Tuesday, October 27, 2020
8:35 am–8:45 am PDT
Welcome Remarks by Conference Producer Breanna Jacobs
8:45 am - 9:30 am PDT
How to Work within Different Organizational Structures to Optimize Your Social's Impact
This panel will explore topics including how to:
9:30am - 9:45am PDT
Break
9:45 am–10:30 am PDT
Many researchers suggest that there is a unified sweet spot on social media platforms to time your posts for optimal engagement. Few identify solutions for the challenges we experience when our organizations have a diverse set of goals for a variety set of stakeholders.
While simply feeding “the content monster” is often times the best we can do as social media managers, it’s time we start thinking strategically about how to effectively communicate our organization’s key messages to the right audience at the right time.
In this session, Rachel will use her own experiences as case studies to discuss the importance of knowing your digital audiences, resources for creating relevant and timely social content, and ways to amplify your reach for continued success.
Takeaways include:
10:30 am–11:15 am PDT
How to Pitch New Ideas and Share Social Metrics with Colleagues and Executive Leadership Not Active on Social
11:15 am–11:25 am PDT
Save Time to Focus on Educating—Not Marketing
Did you know that Constant Contact partners with educational services and institutions just like you? Whether you’re representing a school, a district, or a university with multiple departments, as a Constant Contact partner, you’ll be able to give your staff and educators a Constant Contact account with the flexibility to customize content for their own online marketing efforts. Whether you want to drive recruitment, secure donations, or engage students and alumni, we have all the tools and support needed, all in one place. Attend this session to learn more.
11:25am - 12:00pm PDT
Break
12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Paid Social Masterclass – Best Platforms, Optimizing Spend and Reaching Your Target Audiences
Social media experts claim that organic reach is dead and paid reach is the only way to share content with your intended audience. So, what do you do first? Which platform? How much should you budget? What audience?
During this masterclass, we help you answer those questions plus more by breaking down your specific goals, the specific platforms you can use to reach your audience and how to optimize your ad spend. This session will best suit an attendee who is looking for introductory techniques as well as some advanced tactics. We will also discuss how to utilize your paid strategies to recruit and communicate with students on a one to one level on social and how to present the information in a digestible way on a platform they utilize on a daily basis.
1:00pm - 1:45pm PDT
Balancing Duties as a Social Media Manager While Executing on New, Creative Ideas
There are so many areas where it’s incredibly important for a social media lead to have a seat at the table: in meetings about emergency/crisis communications, in higher-level brand-strategy planning and audience development, and in conversations with various university communicators about how to best coordinate messaging.
But being in all those places can sometimes encroach on making time for the core job at hand: planning and executing on great posts that get people's attention.
This panel will explore:
3:00 pm PDT
Higher Ed Conference Concludes
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
8:45 am–9:30 am PDT
More Brain, Less Storm: The Power of the Creative Process
Whether you're leading an enterprise content team, or serving as a content team of one, we're all on a mission to create the best possible content with the resources that we have. We look for every opportunity to reduce the time, money, and manpower wasted during creation and distribution, but what about creative waste? Creativity, after all, is a process. It's time to optimize our creative processes, too, so we can confidently and efficiently generate more ideas—and better ideas—for how to share our brand story with the world.
9:30 am-9:45am PDT
Break
9:45 am–10:30 am PDT
Influencer Marketing Best Practices
Panelists will be taking attendee questions LIVE during this 45 minute "AMA" style session. They'll also share how their respective brands are managing their influencer marketing programs right now. Come prepared with your questions - you really can ask them anything!
10:30 am–11:15 am PDT
Aligning Social Media Strategy with Broader Business Goals to Drive Growth
11:15 am–11:45 am PDT
Break
11:45 am–12:45 pm PDT
Google Analytics Fundamentals: How to Measure What Matters for Your Business
What are your visitors doing? What aren’t they doing? Where are they coming from? Which marketing activities are making a difference?
If you have Analytics, you have insights waiting to be discovered. This is the session where we show you step-by-step how to set things up, find insights and take action. Be prepared to level-up your digital marketing expertise.
It only takes a few minutes to fix big setup issues and find the nuggets of truth that will make you a better marketer. This presentation is geared toward beginners who are new (or new-ish) to Google Analytics.
12:45pm - 1:30pm PDT
Succeeding in the World of Online Reviews
Businesses are getting creative when it comes to connecting with consumers during the pandemic. Now more than ever, your online reputation is important––it's the most honest way to communicate customer expectations and exude anticipated quality. Learn how to leverage your online reputation in a way that helps grow your audience, increase engagement and drive revenue.
Key takeaways, you'll learn:
Best practices for building a great online reputation
How to manage your reviews and what to do with them, regardless of the rating
How to stay connected and relevant among the competition
How to communicate your current business COVID operations to your customers and community
Strategies, tips and tricks for leveraging Yelp's free tools to take your business to the next level
1:30pm - 2:15pm PDT
Next Level Interactive Social Media Marketing With No-Code Tools
In this session, Saksham will show you how to build interactive marketing products across the customer journey to grow your business, including graders, contests, calculators, quizzes, recommendations, chatbots, or AR apps.
He’ll walk you through examples like Hubspot's free marketing grader, Moz's site analyzer, VenturePact's mobile app cost calculator, New York Times's dialect quiz, Ikea's AR app, L'Oreal's AR app, and Nike's fitness apps. All of these examples are free tools that help drive your social media engagement, build an audience, and generate leads for your business by adding value to a customer during a micro-moment.
2:15 pm PDT
Day 1 Live Summit Concludes
Thursday, October 29, 2020
8:45 am–9:30 am PDT
The One-Person Social Team: Scrappy Social Media Strategies with Big Impact
Do you ever look at a brand’s social media presence and automatically assume a team of 20 is making that magic happen? Chances are it is actually a smaller team, a team of one. In this session, Katelyn Brower, Social Media Manager of Sterling, will help you become a stronger social media manager as you act as a team of one for your organization. You'll learn how to better strategize, prioritize, partner with teams across the organization, and most importantly deliver results. Strength comes in small numbers, let Katelyn show you how!
Takeaways include:
9:30 am–9:45 am PDT
Break
9:45 am–10:30 am PDT
Scaling Your Paid Media in Emerging Platforms
Brand new social platforms are emerging almost monthly, with advertisers being pressured to deliver consistent results while also being early adopters of these new emerging technologies. With new platforms like TikTok, or even smaller ones like Quora or Snapchat, how can you know which one is the right fit?
In their presentation, Zenia and Vernon will share a winning strategy, where they outline:
10:30 am–11:15 am PDT
Social Media: It’s Not All About You!
If I asked you to scroll through your Instagram right now, how many brands that you follow would pop up just in a minute or two? Do you actively engage with those posts? Do you ever buy something just because you saw it on Instagram? Companies of all sizes have embraced Social Media over the last 5-7 years as the newest form of digital marketing and in more recent times, it’s become a key sales driver for many. New products, customer reviews, mission statements, UGC (User Generated Content), and more, are all types of content you would expect to see on a brand’s page.
Now, imagine you saw a brand you follow post their version of a viral meme, write something on Twitter that made you laugh, or respond to a comment you left them to let you know they were there for you. The MOST important thing consumers (64% of consumers if we are being exact) is to feel like a brand wants to connect with them. How do we do this? Find what consumers care about and meet them there. This session will talk about how to make your brand’s social media more about the consumer, and less about you/your brand.
Key Takeaways:
11:15 am–11:45 am PDT
Break
11:45 am–12:30 pm PDT
Attention is Everything: Using Video to Build Brand Love and Drive Action
Earning your customer’s attention is everything. Nothing can be achieved without it. Only once you’ve captured it can you ask someone to share, subscribe, or buy. (And winning attention is hard to do when a person is scrolling through 300 feet of mobile content per day). Video as a creative medium is unparalleled in its ability to grab attention, build brand love, and drive action. This session teaches marketers to build strategies that stop-the-scroll by:
12:30 pm–1:15 pm PDT
Falling Up: The Only Way to Grow on Social Media
In today’s social climate, brands must be willing to take risks (and inevitably fail a few times) in order to be culturally relevant with consumers. It might take posting several videos that flop to land on the one that goes viral - it’s a long game of quantity leading to quality. What most brands don’t realize, is that avoiding such risks will only lead to avoiding opportunity. In this session, hear from Brendan Gahan, Founder of Epic Signal and Partner & Chief Social Officer at Mekanism, on the best ways to develop a social community over time and how he’s leveraged learnings from small failures to generate exponential wins.
1:15 pm PDT
Live Summit Concludes
The role of a college president is unique and challenging given the demands of the position as well as the shifting higher education landscape. Covid-19 has created unprecedented concerns including the inability to connect with stakeholders in person. In this session, you will learn more about the importance of presidential digital engagement both for the leader and the institution as well as research-backed strategies for creating a robust digital presence even with limited resources. We’ll discuss the seven reasons why presidents should devote time and resources to digital engagement and the steps you can take to support their individual styles.
How I Rebranded My 50 Year Old College
Branding is important. Aside from a name, a logo, color scheme, and language are the most identifiable assets that an institution has in order for people to know who this entity is, or what they represent. You see it all the time: businesses, people, products, the list goes on. And educational bodies aren’t exempt from this, either.
But sometimes, there may be an instance in which the current brand image may not communicate the message that the institution is trying to portray. Or perhaps, it’s just dated and needs to evolve to stay relevant in a rapidly changing world. Universities and colleges, in particular, have been known to rebrand – some successfully, others – not so much.
In this session, Chris will walk you through the steps he used to get leadership, athletics, and everyone impacted onboard, as well as the rebranding redesign process itself.
Takeaways include:
Social Media Strategies for Admissions
This presentation will discuss the advantages of an admission office having their own social media accounts and how to utilize resources you already have in place. You’ll also learn tactics on how to develop a positive working relationship with your main marketing/communications department.
You’ll hear about how to create opportunities for customer service on social, including lead generation and how to build your follower base and find user-generated content.
Lastly, discover how you can utilize your current student population to help your enrollment efforts.
Takeaways – how to:
Maximizing Digital Content to Engage International Students a Rapidly Changing Landscape
In this session, we will first discuss the current state of international student recruitment and how your university can handle challenging communications. The world is an ever-evolving place, especially the current state of higher education. I'll talk about ways to assuage student and parent concerns while maintaining your brand voice.
To do so, I will discuss the importance of creating effective campaigns by utilizing storytelling. This will help your institution get ahead of the negative news and position your brand in a positive light, all while increasing connections with students.
After this session, attendees should be able to:
Event Coverage in A Virtual World
With the loss of in-person events, there has been a significant increase in virtual programming. This presents a challenge to social media professionals who aim to generate audience engagement during these annual events. In my presentation, I will share how I've covered these events in real-time, how video has been an essential part of this work, and how I've managed to develop a new model for this work which much different from what I do for live, in-person events.
Social Media Analytics: Making Better Use of Your Data to Create Targeted Campaigns
Many times we find ourselves in a meeting, either pre-campaign or post, trying to explain the measurables to administrators for either justification or approval. This is why it is paramount that we understand our social media analytics. Understanding the data can guide us through our decision-making process, and it allows us to get the most bang for our buck in paid campaigns. Understanding the data and being able to explain that data, can help justify your ask or combat a bad idea.
Takeaways include how to:
Social media is becoming part of many staff roles within higher ed. This presents a variety of challenges for higher education social media managers as those managing social media accounts at colleges and universities are a mixture of novice, intermediate, and advanced users. Additionally, students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends interact with social media in different ways and every college major interacts with social media in unique ways. In order to overcome these challenges, social media teams need to work together and be "social" behind the scenes.
Within Penn State's College of Health and Human Development, we’ve worked to break down department silos and develop ways to learn from each other. Together we've helped novice users become more familiar with social media and helped the experts look at things in a different light. This allowed our team to feel empowered and develop their own approaches to social media and spearhead various initiatives.
This presentation will describe how we moved from 10 independent social channels to one social enterprise working together to achieve the same goal. We'll highlight an Instagram takeover focused on undergraduates and strategies to reach alumni, specifically those graduates of the last decade. At the conclusion of our presentation, we'll provide a virtual toolkit for attendees where you can replicate or borrow any of our strategies, tools, templates, and more.
Reels is an evolution in the future of entertainment as well as a big part of the next chapter of Instagram, which brings together friends, interests, and entertainment like no other platform. Reels is a new way to create and discover short, entertaining videos on IG, and gives people new ways to express themselves, discover more of what they love, and help anyone with the ambition of becoming a creator take center stage. This session will highlight best practices, provide an overview of available creative tools, and demonstrate how you can start experimenting with Reels today.
Surviving Instagram Algorithm Changes to Boost Performance
Staying up on the latest Instagram changes is hard. In this session, we'll cover leveraging the newest Instagram features, including:
Managing Negative Sentiment and Trolls on Social Media — When and How Should You Respond?
Keyboard warriors. They’re everywhere these days — or at least that’s how it feels. Maintaining positive sentiment with your audience is critical to building a lasting relationship, but social media trolls can turn an innocent mistake or misinformation into a public relations crisis overnight. In order to avoid lasting damage, it’s important to know when and how to respond to your harshest and most vocal critics.
In this session, you will learn the tools you need to have in your toolkit to be prepared for the inevitable moment when something goes wrong on social media. We’ll discuss how to monitor the conversation, best practices for engaging (or not), and the building blocks of a good social media crisis plan.
Attendees will leave with a better understanding of:
Reporting: How to Set Yourself Up for Success
Media planners see the world differently. In dissecting campaign performance, media teams are able to dig under the surface of the numbers, finding real truths about the audiences that brands are trying to reach - or even in some cases uncovering complex or trending behavior. In this session, learn how to translate your findings to your clients and brand decision-makers. What about your reporting creates trust between you and your client? How will you cull down complicated data to improve your campaign? Where can you pinpoint cost savings and efficiencies?
Personal Branding for Professionals
Nowadays, it seems like everyone is a “personal brand.” But you don’t need to be a social media influencer to put some basic strategies to work for you in building your business reputation online. We’ll discuss figuring out the basics of your brand, clarifying your message, and setting up your visual and "voice/tone" branding. We’ll also discuss determining your target audience, deciding where to be visible online, content and engagement strategy, and how to extend those online relationships to offline business.
How to Get 100x ROAS on Facebook and Instagram
In this session, you will learn how to optimize your Facebook and Instagram Ads for your ecommerce website. Facebook, when used correctly, can be a powerful advertising platform to help drive ecommerce sales. As a self-taught Facebook Ads expert, Uzair will give some key points on how you can make your ads achieve better results.
Key action items Uzair will cover include:
AI & Social Media: Your Toolkit for Success
Artificial Intelligence. It’s mystical, it’s fascinating, and it is the most prominent of the tech buzzwords heading into the 2020s. For digital marketer’s, AI is most often seen as a piece of technology that is untouchable and near impossible to be able to deploy successfully. Well, the good news is that AI is no longer confined to a black box of mystery. In fact, there are many cost effective and easy-to-use AI-powered tools that already exist that can help you to grow and empower your social media strategy. All you need is a roadmap and a place to start.
In this thought-provoking session, you will:
A year at Klarna: 500K to 5M users
Klarna launched its US Direct to Consumer (DTC) shopping app in 2019. Gylan Saunders and Jon Chang will present examples of the growth marketing structure and social media paid marketing campaigns that grew the Klarna user base to over 5M users in just one year.
3 key takeaways:
How to Choose & Optimize the Right Social Platform for your Brand
Almost all brands have a presence on social media, but the bigger question is if they are on the right platforms to reach their target audience and if they are leveraging those platforms to their fullest.
With new social media platforms emerging and younger audiences with more buying power, is it time for your brand to re-evaluate your channel strategy?
During the presentation, we'll cover:
How to Build a Platform-Tailored Approach to Social Video
Zuck has said it himself, “Over the next few years, the much bigger driver of the business and determinant of how we do is going to be video.” If Zuck’s words aren’t enough, 1 in 3 social video viewers watch videos made by brands, and a majority of internet users – 56% – watch video across all social platforms every month. This session is designed to show you how to repurpose video content to be utilized for organic & paid content across a variety of social channels. Our goal is to help you understand the best way to work with what you have, so you can save time & energy in analyzing video performance and do more of what works for your business and fans!
Adding a Latinx celebrity to an existing campaign, then calling it a day, is one way to try your hand at multicultural marketing. But that doesn’t speak to diverse audiences--at least not in the right way, and not with the right tone.
As marketers, we have a collective responsibility to understand and serve our customers in all the right ways, which includes ensuring we properly understand our audiences, their needs and their cultural nuances so that we can use elements which speak to them specifically.
After this session, you will have an enhanced understanding of:
How to recognize when you are tapping into damaging stereotypes
How to implement key motivators that keep audiences and their attention, as opposed to turning them away
How brands can benefit from properly connecting with multicultural audiences
How to build long-term relationships with Latinx creators
How to turn stereotypes figures into heroes