategy and executed not as a one-off tactic but as an integral component of the overall marketing recipe. Furthermore, effective social media requires ongoing experimentation – and can help inform and shape strategy. Jennifer Dominiquini will share a proven framework for ensuring that social media is linked to strategy and tips for ensuring that social media is not only connected but measurable and sustainable as well.

Marketers are well-aware of the marketing potential of Social Media, at least until LinkedIn enters the conversation. This session will identify the marketing capabilities in LinkedIn and present strategies, techniques and tactics for marketing your company, product or service using LinkedIn’s unique platform and audience. You don’t have to be a master of LinkedIn to enjoy this session, but it is advanced LinkedIn education. You will learn:

How to perpetuate the corporate brand through your employees

How LinkedIn Company Pages support corporate marketing efforts

How a LinkedIn Group can create a community of ardent supporters and brand advocates

Social media is a double-edged sword. It offers a wealth of opportunities for greater connection and communication, with your customers and among your employees. It can help you recruit and retain the best employees. It can be a source for new ideas and innovations that are the lifeblood of growth. But social media also poses unprecedented new risks and challenges for your business. It can expose you to legal liability. It can drain productivity. And it even allows a wayward employee to harm your reputation irreparably with the push of a button.

This has become the decade of social media, and it is only poised to increase in importance and influence. Social media permeates every aspect of today's HR. Yet, according to recent surveys, there exists a vast disconnect between employees and employers around the issues of trust and privacy in the workplace. Nevertheless, despite these divergent viewpoints between employees and management, corporate America is embracing the value of social media.

With the growing importance of social media to American businesses, one would expect most to have a social media policy to guide employees' online activities and temper expectations of appropriate and inappropriate uses. Shockingly, though, one report found that only 29% of American companies have a formal policy regarding employee use of social networking sites. If most of your employees are interacting via this technology, how can you afford not to understand the risks and protect your business? Simply put, your business cannot afford not to understand this evolving medium and the legal risks it presents.

In this session, attendees will learn:

What is (and is not) appropriate online fodder for evaluating candidates?

How to regulate the proper use of social media by employees (both on and off duty).

For what reasons you can terminate employees for their online activities.

How to define who owns corporate social media accounts used by your employees.

How to avoid the dangerous traps the NLRB is laying for the unwary and uninformed employer.

The session will examine the latest consumer trends in social TV and what they mean for the future of television. Topics such as how TV fans are using social media to interact with talent, creators and fans of their favorite shows, what meaningful social experiences look like and how/whether social impressions tie-in to ratings predictions will be explored. You'll learn the important trends facing industry decision makers and advertisers. Insights from TV Guide’s own social and second screen initiatives such as its groundbreaking Watchlist product with 900,000 users will also be presented.

Social business isn't some hot new fad that will be over in an Internet minute. IBM executive Ed Brill shares lessons learned is social media role in various business functions – and how to collaborate. Whether you are a product or brand manager, marketer, customer satisfaction expert, strategist, HR executive, IT manager, or CFO, this session will help you understand how you -- and your organization -- can be more successful through becoming a social business.

In this session, you will learn how to be successful in social business, based on the strategy and lessons learned as IBM adopted a culture of transformation and engagement. Brill candidly shares the best practices, challenges, and results of IBM's social business transformation. He outlines the process of becoming a social business, through organizational commitment, cultural change, the right tools, and a strategy for engagement.

Learn tips and tricks of managing branded Twitter accounts. Topics of discussion will be audience acquisition, engagement and monetization. There are certain do's and don'ts that each brand's social media managers should know and this session will provide information valuable for all levels of Twitter understanding. Those in attendance will certainly increase your Tweet-Fu!

Social media gives companies a place to build communities, increasing engagement with your brand. In this session, find out how a Fortune 500 company has built its social media communities using strong integrated partnerships with Marketing and PR. Attendees will leave the session with new ideas based on examples of:

How to build a social media plan that supports the overall brand strategy

The power of owned, paid and earned media working together to extend the reach of individual efforts

Social media campaigns that increase engagement with the brand

As Pinterest continues to grow, it is becoming a force to be reckoned with in social commerce. Forward-thinking marketers are rapidly adopting the platform as the next frontier of social media. However, many are struggling to get traction early on. In this session, we'll discuss the fundamental differences between Pinterest and other platforms that should inform your strategy, then walk through case studies of what is and isn't working on Pinterest- and wrap up with advanced strategies for maximizing the ROI of your participation in Pinterest both on and off of the network. This session will be highly interactive, and will adapt to the audience, so all experience levels are welcome!

Your customers are online and want to connect with real employees. Your employees are online and want to connect with customers. How do you empower your employees as brand ambassadors, but also protect them from the risks of social media?

In 2010, Dell launched a company-wide training and certification program to empower employees to deepen customer relationships online. To date, 7,000+ Dell employees are certified to speak on behalf of Dell via social media. Dell has witnessed a powerful employee movement that is rich in customer and brand engagement, plus motivated and passionate employees.

In this session attendees will takeaway:

Insights into launching a company-wide training and certification program.

How to identify, support and activate brand ambassadors.

Insights into launching a subject matter expert program to give key powerful employees their virtual voice.

"Oh how I wish I could be a fly on the wall". Marketers have said this to themselves since the dawn of the industry. And while some smart people in underground laboratories worked on a grand scheme to mount tiny cameras to millions of flies around the world, our customers did something that threw us for a loop.

They began Facebook posting, Tweeting, LinkedIn messaging, and Pinning their every interest for the world to see. Too bad for the mad scientists.

For the first time in history, it is becoming possible to understand our customers' needs, wants, pains, and attitudes in real time, at a micro and macro scale. For us marketers, the choice is clear. We can do nothing, and ignore what our customers are saying publicly. Or, we can choose to leverage these clues about what customers want to create a better experience.

Join this session and learn how SAP has used social listening to:

Pick up clues about customer needs, pains, wants, and sentiment

Inform its content strategy

Respond to crises in real time

Enable the sales force with unprecedented insight into their prospects

Measuring success on social channels has become increasingly important to businesses, but often more questions are raised than answers yielded. While social channels have unique dynamics, ultimately comparability with other media channels is paramount. The purpose of this session is to illuminate how to effectively measure critical business impacts on Facebook.