Sessions

In this session, Near-Time and Microsoft SharePoint will present their enterprise social media offerings.

Each presenter will have 25 minutes to speak, intermediated by a 10 minute transition period.

You’ve heard the talk, you’ve heard the hype — word of mouth marketing is the next big thing. What’s also become clear is that blogging and blogger engagement have been central to many successful word of mouth campaigns.

How exactly should you do to create a word of mouth marketing campaign that leverages weblogs and influential bloggers? How do you convert blog visitors to paying customers? How do you use your blog to build your brand — and reduce negative word of mouth?

Andy Sernovitz is the guru of Word of Mouth Marketing, author of the definitive book on the topic, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association — and now teaches the first ever graduate course on the topic at Northwestern. And he’s a great blogger, too.

Learn the 5 steps to starting an impactful, effective, sales-driving campaign. We’re going to get specific here: Who to hire, where to start, and how to make it successful.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Finding the right people to talk about you
• Giving them something to talk about
• Creating tools to make it easier for them to talk to each other
• Participating in the conversation
• Tracking and measuring results

The Mobile Internet is changing the dynamics of relationships — from how we interact with our colleagues, customers, and partners to how we find, collect, and use information. In essence technology is changing the traditional definition of the “human experience.” The world where your potential customers can use their mobile handsets to receive opinions from trusted sources and up-to-date price comparisons on products you carry whenever they pass by your retail outlet isn’t far off. Today moblogging is changing the dynamics of journalism by enabling all of us to become “journalists” by capturing news from our mobile devices and posting to major news blogs. This sharing of personal opinions has become the norm with the advent of video and services such as YouTube.

According to a study released late last year by comScore, 19% of Americans access the Internet through their mobile phones. In Europe as many as 34% of people access the Web from their phones(1). The numbers are even higher in Asia. In Japan, 69.2 million people use their phones to connect to the Internet, compared to 66 million PC users (2).

As Web-ready phones continue to proliferate in the US and abroad, and technologies like GPS become more prevalent, mobile access to blogs and social networks will influence consumer decision-making more than ever before. On the flip side, your employees’ access to social media on their mobile handsets can add tremendous value to your marketing and communications initiatives.

In her keynote, Motorola CTO Padmasree Warrior, will demonstrate how the mobile internet is transforming businesses, economies and societ ies around the world.

Everyone knows the adage, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.” But the changing face of customer outreach compels companies to find new ways to build affinity with wired and wireless consumers.

Taking a page from its past as “America’s Storyteller,” Eastman Kodak Company has embraced new media — including blogs and podcasts — to synch with consumers. Kodak’s blog isn’t a product showcase, or a feed of executive corporate-speak. Instead, everyday employees write and photograph the people, places, and things they’re passionate about.

In this session, Kodak’s manager of new media, Denise Stinardo will describe how the Kodak blog began, and how it continues to help Kodak build new relationships with customers in a digital era.

Online chatter often feels like a shouting match between traditional outlets, user-generated content, social networks and millions of blogs in the US alone — all competing for attention, shaping popular perception, and ultimately, impacting consumer purchasing decisions.

So how do you separate signal from noise? Is pinpointing influence as easy as pulling up a blogger’s authority ranking and audience size? Can influence ever truly be measured?

This panel will explore:

• Whether influence online can be scientifically proven
• The correlation between online influence and advertising performance - does an “influential” blog necessarily mean it’s a good ad target?
• Once deemed influential, what are the implications for those creating influential content, and the businesses seeking to reach their audiences?
• What are the best practices for engaging influential bloggers?
• What should corporate marketers and advertisers avoid?

Building online communities has become a key part of the new marketing equation for many businesses. While some companies have engaged with communities inside existing online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, others have opted to build their own using a wide variety of newly available tools.

In this session, we’ll discuss the best strategies for building online communities, both on your own and on third-party social networks, with a focus on:

• Granularity and ease use of in privacy settings
• Creating a positive user experience
• Exercising good marketing boundaries
• How much branding is too much branding?

It’s clear that in the era of social media, traditional customer outreach is no longer a viable strategy. Ben Edwards, publisher of Economist.com and former new media guru at IBM has spent years staying on top of the trends and technologies driving conversational marketing. In this session, Edwards will deliver a personal narrative about where the customer participation model is taking businesses and how smart organizations can leverage this new paradigm for competitive advantage.

• Engaging with your audience
• Gathering input and sentiment
• “Gradualism” and being guided by your customers
• Optimizing for the medium while staying true to your brand.

Online social networking aficionados have always known that the future of the medium would include third-party developers. For example, when Friendster opened up their network to a few select developers late last year, their month-over-month unique visitors increased 17.76%. Allowing users to make additions to a social networking site’s functionality adds value and gives the community more say in how the site works for them. With Facebook’s launch of the new “platform” functionality, the proverbial chickens have come home to roost.

These open APIs create numerous opportunities for businesses and organizations by enabling them to reach millions of passionate users without buying advertising by simply creating a useful application that adds value to a user’s experience of their favorite social network.

In this session, you will learn:

• How the big online social networks work, who their users are, and which ones have APIs for you to use.
• What other organizations have done and what the results have been.
• Finding the right developer to work with the API
• Adding real value rather than just peddling your product or service

Need to understand your target market better? Want to develop products that resonate with customers? Experienced bloggers know that their readers can provide them with a treasure trove of valuable information to assist in product development efforts.

In this session we’ll focus on the practical strategies and tactics that bloggers use to leverage reader comments and cross-postings to affect how messaging, features, and packaging of products can be optimized.

• “Comment farming”: Writing posts that drive reader participation
• How provocative posting works
• Determining what “acid test” questions to ask
• Getting your organization behind weblog-based research

Selecting a platform for your blogging and social media efforts is a high-stakes process. Choose the right software and you’ll have a significant edge over your competitors and reap huge dividends from network effects. Choose wrong and you may find yourself in a technological dead end and be forced — at great expense — to start over.

The open architecture of the World Wide Web obliterated closed networks like Prodigy and Compuserve, while a diminished AOL was forced to migrate largely to a role of Internet access provider. Conversely, Windows remains supremely dominant on corporate desktops while Linux has been unable to expand much beyond it’s role as a server platform.

As companies large and small rush to embrace the world of social media, it’s critical that they understand the issues of control, lock-in, and extensibility that they will face long-term. In his keynote, WordPress founder and creator Matt Mullenweg will explain the evolution of open source, and show how participation in open source user and developer communities offers all businesses an upside that he feels far outweighs the risks.

One of the most important aspects of any business venture is measuring how well your efforts are meeting your goals. Blogging is no different. With syndicated feeds, the standard methods of reading visitors and impressions goes out the window–how can you determine your actual audience size? In this session you’ll learn:

• Buzz measurement tools
• Do “hits” matter anymore?
• Measuring inbound links
• Using statistics programs made especially for blogging
• Using feedburner stats
• Blogroll links, Pagerank, and combination measurement systems
• Emerging measurement services

Before you flip the switch and encourage employees to blog about the business, it’s critical that you set the stage for responsible posting. Your employees need to be aware of potential “land mine” issues that you don’t want them to write about. It’s also critical that you resolve any issues about ownership of the content your employees generate on company time. Finally, your blog readers need to know where you stand on profanity in the comments, commercial postings, and other issues.

This panel of experts will cover the most critical internal and external policy areas, and how to deal with them:

• Integrating blogs and confidentiality agreements
• Accuracy mandates
• Do disclaimers help?
• Reconciling personal opinions against implied corporate representation
• Competitor linking and dialog—how open do you want to be?
• Screening and editing posts.
• Developing a respectful and transparent comment policy

Of all the professionals impacted by the emergence of social media, business communicators have seen the most changes. Information embargoes and top-down, command and control messaging aren’t as useful as they used to be. How can business communicators embrace transparency and customer participation while supporting the needs of companies?

In this session, you’ll learn:

• How to work with bloggers to make your message heard
• Prioritizing which bloggers to work with
• Responding to customer’s concerns in the blogosphere
• The power of linking to your critics
• Letting go of spin
• What the legal department doesn’t know about saying “sorry!”

A recent Wall Street Journal Report covered how much blogs bring to the table when it comes to search engine optimization. In fact, you can accomplish most of what they recommend with a well put-together business blog.

In this session, you’ll learn:

• Why blogs beat regular Web sites
• Which blog platforms have an edge
• How to craft post titles with keywords in mind
• Why your URLs, permalink structure and post slugs matter
• Categorization and tagging techniques
• Plugins that add value to SEO efforts
• Tools for researching what people are searching for
• Optimal layout and feature considerations