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.

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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:

1. How to get everyone on board with a rebrand
2. The best process for redesign and a roll-out
3. Where to look to avoid the pitfalls in the rebranding process

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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:

• Start an admission social media account
• Collaborate with others to produce valuable content
• Create customer service and lead gen. opportunities on social
• Utilize current students

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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: 

• Address current international student issues.
• Increase your connections with potential international students.
• Create campaigns the put a positive spin on current events.
• Connect with students on a human level, utilizing and amplifying student stories.

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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.

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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:

• Take a look at the free data that platforms provide.
• Explore how to use data to create targeted campaigns that will yield promising results.
• Discuss how to explain your campaign results to your administrators in a way that makes sense.

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Social media is becoming part of many staff roles within higher. 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.

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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:

• The newest social platforms that are delivering the best results for our clients
• Understanding if a platform is the right fit for your customers
• The ideal testing methodology to determine the impact of running media on a new channel
• How to develop a creative and messaging theme that will resonate with your core audience regardless of platform

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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.

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Staying up on the latest Instagram changes is hard. In this session, we'll cover leveraging the newest Instagram features, including:

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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:

• Tools for monitoring sentiment and conversation about your company
• Framework for deciding when to engage with trolls
• How to build a successful social media crisis plan

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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:

• Working across the entire organization (not just marketing) to boost brand awareness, lead generation, and client success/support
• Optimizing content to fit across multiple social media platforms, multiple times
• Prioritizing your time and projects as a one-person team

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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?

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During this session, Tessa, Matt and Cameron will showcase how Microsoft connected with thousands of developers across the globe during our annual Microsoft Build event, share best practices for engaging audiences, monitoring comments, managing trolls, and ensuring that people felt excited to try the offerings that were announced during this event.

Takeaways:

• Which Twitter capabilities to leverage for during event experience and engagement
• How to effectively engage audiences at scale with custom creative and engagements
• How to sustain momentum once announcements have landed

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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:

• Setting up the campaign correctly
• Determining the right demographics to target
• Choosing creative and copy that will most likely resonate with your target demographic

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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:

• Learn the basics of Artificial Intelligence: what it is, how it works, and why it matters
• How AI has been and will continue to impact marketer’s heading into the 2020s
• Learn about some of the AI-powered tools available today that can help enhance your social media strategy
• Leave with a roadmap that can help you to determine where AI can best fit within your digital marketing strategy to yield the greatest ROI

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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:

• Using target audience research to determine the best platforms
• How to identify the right channels and KPIs for your objectives
• Ideal content types and messaging by platform
• Key tactics that are driving the best results on those platforms

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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!

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