Latest Agenda

Social media 2.0: Make your marketing excellent and further integrate social media across your company and work flow

Theme One: Harnessing top quality engagement and building a solid and broad fan base to utilize enhanced engagement strategies

Harness yourself a community and keep the masses engaged with your brand

The social media arms race has been in full swing but is slowly moving towards a stance of quality of quantity. It's better to have 100 followers with whom you regularly engage than 10,000 who never pay attention to you. In social media - your community of fans are representative of people's perception of your brand. The stronger and more vibrant the community, the better it reflects on the brand. Once you've got those numbers, what do you do with them? If they aren't interacting with you then you're doing something wrong.

• Learn how to successfully engage with your community and make the most of every fan
• The social media arms race: Weapons of mass interaction - how can we keep the audience involved
• Sleeping giant: Utilzing your fanbase - become friends with your 'friends'

IBM, Joe Hanley, Director, External Relations Europe
Unilever, Senior Director, Global Media Innovation, Debbie Weinstein
Microsoft, EMEA Regional PR and Digital Lead, Consumer, Wendy Gold

The Engagement calculator: How do we measure the effectiveness of social media engagement?

The question on most of the c-suites lips is the same. "The audience is engaging with you on a daily basis, so what?" If there's no financial return is it even viable to persue as a marketing tool, let alone worthwhile. Social media offers unprecedented communication with fans and potential clients alike. The effect that engagement has on your company is a multi-faceted. The PR affect, the sales effect, the 'likes' the 'retweets'. Finding which KPI's make the most sense to your company is a minefield. You have to grab the bull by the horns and take the initiative and decide what is most important to your company and what fits into your objectives broadly.

• Learn what an engaged audience adds to your business in returns
• Don't just measure money, what is the true value of share of voice?
• A reactive community, are you getting enough from your audience?

Workflow and process - how to order social media within a multi-national corporation

To execute your social media strategy , the process and workflow is critical to it being successful. Without order and structure in place your social media strategy risks running out of steam. The correct measures ensure that your staff are both making the most of their time and assisting each other.

In essence it's about getting the entire business behind and involved in social media. Within this another problem arises How do we train people who are going to interact in this new sphere on the internet? An error on social media is amplified by your number of followers multiplied by their followers ad infinitum.

In this session we will examine how those different frameworks in place fit into a corporation model and how that applies to your company.

• Who should be interacting with social media within the company and to what extent?
• Internal platforms: What are the best ways to encourage your staff to interact internally and share best practice amongst themselves?
• Break down the silos: enhance relations between departments and staff and reduce time waste

Cisco, Andrew Warden, Head of Strategy, Emerging Markets Services
Glaxo Smith Kline, Alkesh Shah, Social Media Demand Manager

Theme Two: Commerce through Social Media

Sales as part of the social mix, where it fits and how to make it work for you

The next frontier of your social media policy has to be to monetize it. Social media is known to be great at the start of the sales cycle for the initial contact, and for after-sales care. But how can you make a more integral part of the sales process.

The days of social being 'experimental' and trialling it are finished. Social needs to pay for itself in order to open those budgetary floodgates. Domino's Pizza is one of the first to openly demonstrate that strong growth in online sales is possible via social media. In turn they have seen a 29% surge in pre-tax profits.

Something that can help to add sales into the mix is the further integration of social platforms with the sales and lead generation process. The pitfalls are the dangers of turning off your audience who perceive sales messages as a negative, however that shouldn't stop you from using social to drive sales and as a leading business development tool.

• Discover how to add sales to the social mix without alienating your audience
• Be clever: push at the right times, using the right people
• Are sales the end final frontier, do they matter at all? Is the value not somewhere else?

Whole Foods Market, Bill Tolany, Head of Promotional Commerce

Establishing your social media team as thought leaders and seeing the long term profit

To make those budgetary gains and ultimately make the most of the social media sales vehicle, the most important component is making your brand into acknowledged thought leaders in that space. We've seen the likes of Dell and AT&T become seen as thought leaders in the tech and telecommunications industry. A reputation which has now gone beyond their industry. The lesson is that thought leadership in the social space will lead to a priceless PR value but perhaps most importantly to the C-suite - revenue. This session is designed to show you where to place your expertise, the best platforms to express your business aims and ultimately nurture that reputation into £,€,$ and ¥!

• How can social media help to position your brand as thought leaders
• How to attribute social media indirectly to sales as part of the larger mechanism
• Learn how and where to position your knowledge base in the social space to optimize

Telefonica (O2), Tamara Korcak-Novicka, Social Media Manager
LivingSocial, Rebecca Barr, Communications Manager

The unconference: An ideas session on a topic of your choosing - have your ideas discussed

You come to a conference to get your questions answered. This session is designed to make sure you get that and then some. Bring along your ideas and campaigns and enjoy the biggest brainstorming session available with a room of experts on a topic you decide. What we will do is take votes on the topics most important to you and then move to round-table format to question each other and the experts in the room. This is designed to get you the answers you need and ensure every single piece of knowledge in the room no matter how small is utilised.

• Benchmark against others and see what's working and more importantly what isn't
• Brainstorm en masse: offer critique and get constructive feedback on where to go with your social
• Harness the rooms knowledge, learn from the best practitioners in Europe and your peers

Theme Three: The Elephants in the room - The Social Media Metrics

ROI conundrum - the who, what, where and why on return on investment

It seems that the ROI question is the one thing that will continue to plague social media until we get a definitive answer; or decide that much like the chicken and the egg we won't find an answer everyone agrees on. What it is important to note is that no matter what view we hold on the subject, it is ultimately what most will judge marketing on; and social media is just the latest part of the mix. The business plan for social at some stage must incorporate the ROI, but what are the best ways of finding that?

• See the new systems and metrics involved to finally discover social media ROI
• How do we attribute money to our efforts on social?
• ROI - the true benchmark of success or a marketing mirage?

3M, James Simpson , General Manager, e-Channels UK and Ireland
Brandwatch, Giles Palmer, Founder & CEO

Tracking time: See the non-financial ROI in your social media strategy

Given the contentious nature of ROI, it is important to analyse those KPI's that aren't directly revenue based ROI. If it's not financial then you must look at the next level of investment you place into social which in almost all cases is either time (yours) or that of staff. These measurables should be an important part of the ROI mix. Where should your business be spending its time and how much time should you allocate to the social channels? A question answered by a well monitored strategy. The fact remains that email for example are still one of the most effective tools to a marketer, so it would be wrong to neglect tested methods that are currently working. Social media isn't a fad, but it's important to gauge the right level of spend across the board. With the right KPI's in place, not only justifying but identifying weaknesses in your social media strategy will becoming far easier.

• Time keeping: How much time do you spend on the social forums?
• Staffing: striking the balance between social activities and non-social
• What do we forgo in order to gain in the social space

CME Group, Allan Schoenberg, Director, Corporate Communications

Theme Four: The High Court of Social Media - Marketing vs Legal team

Risk, positioning and trouble ahead - how do avoid, detect and overcome social media dangers.

The dangers of getting social media wrong represent the potential for a social media disaster. They've been well documented, from Versace and Mattel's deleting of posts that they didn't agree with to Kenneth Cole's loose hashtagging and a Pizza Hut and Nestle inbetween. These examples of it going wrong are all too easy find. A reputation you have spent years building on can disappear in an instant. It is said that if you don't trust your employees [to use social media responsibly], then you may not be hiring the right people. Perhaps that's true, but perhaps more importantly, if you haven't created the right guidelines then perhaps the blame lays a little closer to home.

And if it's not reputation, then the risk involves the lawyers. Who's responsible for customers details on social media platforms? Does opening access to employees open up a box of more risks than benefits?

• The Social audit trail: who's keeping a track of customer interactions?
• The firewall: security measures inplace for big business on social media
• The Ten Commandments: discover a workable social media policy that keeps you out of trouble

Paddy Power, Michelle Daly-Hayes , Online Sportsbook Social Media Manager

Theme Five: Social Media Work Flow

The Integrated approach: Who owns social media and where should it live?

As with everything innovative and new, social began life in the marketing department. However, it has long since graduated onto to pastures new. Most will agree that social media is best harnessed when spread across a number of departments. We've seen the hub and spoke model and various takes on how to structure. But what actually works for you?

There is a fine balance to strike between where expertise lives and having the correct resources at your disposal to execute it properly. Should your social be led by marketing? And if so will this interact negatively on other areas? The problem only goes when you began to ask how much to take from comms, product development and customer care. This session is designed to demonstrate where resources are best placed and how you can streamline and ultimately sing from the same hymn sheet internally.

• The next steps: Leaving the comms. and marketing department, where to take social media
• Follow the leader: Learn who takes the lead internally and clarify how much share of voice everyone has internally
• The integration of various departments and where they cross-over.

Dell, Stuart Handley, Communications Director, Public Relations and Corporate Communications
Citrix, Kelly Feller, Director of Social Media

Global and European Strategy - Unify your social media across markets

The European market faces a different set of problems to any other. The language and cultural differences are huge and ones that American based companies often do not have to face. A key to social media success is maintain a unified brand message tailored to different environments and communities. Germany for example differs greatly in terms of both interaction and tolerance to social. The ability to talk about global company issues on a micro-level is essential to social media success. The need to relate to a different audience while achieving core objectives is a problem unique to the social marketer.

• Changing your accent: Dealing with the language gap and cultural differences between markets
• Lines of communication; how do you localize your social media while keeping a unified message?

Siemens, Gail Lyon, Global Internet & Social Media Manager