Latest Agenda
Plenary session: Doing the basics well: The importance of governance in developing a successful strategy for social media
For B2B and B2C Marketers
Barclaycard, Ben Padley, Global Digital Engagement Director
Philips, Vijay Solanki, Senior Director Global digital marketing
GSK, Alkesh Shah, Former Internal Social Media Demand
Your Roadmap to Success: Discover how to unlock the potential in your social media strategy – and use it to enhance your organisation's business ambitions
If you ask: "Who leads the way in social media?" names like Pepsi, Starbucks, and Domino's trip off the tongue. Confirmation that social media is a great B2C tool – but better avoided by B2B marketers? In a word: No.
According to the latest forecasts, B2B spend on interactive marketing will double in the next five years – which goes to show that those who are already exploiting social media as a B2B marketing tool are finding it a profitable exercise.
Even so, B2B social success stories are limited, and there is a sense of risk associated with B2B marketers moving into the social space. After all, when your stock price and major accounts are on the line, is it worth investing resources – and diverting budget – from tried proven sales and marketing strategies?
Perhaps the more pertinent question is: "Can you afford not to incorporate B2B social media into your future plans?"
Here are the facts:
- B2B social media is proven to work
- Most B2B companies don't know the best practice they need to make it a success and exploit it as a business acquisition tool
This session maps out an A-Z of steps you need to take to get B2B social media marketing successfully up and running – and delivering – for your business. And you'll be pointed in the right direction by major corporations who are at the top of the B2B social tree.
Dell will share their own roadmap and the key moments that have seen them grow to become one of the world's leading social media brands. GE Healthcare will show you that if they can do it well in one of the most heavily regulated and complex industries, so can you.
- The possibilities – and limitations – of B2B social media: See how far your company can push its social media strategy and benchmark against those who have been there and done it
- Be Prepared: Understand where the next B2B social media trends are headed and see how you can leverage the information to maximum advantage
- The Returns: Gain access to premium data about the expected returns of current B2B campaigns and calculate what your own marketing can expect to gain from smart use of social media
General Electric - Conor Mckechnie, Global Public Affairs
Dell - Kerry Bridge, Social Media Manager
Case Study: How to use Twitter for maximum impact on your marketing and reach
Twitter is one of the most powerful tools in a B2B social marketer's armoury, with 33% of those who use it saying they have gained at least one customer as a direct result of their Tweets.
So if everyone's using Twitter, the real question is: "How can you use Twitter better than everyone else?"
At this session you'll discover why Twitter should rightly sit at the centre of your digital strategy, how to make it work for your business – and how to out-smart your competitors.
- The Benefits of two-way Twitter: How to transform your one-dimensional communications into messages that make your target market want to talk back to you
- Innovate: Lift yourself above the noise, and deploy the latest trends and tactics to differentiate yourself from the competition
- 140 characters: What can you realistically achieve with short messages – and is Twitter best used to support non-social and other digital marketing messages?
IBM - Stuart McRae, Executive Collaboration Evangelist
Case Study: Why strengthening your presence and driving usage on LinkedIn needs to be a top priority
LinkedIn feels like a natural fit for B2B communication. After all, its primary function has always been to connect business people – unlike Twitter and Facebook.
Did you realise that 26% of B2B social media users report that LinkedIn is a primary resource? Or that every single Fortune 500 company has executives on the network – and that 50% of these executives are decision makers?
How much business and marketing have you done with those people? And how much incremental business could you gain if you unravelled the full potential of LinkedIn? With so many decision makers in the space, getting an effective LinkedIn strategy in place and making it work to your advantage probably merits a higher priority.
In this session Head of Communications & Campaigns from BT Expedite, BT’s multichannel retail specialist will demonstrate exactly what LinkedIn can do for your business and the role it is capable of playing in your social media mix:
- Learn how to deploy advertising on LinkedIn for maximum impact to better target new and existing customers
- Hear how Linkedin has helped reach prospects, drive registrations to events and help secure new business appointments
- Assess how LinkedIn offers your business the chance to advocate the brand and build higher value, longer lasting relationships
- Unravel LinkedIn Groups: Decide where your strategy fits in with the current LinkedIn landscape and target the right people without any need to segment your audience
BT Expedite - Justine Arthur, Head of Communications and Campaigns
Increase your audience engagement: Avoid three common, counterproductive mistakes – and start making your people care about your business and what it has to offer them
One of the biggest dangers as a B2B marketer in social media is having a monologue instead of a conversation. That's simply not social! A one-way conversation looks like push marketing. And that – quite simply – is a turn-off to all those who inhabit the social media space.
What are the most common mistakes? Rehashing old press releases. 'Shouting' at your audience. Creating a social media presence and then doing nothing with it.
A new survey shows only 32% of B2Bs 'engage' with clients and potential customers on a daily basis via various social platforms (compared to 52% of B2C counterparts) so it's clear there's everything to play for when it comes to building genuine relationships online – and making engagement in the social space pay.
What are the secrets of making your audience care about – and respond to - your messages?
You'll need great content, plus some interesting conversational gambits. And in this session, our experts will let you have proven best practice strategies that demonstrate how to foster genuine conversations via social media – and reap the benefits:
- Analyse the latest engagement models and campaigns that unlock a response from your audience
- Be heard in every forum: Adapt your engagement approach and methodology from network to network. Learn which voice fits which area
- Be proactive: Understand when to engage the audience in conversation – and when to take a back seat and allow the conversation to flow
CME Group - Allan Schoenberg, Director of Corporate Communications
3M - Kirstie Heneghan, Social Business Manager
Gain clear visibility: Pinpoint your end users and effectively communicate with them
B2B social media conversations usually take place across a variety of networks - including business forums, Twitter, industry-specific sites and even competitor networks - which makes it that much harder to keep track of customers and potential customers.
This session, will help you develop a successful in-house strategy so you can pinpoint the most appropriate social media profiles for engagement which meets the needs of your customers:
- Build a clear picture of who your messages need to reach in order to develop Social Media profiles using business drivers and customer insight
- Learn how to set-up an in-house social media strategy and framework to alleviate risk and optimise resources
- Look at proven methodology for tracking down your end users and communicating effectively with them
Standard Life, Craig Johnston, Digital and Social Media strategy
GSK, Alkesh Shah, Former Internal Social Media Demand - Simon Hughes, Global Marketing operations
How to align your social media activities with your key business objectives – and why failure to do so will damage your company
According to the experts, 90% of B2B organisations will have dipped a toe into the social media waters by this time next year. But the harsh reality is that unless you think hard about why you're getting involved, you might do more harm than good.
Regarding social media as a necessary evil – something you have to do, so "let's do it and get it out of the way" – won't sit well with your audience and it probably won't sit well with the rest of the business.
By contrast, if you accept social media can support everything your company does - and act as an extension to your business – you're already on the way to using the space to gain new customers and increase brand loyalty.
Right now, savvy marketers know social media gives them huge scope to elevate their brands above those of their rivals – and never more so than when they have thought through their online presence to ensure it supports key business objectives.
This session showcases innovative, interesting social media campaigns that are perfectly aligned with business-critical objectives:
- Examine which areas of the business your own social media strategy can help with, and understand how you can better support other departmental needs
- Harness your non-traditional audience to help you discover what your key business objectives should be: Let the audience tell you what they want from your business – and deliver it
- Design and distribute messages that both engage your audience and chime with your key business objectives. Make your messages valuable to your audience whilst progressing your own objectives.
Siemens - Gail Lyon, Global Head of Social Media
Psion, Jonathan Brayshaw, Social Lead
Resource Drain: How to achieve maximum impact – and tangible results – with only limited resources
One thing that is holding back the advance of B2B social media is scepticism from above. Somehow it remains easier to secure B2C buy-in.
If you're still hearing: "It's a fad" and "It'll pass", you need to be extra sure that your first steps at B2B marketing will pay off – otherwise, second steps are unlikely to happen at all.
So how do you extract maximum benefit from a campaign? And where – exactly – is it most profitable to invest your resources in the first instance? After all, there's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, the Blogsphere, Google+, LinkedIn, Flickr, Pinterest– and that's before you've even thought about forums and industry hubs!
There's no way of covering them all, so where should you look? And should it be a full or part-time corporate commitment?
In this session we'll help you to decide how to start out with your social media marketing – and help you to strike an optimum balance between traditional marketing and social space activities. Importantly, we'll also highlight the key mistakes that you need to avoid:
- Time is money: How many networks do you need to have a presence on, and how much time should you dedicate to each?
- New networks: Evaluate which of the newer social networks – Pinterest, Google+ - will deliver lasting value, which ones are passing fads – and how to use this assessment technique to determine your response to new sites in the future
- Resource: How much of the marketing team's time and effort is required to successfully run an active social media presence? And how should this change over time?
BAE Systems - Price Floyd, Vice-President of Digital Strategy
Put your efforts into perspective and discover value: Understand what your B2B social media campaigns are bringing to the table
It's tempting to consider measuring social media impact in simply monetary terms. After all, that's all the Board wants to see.
But that would be too simplistic – and even counterproductive, because social media impact is far more complex than that.
So how DO you measure your social media success? It all depends on your business objectives.
Perhaps you want to improve company image, in which case you need to track sentiment. If you want to boost conversation, you need to track mentions about your brand.
Everything must be relative to your aims, and you need to put the right metrics in place to see what – exactly – social media is bringing to the table.
In this session, you'll get to grips with popular metrics and models that will tell you if your social media engagement is making a real difference. You'll also learn how to set targets that are appropriate for your business goals:
- Analyse the B2B-specific metrics that allow you to show progress in your marketing efforts and act as KPIs for your social marketing initiatives
- Map your social media footprint and see how it's benefitting the wider business and you
- Assess the success of your campaigns against other digital channels, and adapt your methodology to analyse both on the same spectrum
Intuit - Bjoern Uehss, Global Social Media Manager
Convincing the CFO that B2B social media can be a profit centre rather than a cost drain
Social media 'Return on Investment' is a question that won't go away. After all, you are pulling time and effort away from other resources, so where are the returns – and how much do they add up to?
The good news is that leading B2B social practitioners can demonstrate that their digital activity is making money.
This session is designed to give you the tools you need to show your CFO how social engagement is impacting on the bottom line:
- Proven methods to uncover the ROI of your social media campaigns and just what that means
- How to strike a productive balance between searching for ROI – and actually driving your business forwardDebate whether ROI is the true measure of success – and if not, where that lies for your business
SAP - Sarah Goodall, Regional Head of Social Media (EMEA)
Case Study
Avaya, Claire Macland, Head of EMEA Marketing
Moderator: Krisha De
Business Influencers: How to develop Brand Ambassadors who are eager to sing your corporate praises in the social space
Speakeer TBC
The three "Rs" of Social Media in B2B Marketing: Re-use, Reach and Relevance
In this session you’ll discover ways Avaya leverages social media to achieve its marketing goals. Specifically how you can go about:
- Integrating social media to amplify marketing programmes
- Using social media for strategic thought leadership
- Striking the balance between local and global to achieve relevance
Avaya, Claire Macland, Head of EMEA Marketing
