Sunrise Walk

Registration and Networking Breakfast

Conference Kickoff from PR News

Wake-Up Call: How to Think About Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat in the Post-Organic Era

The era of reaching your audience at scale organically using the major social media platforms is over. Given that the social networks are now actually advertising publishers where brands are concerned, what do you do as a communications professional? This wake-up call will confront this essential question, and look at what success on social media means when you have to pay to get visibility for your content.

Speaker:

David Kellis
Director of PR & Social Media
The Clorox Company
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How to Create a Unique Experience on Snapchat and Build Your Brand

It’s high time to do away with any doubt about Snapchat and embrace the ephemeral platform. With significant updates creating a much more immersive and engaging experience, Snapchat’s more than 100 million daily active user count shows no signs of slowing. This session will take an in-depth look at exactly what it takes to succeed on the unique platform, whether you’ve just started, taking a wait-and-see approach or have been snapping from the beginning.

You’ll learn how to:

• Get your brand started on Snapchat—but first determine whether or not it’s right for your brand
• Embrace Snapchat’s vertical format to draw users in and offer a unique view of your organization
• Use the platform’s powerful video features to develop provocative and engaging stories
• Use Snapchat’s inherent flexibility and change your content strategy on the fly
• Target your content to ensure you’re reaching the right audience
• Build your audience by cross-promoting your Snapchat content on other social platforms
• Measure the success of your campaigns on the platform

Speakers:

Leslie Douglas
Senior Manager, Social Media
PwC
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Colleen Hartman
Head of Paid and Shared Social Media Marketing
W2O Group
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Networking Break

Facebook Content—What Works, When to Pay and When to Go Organic

With Facebook now reaching almost 1.6 billion users worldwide, the premier social network has never been more important for communicators. But visually appealing images and short but engaging text posts aren’t enough anymore. With 100 million hours of video watched every day on Facebook, PR pros have little choice but to adapt their content strategies—they’ve got to make video part of the mix, and often have to pay to get their content seen in news feeds. In this session, Paul Englert, C. Mondavi & Family winery, Veda Banerjee of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and Stephanie Elsea of the American Heart Association will show you how they balance paid and organic posts, and share their Facebook video strategies.

You’ll learn how to:

• Develop a strategy for your Facebook content that will enable it to appear in your audience’s news feeds
• Determine when to pay for Facebook advertising and boosted posts, and when to rely solely on organic reach
• Develop quality videos for Facebook without breaking the bank
• Navigate Facebook’s live-streaming option, Facebook Live, and determine if it’s a good fit for your brand
• Use Facebook Analytics and other tools to measure your campaigns and determine what works and what doesn’t

BONUS CHECKLIST: Facebook Live—What You Need to Know

Speakers:

Paul Englert
Vice President, Marketing
C. Mondavi & Family
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Veda Banerjee
Director, Communications & Digital Marketing
Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
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Stephanie Elsea
Vice President of Communications and Marketing, SouthWest Affiliate
American Heart Association
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How to Use Twitter’s Periscope App for Your Organization’s Video Strategy

Live streaming is a wide open and exciting frontier in brand communications. It’s affordable, powerful and it can be used in many contexts for a variety of messaging strategies. Feeling the heat from Facebook Live, Twitter continues to update Periscope, its popular live-streaming app.

You’ll learn how to get started using Periscope and master the technical details of using the app, and will get real-world applications.

We’ll cover:

• Determining if live streaming is right for your organization
• Getting internal or client buy-in for live-streaming
• Effectively measuring live streams
• Specific case studies of organizations that have used Periscope successfully
• Inspiring your followers to comment/share your live stream, and share “hearts”
• Some of Twitter’s latest features

BONUS TIP SHEET: 10 Scoping Best Practices

Speakers:

David Landis
President/CEO
Landis Communications Inc.
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James Mowdy
Founder

BSPOKE
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Networking Break

Lunch and Keynote Presentation – How to Make the Transition to Strategic Reputational Storytelling

Walmart’s blog, Walmart Today, was relaunched in 2015 with a whole new strategy and look revolving around a mission from the company CEO to “write a story our kids and grandkids would want to hear.” Since then, Walmart has taken a more strategic approach to reputational storytelling, using not just the blog but its executives on social media to rebuild trust between Walmart and its customers. With a few key audience segments in mind, Chad Mitchell’s team develops engaging content that brings the stories of Walmart associates and customers to life. The results so far include the Ripple Effect campaign, which communicates the details of some landmark wage and benefit upgrades, and the Made By America series, which profiles Walmart’s support of U.S.-made products and businesses. Chad will share what went into this transformation, their most successful moments, some not so successful moments and what we can all learn from the journey.

Speaker:

Chad Mitchell
Senior Director, Digital Communications
Walmart
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Networking Break

How to Visualize Your Brand’s Stories With Instagram

Instagram surpassed Facebook in 2015 and accounted for 52% of brands’ total social actions, according to Shareablee data provided exclusively to PR News. Social actions grew 36% vs. 2014, with 75% of that growth from Instagram, 30% from Twitter and 9% from Facebook. Find out how you can make Instagram your most potent social media force and keep pace with the platform’s latest features.

You’ll learn how to:

• Develop content strategies for Instagram
• Use Instagram for your brand if you’re a one-person team
• Make the most of Instagram’s new 60-second video length
• Measure Instagram’s value for your brand
• Share your organization’s behind-the-scenes content on Instagram
• Work with affinity groups to tag you in their Instagram posts
• Only use content that adheres to Instagram users’ higher aesthetic standards

BONUS PR NEWS ANALYSIS: What Instagram’s 60-Second Video Format Means for Communicators

Speakers:

Karen Do
Senior Manager, Brand Social Media
Adobe
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Erin Flior
Senior Director of Digital Communications
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
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Co-Moderator: Treva Cooke
Co-Founder, Partner
Blue Flame
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Co-Moderator: Marne Saunders
Director of Growth
Blue Flame
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How-To Clinic: Pay-to-Play—Putting Paid Social to Work to Amplify Your Brand’s Messages

Social networks are turning to paid posts as a main source of revenue—none more so than Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And as algorithms are updated to reflect this change, it’s harder than ever for organic content to make it to a user’s newsfeed. In this clinic we’ll take a hands-on approach to researching and building engaging paid posts across the major social platforms, while at the same time learning how these posts can fit into an overall PR strategy.

You’ll learn how to:

• Get  budget for paid social
• Map out your paid social strategy
• Understand your analytics options
• Build an ad from the ground up on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
• Optimize user data to target content to a specific audience
• Use the social data you already have to create content that will resonate with your audience
• Set the right goals in the beginning, and measure them throughout a campaign
• Determine the lifecycle of individual posts to know when they should be updated or taken down
• Optimize content for each network
• Use hashtags correctly for your paid posts

BONUS CHECKLIST: 4 Key Considerations for Ads on Instagram

Speakers:

Leslie Drate
Social Media Manager, U.S. Consumer Print
HP
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Melissa Wisehart
Director - Social/Digital Strategy
Moore Communications Group
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Networking Break

The Future of Social Marketing: Using Facebook Messenger and Snapchat to Make Personalized Connections for Your Brand

Facebook Messenger and Snapchat are both looking to personalize how audiences interact with the brands they follow. Whether it’s by using bot technology or offering a varied media experience, these messaging apps have created a deeper experience that communicators shouldn’t ignore. This session will offer insight into using Facebook Messenger’s new advertising options and Snapchat’s rich multimedia chat features to build a truly personalized experience for your audiences.

You’ll learn how to:

• Determine if developing a bot on Facebook Messenger is right for you
• Deploy Facebook Messenger’s “Sponsored Messages”
• Jump between images, text, video and audio on Snapchat to give users an immersive multimedia experience
• Use these two messaging apps to go beyond customer service and offer exclusive content and promotions
• Navigate Facebook Messenger as an ecommerce tool
• Use Snapchat’s expanded chat features to compliment and expand on your overall Snapchat presence

Speaker:

Carlos Gil
Global Head of Social Media
BMC Software
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Closing Remarks