Become a social business

Map out how to move beyond marketing: Your role in embedding social across multiple departments in your company

It's essential to realise that social isn't simply a way to do marketing - it's a whole new way of doing business. According to IBM, companies that embed social strategy across more than simply the marketing department drive real business value and create competitive advantage.

Your role is critical. As head of social media, you need to help lay the foundations of a corporate social infrastructure – and in this session you'll learn how to do just that:

• Plan the system, develop the infrastructure: Learn the best ways to create a system which allows full social integration and synergy across your business
• Give your employees and colleagues the tools to succeed: Empower your biggest assets to make the right decisions and be a critical asset in your social plans act decisively for the benefit of your social strategy
• Understand when to collaborate: Ensure you're able to plan the levels at which cross collaboration is essential so you can achieve an even better internal communication flow
• Overcome conflicts of interest across multiple departments: Ensure your colleagues work in harmony to achieve corporate goals quicker

Practical steps to put your new social infrastructure in place: Enhance consumer experience through well-managed multi-departmental social engagement

Once you have broken down internal silos, set out a road-map and encouraged collaboration across your company, you've got to start walking the walk. Whether you are faced with a crisis, customer issue or simply want to engage your online customers, you need to ensure the strategy you've put in place works in the real world. In this session you'll learn:

• How to ensure different departments deliver consistent solutions - guarantee all departments engage your customers with one voice
• Engage across multiple markets: Deliver your core messages, while adapting to different cultural expectations
• Define the triggers for multi-departmental involvement: Know when different departments need to collaborate to solve issues and leverage opportunities

Energise your community and advocates to build authentic relationships: Become a valued part of your community, interact with purpose and spot new engagement opportunities.

As social media evolves, building authentic relationships - as opposed to building follower numbers - is becoming increasingly important for brands.

Your business needs to become the center of the community, a trusted partner and 'friend'. You achieve that, and you will benefit from a wealth of information and insight. You'll ensure you keep in line with changes in your industry, and in consumer demand.

Keep ahead of competition by becoming trusted, boosting your reputation and driving long term credibility:

• Discover where your community communicates: Identify and rank different discussions channels so you can prioritise where your company should be spending resource
• Grow your own: Foster meaningful online discussions which allow you to build your own engaged community
• Become a thought leader: Provide valuable and credible information to attract customers, and drive leads back to your website

From quantitative to qualitative measurement: Analyse the holistic impact your social engagement is having on your business

According to Econsultancy, "having 1million 'likes' means nothing if they are not engaged" They're right. For effective social engagement, one must move beyond basic statistics.

It is essential that you have an in-depth overview of your company's performance in order to drive future success. Social interaction offers unprecedented levels of data – unprecedented insight on impact, customer sentiment and more. But it all goes to waste unless you're tracking it.

• Shift your measurement from clicks to comments: Understand the sentiment of your consumer's conversation so you can analyse the effect that social has on your brand's reputation.
• Measure your customer relationships: How relevant, quick and accurate are you are when engaging with potential or existing customers?
• Analyse how your online community is sharing your content - the reach your postings achieve - and how this ties back into revenue generation

Effective audience segmentation: Understand your customer better for more effective, targeted and precise marketing

It is important to realise that no consumer is the same. Every individual you’re trying to engage has a different set of tastes, needs and preferences. Fortunately, social media data gives you a better opportunity than ever before to get a truly 360-degree view of your customer. Once you’ve got that, you can enhance your customer’s experience with targeted messages that are engaging, personalised and differentiated.

• Spot an audience: Take your worldwide community of customers and break it down into different niche groups
• Identify your customer’s needs: Understand their behaviours, preferences and desires - so you can target your messages accordingly - ensuring relevance.
• Build trust and relationships: Use social media to provide value to subsets of your customer base and engage in a way that allows your consumers to feel a connection with your brand

Safeguarding Your Social Media

Recently there have been an unprecedented rise in social media account hacks. Major brands, including NPR, FIFA, CBS 60 Minutes and 48 Hours, and The Associated Press have all suffered significant attacks. As you look to maximize your social media investment, it's wise to also consider how to protect it. In this session, we'll walk through examples of social media attacks and share how you can stop them to protect your brand and ensure compliance.

Dilemma session:

Social media for crisis response: Preserve brand reputation with a fast, transparent and empathetic response

It is no longer acceptable to communicate during a crisis using a press release. It is vital that you reach out directly to your stakeholders for better - more efficient - crisis resolution.

Social media creates additional challenges for your crisis response strategy – you need to react more quickly, across multiple platforms, to many different audiences. Overcome the challenges raised by social - create a strategy which allows you to forward plan against potential threats and deal with those unexpected.

• Organise and train your team: Provide guidelines, processes and procedures to ensure a quick crisis resolution.
• Identify and differentiate one-off issues with those that require a coordinated response: Avoid time-wasting and prioritise your efforts for most efficient resource allocation
• Become proactive: Scenario plan to pre-identify solutions for your most common issues.

CASE STUDY 1: Target on the evolution of social media: How it has changed the way brands work and what’s in store for the future

In this session Bonnie Gross, Vice President of Digital Marketing and Loyalty, will discuss the rapid evolution, vision for innovating strategies and how social media has changed the way Target works. She will also be the first to share with you Target’s most recent program launch that looks ahead to the future of social media and offer advice on how you can ensure your social activity is engaging and true to your brand.

CASE STUDY 2: Crowdtap on Collaborative Marketing: Driving Consumer Powered Products and Marketing

In this session, Brandon Evans, CEO of Crowdtap, will discuss the next evolution of social: collaborative marketing. Brandon will explain how brands can market collaboratively with their consumers to drive advocacy and quickly move products from ideation to store shelves. Brandon will discuss how more than 50 brands have partnered with Crowdtap to apply collaborative marketing principles, including Reckitt Benckiser, Mastercard, Verizon and Sony. He will also provide 5 steps brands can take today to market with consumers and build a truly consumer-powered brand.

Establish the right framework to capture, manage and analyse social data – for an improved future business strategy

With the explosion of social media data, your company has more information than ever before to guide activity, strategy and future performance.

But to leverage it, you need to know how to capture this data, then analyse it and act.

It is most vital to have a clear strategy to deal with this data - so you can forward plan to meet the demands of your consumers.

In this session we will prepare you will the tools and tactics that you need - to turn your data into actionable insight.

• Capture relevant information: Enable relevant data to be captured throughout your social media engagement to ensure this is logged for future use.
• Take new information and distribute it correctly: Ensure your provide new insight to the right person which will define your business strategy moving forward.
• Inform content, marketing and product development decisions: Use social data to decide where to focus your next efforts.