Sessions at BlogWorld New York 2012 on Tuesday 5th June in 1A21

The Influence industry has been disrupted. The rise of social media has democratized the playing field of influencers and opened up an entire new world of advocates and audience. These “new famous” can have as impactful of a role as traditional journalists , editors and celebrities have had in the past. Today, brands and agencies are struggling to define who is influential and how to measure the impact of this new influence. The emerging area of IRM (Influencer Relationship Management) can provide clients with the ability to truly scale their outreach programs.

Key Points
This session will explore a best practices approach to balancing the art and science of Influence and present case studies of brands that are successfully managing this emerging area of public relations.
1. Understand the variety of tools in the marketplace that support Influencer Relationship Management (IRM) and best-practices approach to scaling this emerging skill
2. Ideas for how to enhance relationships with online influencers (in a variety of verticals)
3. Explore impact of influence on community management (through case studies)

While the number of people, businesses, and organizations active on social platforms continues to grow daily, not everyone is sold on the value of social media marketing. And while you may “get it”—the whys and hows of social media marketing—sometimes it seems like an impossible task to convince skeptics to suspend their disbelief and dive in. This session explores what skeptics want and need at every stage of their belief, and how to deliver that to them.

Key Points
1. How to identify the key questions in skeptics' heads—and how to use them to build your case
2. A seven-step process that every "Social Skeptic" goes through, from Shock to Integration
3. How to recognize where skeptics are in that process, and what information they need (and in what format!) to help move them to the next phase

Ever get jealous that the open, unstructured social media efforts of the community completely trounce your well-planned and even well-funded social media programs? Are you frustrated when your own social media efforts are thwarted by inter-departmental competition? These problems are common, and we can no longer blame them on people “not getting” social media. The blame actually lies in the way we run our organizations. In this session the authors of Humanize: How People-Centric Organizations Succeed in a Social World will explore how to create organizations that are more human, thus more compatible with social media.

Key Points
Learning objectives:
1. Understand the subtle ways in which our organizational “best practices” have been sabotaging our social media efforts for some time now.
2. Understand a new framework for changing culture, process, and behavior in organizations in ways that is more aligned with the power of social media.
3. Begin to develop specific strategies for changing their own organization on at least one of those three levels.